Back in Brighton. New Years Eve. Sat on my bed, smoking a cigarette, wondering if I should make a cup of tea. Yes, I think so.
A white pre-January day outside, not cold, but not warm either. The air feels hollow, wiped clean. The decade closing down. The kettle is boiling.
Moved down to Brighton ten years ago yesterday. Unbelievable. Only came down for the millenium weekend, and have somehow ended up here for ten years. Thinking about this as my father drove me back yesterday, as we stopped at gray and drifting service station cafes for breakfast and coffee. Nowhere places, pleasing in their dreaming stillness. Grey skies, barren trees, a landscape offering no comfort but a kind of dreary consolation.
I finally made it across the sand dunes on my last day in Perranporth. A sea mist came down, hazing the distance, making the ocean obscure. Lost amongst the labyrinthine paths. St Piran's cross out in the middle of all this pleasing wilderness. Twenty feet high. A thousand years old? Maybe. St Piran, Cornwall's patron saint, came over from Ireland in the sixth century, falling out with some king. Stood at the base of the cross, situated on a high mound, watching twilight take the landscape. Letting myself drift in the comfort of isolation, listening to the wind, the rain on the grasses, streams hidden by rushes, marshy pools of water, thinking; remember this, remember this forever. Found the lost church too, buried beneath sands, covered in concrete. Allegedly haunted. Found a stone at the foot of the church, slipped it in my pocket. Fragments of history. A pleasing texture, smooth, and remniscent of tides. Wondered back through the empty caravan park, across the beach crowded with dog walkers and families, chased by the darkness settling down. Another year ended, another decade done.
A night of dreams last night. Fragments slipping away already. Kinloss in Scotland, again, walking the streets of Southside. Tall street lamps shining, lining the fence that enclosed the houses. Fallow field between houses, thinking there should be a river here. Thinking I should not be here. Trying to find my old house, lost in Abbey Crescent, not finding it. Almost on the verge of realising it was a dream.
Quiet room. A new cup of tea. Another cigarette. Meeting Sarah for a coffee at midday. Last acts of 2009, closing down the year, shutting the door on the decade.
I hear seagulls in the distance, Brighton's clarion call, and the muted sounds of passing traffic, surprisingly quiet. I lose myself in seagull-songs, their sea-tones and undercurrents, think of the pebbles on the beach and the ceaseless, timeless tides,
Thursday 31 December 2009
Monday 28 December 2009
More Dream Fragments
1. A city street. Walking along the pavement. three figures stood by an old building. Think one of them is an old school friend. He is dressed in a priests raiments, (he is a priest in waking life) and this convinces me this is my old school friend. I shout his name and he looks up. It is an old man with pale skin, and staring eyes. it is not my friend.
2. I must go on a journey by train. I am unsure of what route I need to take. At a train station. White january light. Hollow air. The details of my journey are flashed up on a board. I must write down these details in my notebook. The details change too quickly for me to be able to. I must wait until the details come up again. They are too quick again. How on earth will I be able to find out the details of my journey?
3. I am back in my old room at 136 London Road, Worcester. The wall separating my room and the adjoining room has been knocked through, creating one single large room. I marvel at the difference, try to imagine what it was like living here. Noting the similarities, the differences. I point out to someone that the fireplace was there when I lived here. The fireplace is set into a strange, sloping wall, that runs at a 45' angle from ceiling to floor. The wall is lumpy, and has the texture of candlewax left to dry.
2. I must go on a journey by train. I am unsure of what route I need to take. At a train station. White january light. Hollow air. The details of my journey are flashed up on a board. I must write down these details in my notebook. The details change too quickly for me to be able to. I must wait until the details come up again. They are too quick again. How on earth will I be able to find out the details of my journey?
3. I am back in my old room at 136 London Road, Worcester. The wall separating my room and the adjoining room has been knocked through, creating one single large room. I marvel at the difference, try to imagine what it was like living here. Noting the similarities, the differences. I point out to someone that the fireplace was there when I lived here. The fireplace is set into a strange, sloping wall, that runs at a 45' angle from ceiling to floor. The wall is lumpy, and has the texture of candlewax left to dry.
Sunday 27 December 2009
Caught in Traps set for Complacent Nostalgics
The wind was up last night, rattling the door of my room, a pleasing ghost story cliche. I lay there unable to sleep, though not really minding, imagining I could hear the sea, just below the wind. My reveries were eventually ended when I had to leave the comfort of my bed for the less welcoming enclave of the bathroom. My sojourn to the bathroom lasted longer than I had originally envisaged when I found I had, don't ask me how, actually locked myself in.
It took me a good few minutes to extricate myself from the bathroom, and by the time I had returned to bed, the wind had lost her charm, and all I wanted to do was sleep.
Strange, I don't remember dreaming recently. Not for days.
I woke up at midday, spent a few hours reading. Finally, I decided I had to go out for a walk. I hadn't left my parents bungalow since I had gone to Truro on Christmas Eve, and was beginning to suffer both cabin fever, and an overdose of Radio 2, which are still insisting on playing Christmas Songs, and which my parents insist on playing all day.
Actually, I did leave the house yesterday, in an attempt to take Misty, my parents border terrier, for a walk. After five minutes, Misty sat down, refusing to walk any further. I remember when she would be quite happy to accompany me for miles and miles, whole afternoons spent lost in the labyrinth of the sand dunes, or exploring the cathedral like caves of the beach.
I left Misty behind, and felt strangely guilty.
I decided to walk along the cliff top path, which would mean I didn't have to walk through the centre of Perranporth, which would be full of Christmas families heading along to the beach for a stroll.
Walking across the fallow field to the path, I noticed the waxing daylight moon above me, pale like summer turning into autumn. A vast sky like memories of October.
The cliff top path is interesting; steep slope on one side falling down to a tumultuous sea, and on the other, crumbling bits of industry littering the landscape. Remnants of tin mining country. Remains of cottages and uncapped mineshafts. Structures with unknown purpose that resemble bridges and railway station architecture. A pile of bricks looking like a hunched figure of a man watching me. There is something almost primal out here. The sea crashes against the rocks with an odd echo, an ancient resonance. The alien-ness of the place only accentuated by the remains of some mine building on the horizon, jagged and strange as some imagined Aztec temple.
I walked back across the heather through the fading light, watched by the moon, and the hunched old man made of bricks.
I went up into the attic after dinner, that strange space full of old books and records, notebooks and sketchbooks from my years at art college. I found an old diary I kept, actually found a few old diaries I kept; 1985, 1986, 1991, and one I kept, off and on, from 1988 to 1995. It was the last that I sat down and flicked through, reading old entries from my time at Southampton. Inserted in the pages were letters from friends, and letters I had written, but never sent.
I never think much about the two years, 1994 - 1996, I spent at Southampton, studying illustration, -not at the slightly prestigious university on the outskirts of town-, but at the then-called Southampton Institute of Higher Education. A strange time in my life, and one that doesn't have the mythic resonance of Worcester, or Scotland, or even Ickenham, where I spent my adolescence. I always assume I was permanently miserable there (undiagnosed depression, inner city housing, a less than inspiring course) but it seemed I was having quite a good time. At least between bouts of misery. Reading the entries bought up questions which can now never be answered. Who was Fabian? Why was I so upset that Duncan and Kelly were kissing? Why was I walking hand in hand through the park with an unnamed girl? Why was I lying drunken in the street after the Network (the club we went to where a pint cost, apparently, 69 pence?). I wished I was back there again, 24 years old, still in higher education, still with that illusion that I knew where my life was going, and that, somehow, everything would get itself sorted out.
I found an old exercise book from school too, this must have dated from 1986, and contained a story detailing my walk to school. In it, I pointed out those landmarks that I had named; the Generator of Ghosts, Dead Man's Hut, Sunlight Wood. I remember the Generator of Ghosts, just down the street where I lived, a 'Danger of Death' sign on the high wooden fence surrounding it. I don't remember Dead Man's Hut though, or Sunlight Wood. Were these just names made up to make the story sound better or did they really exist? Sunlight Wood doesn't ring any bells at all, but there is a vague frisson of remembrance about Dead Man's Hut. (Some image of a white clapboard shack, nestled under trees on an unreal summers day).
I had written this story when we lived in Ickenham, terminal-section of the Metropolitan tube line in London, but the walk referred to where we had lived a year previous, Forres in Scotland.
Tin-mines and diaries, old Mineshafts and old school books. Our lives are filled with ghosts and memories, scattered with abandon about us, inescapable traps set for complacent nostalgics.
I wish...
I stop myself, knowing that I am caught again, for the past is dead, and that is why it continues to haunt us.
For myself, anyway.
It took me a good few minutes to extricate myself from the bathroom, and by the time I had returned to bed, the wind had lost her charm, and all I wanted to do was sleep.
Strange, I don't remember dreaming recently. Not for days.
I woke up at midday, spent a few hours reading. Finally, I decided I had to go out for a walk. I hadn't left my parents bungalow since I had gone to Truro on Christmas Eve, and was beginning to suffer both cabin fever, and an overdose of Radio 2, which are still insisting on playing Christmas Songs, and which my parents insist on playing all day.
Actually, I did leave the house yesterday, in an attempt to take Misty, my parents border terrier, for a walk. After five minutes, Misty sat down, refusing to walk any further. I remember when she would be quite happy to accompany me for miles and miles, whole afternoons spent lost in the labyrinth of the sand dunes, or exploring the cathedral like caves of the beach.
I left Misty behind, and felt strangely guilty.
I decided to walk along the cliff top path, which would mean I didn't have to walk through the centre of Perranporth, which would be full of Christmas families heading along to the beach for a stroll.
Walking across the fallow field to the path, I noticed the waxing daylight moon above me, pale like summer turning into autumn. A vast sky like memories of October.
The cliff top path is interesting; steep slope on one side falling down to a tumultuous sea, and on the other, crumbling bits of industry littering the landscape. Remnants of tin mining country. Remains of cottages and uncapped mineshafts. Structures with unknown purpose that resemble bridges and railway station architecture. A pile of bricks looking like a hunched figure of a man watching me. There is something almost primal out here. The sea crashes against the rocks with an odd echo, an ancient resonance. The alien-ness of the place only accentuated by the remains of some mine building on the horizon, jagged and strange as some imagined Aztec temple.
I walked back across the heather through the fading light, watched by the moon, and the hunched old man made of bricks.
I went up into the attic after dinner, that strange space full of old books and records, notebooks and sketchbooks from my years at art college. I found an old diary I kept, actually found a few old diaries I kept; 1985, 1986, 1991, and one I kept, off and on, from 1988 to 1995. It was the last that I sat down and flicked through, reading old entries from my time at Southampton. Inserted in the pages were letters from friends, and letters I had written, but never sent.
I never think much about the two years, 1994 - 1996, I spent at Southampton, studying illustration, -not at the slightly prestigious university on the outskirts of town-, but at the then-called Southampton Institute of Higher Education. A strange time in my life, and one that doesn't have the mythic resonance of Worcester, or Scotland, or even Ickenham, where I spent my adolescence. I always assume I was permanently miserable there (undiagnosed depression, inner city housing, a less than inspiring course) but it seemed I was having quite a good time. At least between bouts of misery. Reading the entries bought up questions which can now never be answered. Who was Fabian? Why was I so upset that Duncan and Kelly were kissing? Why was I walking hand in hand through the park with an unnamed girl? Why was I lying drunken in the street after the Network (the club we went to where a pint cost, apparently, 69 pence?). I wished I was back there again, 24 years old, still in higher education, still with that illusion that I knew where my life was going, and that, somehow, everything would get itself sorted out.
I found an old exercise book from school too, this must have dated from 1986, and contained a story detailing my walk to school. In it, I pointed out those landmarks that I had named; the Generator of Ghosts, Dead Man's Hut, Sunlight Wood. I remember the Generator of Ghosts, just down the street where I lived, a 'Danger of Death' sign on the high wooden fence surrounding it. I don't remember Dead Man's Hut though, or Sunlight Wood. Were these just names made up to make the story sound better or did they really exist? Sunlight Wood doesn't ring any bells at all, but there is a vague frisson of remembrance about Dead Man's Hut. (Some image of a white clapboard shack, nestled under trees on an unreal summers day).
I had written this story when we lived in Ickenham, terminal-section of the Metropolitan tube line in London, but the walk referred to where we had lived a year previous, Forres in Scotland.
Tin-mines and diaries, old Mineshafts and old school books. Our lives are filled with ghosts and memories, scattered with abandon about us, inescapable traps set for complacent nostalgics.
I wish...
I stop myself, knowing that I am caught again, for the past is dead, and that is why it continues to haunt us.
For myself, anyway.
Saturday 26 December 2009
The Followers
It was Boxing Day in 1996. I was at my parents then-house in another small village in Worcestershire. Despite the fact that I was 24, I still hadn't told my parents that I smoked, and, for some reason, thought that I could get through the Christmas period without smoking. By the time that Boxing Day came, I discovered that this was not a tenable idea. Bretforton, the village my parents lived in (and incidentally, one of the most haunted villages in England) only had two shops, one of which was closed on Boxing Day, and the other was run by people who knew my parents, ('Hello Mrs Hermolle, yes, we saw your son earlier, buying 20 Silk Cut!') All of my ridiculous and paranoid thoughts did actually belie the fact -as I was to discover the following summer- that my parents had, unsurprisingly, known for quite a while I smoked. Still, I was unaware of this on that distant Boxing Day, thirteen years ago today.
At the time, I was living in Worcester, in the first year of a degree in English Literature. Bretforton was only ten miles away or so. I came up with some ridiculous excuse (I can't remember what now) about why I needed to return for a few hours, and my Father drove me there in the afternoon.
I remember it was one of those typical 'dead days' weather (the period between Christmas Day and New Years Day), all white and depthless skies, cold and empty. I have some vague memory of going to the shops to buy 20 Silk Cut, or I might have had some cigarettes stashed in my room somewhere.
The house was empty, my housemates having all gone home for Christmas, and the house seemed different somehow, in a way I couldn't quite pin down. It felt like, as a child, seeing your school on a summer holiday afternoon, something you weren't supposed to see. Accentuating this strange atmosphere was the fact that, just before Christmas, we found out that the owner was selling the house, and we had to leave by the end of January. Living inside a place you knew that you would never see again, haunting you already. Nostalgia for the present.
I smoked cigarettes in my room, whose walls, in my memory, had dark wood panelling; mahogany, or oak. This was not true at all - the walls were pink, a pastelly pleasing wallpaper, but on that Boxing Day, I remember wood panelling, like some antique grandfather clock, or a dusty library, lost in some forgotten English Manor.
After growing bored of smoking, I fell asleep.
I woke up when it was growing dark, lit another cigarette, grabbed a pad of paper and wrote a poem.
It was a poem about a man, whose friend was complaining of being followed. The friend had no reason, that he knew, for why he was being followed, and nor could he actually describe who he was being followed by. Shadowy figures, only glimpsed on horizons; alleyways, fields, lost streets, snowy wastegrounds. The figures were indistinct, sillhouettes really, but they were dressed in a slightly old fashioned way; smart jackets, trilby hats, long coats. The friend disappeared, leaving the man with a hollow, melancholy feeling (the empty flat, the unanswered phone). The man himself then started glimpsing these indistinct figures, always on the horizon, and amongst them, the half familiar figure of his friend.
I called it, of course, 'The Followers'.
I had, and still have, no idea, where the poem came from, but it struck me as being the perfect ghost story.
I thought this might make a good novel, no explanations, no rationality, just a long, meandering trawl through atmosphere only; sinister, lingering, mysterious. As my time at Worcester continued, and ended, leading into my move to Brighton ten years ago, my obsession with the Followers continued. Ideas were added, things were discovered, theories postulated. Vincent James, a ghost story writer who vanished in the summer of 1956, his last story being a piece about a writer being followed who eventually vanishes. A motorway flower seller called Cathryne who read the tarot cards. A lost book of ghost stories called 'Across The Fields'. In a flash of inspiration (sat in the garden of my second flat in brighton in 2001) I even discovered who the Followers actually were.
The last time I tried to write The Followers was in the late winter / early spring of 2004, then in my fourth flat in Brighton. I haven't attempted it since, but every few months or so, I find myself still writing down notes for it, ideas, scenes, sketches.
An idea I can't leave alone, a word I can't remember, just on the tip of my tongue. A song I can't get out of my head.
When I lay down to sleep on that distant Boxing Day, when I was 24 years old, I couldn't, obviously, concieve that, thirteen years later, when I would be 37, I would still be writing about that strange poem that came out of nowhere, and all because I returned to an empty house to smoke cigarettes.
At the time, I was living in Worcester, in the first year of a degree in English Literature. Bretforton was only ten miles away or so. I came up with some ridiculous excuse (I can't remember what now) about why I needed to return for a few hours, and my Father drove me there in the afternoon.
I remember it was one of those typical 'dead days' weather (the period between Christmas Day and New Years Day), all white and depthless skies, cold and empty. I have some vague memory of going to the shops to buy 20 Silk Cut, or I might have had some cigarettes stashed in my room somewhere.
The house was empty, my housemates having all gone home for Christmas, and the house seemed different somehow, in a way I couldn't quite pin down. It felt like, as a child, seeing your school on a summer holiday afternoon, something you weren't supposed to see. Accentuating this strange atmosphere was the fact that, just before Christmas, we found out that the owner was selling the house, and we had to leave by the end of January. Living inside a place you knew that you would never see again, haunting you already. Nostalgia for the present.
I smoked cigarettes in my room, whose walls, in my memory, had dark wood panelling; mahogany, or oak. This was not true at all - the walls were pink, a pastelly pleasing wallpaper, but on that Boxing Day, I remember wood panelling, like some antique grandfather clock, or a dusty library, lost in some forgotten English Manor.
After growing bored of smoking, I fell asleep.
I woke up when it was growing dark, lit another cigarette, grabbed a pad of paper and wrote a poem.
It was a poem about a man, whose friend was complaining of being followed. The friend had no reason, that he knew, for why he was being followed, and nor could he actually describe who he was being followed by. Shadowy figures, only glimpsed on horizons; alleyways, fields, lost streets, snowy wastegrounds. The figures were indistinct, sillhouettes really, but they were dressed in a slightly old fashioned way; smart jackets, trilby hats, long coats. The friend disappeared, leaving the man with a hollow, melancholy feeling (the empty flat, the unanswered phone). The man himself then started glimpsing these indistinct figures, always on the horizon, and amongst them, the half familiar figure of his friend.
I called it, of course, 'The Followers'.
I had, and still have, no idea, where the poem came from, but it struck me as being the perfect ghost story.
I thought this might make a good novel, no explanations, no rationality, just a long, meandering trawl through atmosphere only; sinister, lingering, mysterious. As my time at Worcester continued, and ended, leading into my move to Brighton ten years ago, my obsession with the Followers continued. Ideas were added, things were discovered, theories postulated. Vincent James, a ghost story writer who vanished in the summer of 1956, his last story being a piece about a writer being followed who eventually vanishes. A motorway flower seller called Cathryne who read the tarot cards. A lost book of ghost stories called 'Across The Fields'. In a flash of inspiration (sat in the garden of my second flat in brighton in 2001) I even discovered who the Followers actually were.
The last time I tried to write The Followers was in the late winter / early spring of 2004, then in my fourth flat in Brighton. I haven't attempted it since, but every few months or so, I find myself still writing down notes for it, ideas, scenes, sketches.
An idea I can't leave alone, a word I can't remember, just on the tip of my tongue. A song I can't get out of my head.
When I lay down to sleep on that distant Boxing Day, when I was 24 years old, I couldn't, obviously, concieve that, thirteen years later, when I would be 37, I would still be writing about that strange poem that came out of nowhere, and all because I returned to an empty house to smoke cigarettes.
Wednesday 23 December 2009
So Many Stars (First Night Back in Perranporth)
So many stars.
Just been out in the garden for a cigarette. Icy air. A neighbour calls out for a dog. No cars. Silence, except for the hissing sea, which somehow only seems to increase the silence, and the stars. So many stars. Dizzying really. Get used to the street lamps drowning the stars in Brighton, know that you can't see all of them because of the city glare, but you never quite realise how many are lost till the city is taken away...
And the silence. Miles and miles of silence. Out over the garden, and across the field to the cliff top path; tin mining ghosts, echoes of old industry falling into stones and ruin, quarry workings, and that sea (The Atlantic?) so unlike the calm and tranquil Brighton coast. The silence holds dominion here, casts its pall over the town, and out beyond the town, over the sand dunes, the thousand labyrinthine paths, St Piran's Cross, the Oratory, a lost church, buried beneath the sands.
The silence has a weight, almost a burden.
Left Brighton when it was still dark this morning. Greying skies fading backwards. Remnants of snow on the outskirts of town. Radio Two on in the car, detailing a litany of car crashes and pile ups, closed airports and warnings 'do not travel unless absolutely necessary'. Lanes closed by scattered cars. Police sirens, ambulances. Rain and sleet. Watching the temperature guage in the car drop down to zero. Tried to sleep in the car but kept being awoken by Christmas songs from Radio Two. Stopping at a transport cafe somewhere in the west country for a bacon sandwich, hidden from the motorway by sad trees. Looking out of a window in the cafe, seeing scraggy December bushes pushing up against the glass. Began thinking about December blackberries, if there is such a thing, distilled into deep winter wine. Drunk on short days and absolute nights... Reminded me of something but I couldn't quite think what.
Down in Perranporth for a week. Last chapter of this strange and difficult decade. 2666 by Robert Bolano and a volume of ghost stories to read. The attic full of lost things; half filled notebooks, abandoned photographs, books unread for years, comics from my childhood, all waiting traps for the complacent nostalgic.
I have a slight cold, lending my already travel-tired mind, a miasma of fever. Travelling in december is always deperate and beautiful, racing the night across the country, watching it grow dark in unfamiliar towns.
Keep thinking oif the sky outside though, that profound silence, the near, though remote-sounding sea, and the tilted bowl of the moon, spilling the night like a flood amongst an impossible conspiracy of stars.
Just been out in the garden for a cigarette. Icy air. A neighbour calls out for a dog. No cars. Silence, except for the hissing sea, which somehow only seems to increase the silence, and the stars. So many stars. Dizzying really. Get used to the street lamps drowning the stars in Brighton, know that you can't see all of them because of the city glare, but you never quite realise how many are lost till the city is taken away...
And the silence. Miles and miles of silence. Out over the garden, and across the field to the cliff top path; tin mining ghosts, echoes of old industry falling into stones and ruin, quarry workings, and that sea (The Atlantic?) so unlike the calm and tranquil Brighton coast. The silence holds dominion here, casts its pall over the town, and out beyond the town, over the sand dunes, the thousand labyrinthine paths, St Piran's Cross, the Oratory, a lost church, buried beneath the sands.
The silence has a weight, almost a burden.
Left Brighton when it was still dark this morning. Greying skies fading backwards. Remnants of snow on the outskirts of town. Radio Two on in the car, detailing a litany of car crashes and pile ups, closed airports and warnings 'do not travel unless absolutely necessary'. Lanes closed by scattered cars. Police sirens, ambulances. Rain and sleet. Watching the temperature guage in the car drop down to zero. Tried to sleep in the car but kept being awoken by Christmas songs from Radio Two. Stopping at a transport cafe somewhere in the west country for a bacon sandwich, hidden from the motorway by sad trees. Looking out of a window in the cafe, seeing scraggy December bushes pushing up against the glass. Began thinking about December blackberries, if there is such a thing, distilled into deep winter wine. Drunk on short days and absolute nights... Reminded me of something but I couldn't quite think what.
Down in Perranporth for a week. Last chapter of this strange and difficult decade. 2666 by Robert Bolano and a volume of ghost stories to read. The attic full of lost things; half filled notebooks, abandoned photographs, books unread for years, comics from my childhood, all waiting traps for the complacent nostalgic.
I have a slight cold, lending my already travel-tired mind, a miasma of fever. Travelling in december is always deperate and beautiful, racing the night across the country, watching it grow dark in unfamiliar towns.
Keep thinking oif the sky outside though, that profound silence, the near, though remote-sounding sea, and the tilted bowl of the moon, spilling the night like a flood amongst an impossible conspiracy of stars.
Monday 21 December 2009
Walking through the Snow-Silence
There had been rumours of it for days, conversations over cigarettes outside of work, proclamations of certainty based on nothing but other rumours and childhood memories. A vague excitement that no-one really believed, because, after all, it never snows in Brighton (even though it did this year, back in January, and the year before, in April of all times,) and anyway, it never snows before Christmas.
I was at the pub on Thursday night when it happened, the first few flakes drifting down from implacable skies. 'It will never stick' someone said, and yet, it did. New Road, where the pub I was at, Fitzherberts, turned into a television set from a Christmas Day special. Half-drunk pub goers having spontaneous snowball fights, ripping off their shirts for 'snow-wrestling', pelting passing taxis with hastily constructed snow balls. A strange sense of glee came over me at this scene of anarachy, at the utter strangeness of it snowing before Christmas.
Had eaten too little that day and had gone to the pub straight after work; ale, jagermeisters and coke, whiskies, conversations with people I barely knew. Walked back along Western Road with Pam, delighted with the treachery of the streets, at the bus stop signs proclaiming 'all services suspended due to servere (sic) weather'. Half-drunk, and verging on nausea I collapsed quickly into sleep, a dreamless deep from which I wakened early the next morning.
Met Andy and Joe at the Meeting House cafe on the seafront. More snow had fallen but was turning quickly to ice. The Meeting House was busy, everyone excited, watching eagerly the people falling over, swapping notes on elaborate snowmen which seemed to have sprung up overnight (sea serpents, figures on benches, dragon-like monsters.)
After a coffee and numerous cigarettes we made our way to Preston Park. I wanted to see Preston Manor in the snow, the pet cemetary, the churchyard, the trees, and pretend I was somewhere far, far from Brighton.
Getting there proved to be somewhat difficult. I didn't remember this when I nwas a child. The sheer difficulty of walking, of carefully measuring every step; one foot precisely placed in front of the other precisely placed foot. A carelessly planted foot could lead swiftly to a fall. I watched other people fall. It all seemed so random. I began to imagine that this is what it was like being old, not being able to walk properly, having to think about every single movement. Reminded me of the flu that nearly killed me, almost five years ago now, dragging myself to the toilet, unable to even stand. I lived alone then as well. No-one knew I was so ill. Halfway through that week, I ran out of electricity. No food, no phone, no heat. Plagued by feverish images of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and medieval magicians, insane theories about temperature controlling the illness, controlling the atmosphere. Took me three months to recover. Over the course of eight days I had lost a stone and a half, and had eaten nothing for eight days.
We finally made it to the manor. Went through the adjoining churchyard, tombs covered with snow, church spire lost beneath arctic ghosts. The area is said to be haunted, the churchyard by a woman in medieval costume (someone found dismembered in Lovers Lane? I can't remember the story), and the numerous incursions of Preston Manor are well documented in any number of local paranormal guides. I spent a night in the church, ghost-hunting, with two friends once, paying a deposit at the local pub for the key. (I would like to say thge church is deconsecrated, but all I know is that the church is no longer used for services. Deconsecrated sounds better though.) Well, one of the people was a friend (an old landlord in fact) and the other was my old landlord's fiddle teacher. he achieved some kind of literary noteriety a few years later on the publication of his history of funerary violinists, a history that was, of course, entirely fictional. We came armed with camcorders, thermometers and all manner of hastily assembled recording equipment. Cold, dark church (we turned off the lights), altar like a sacricial stone, choir pews in which shrouded figures could easily be imagined... and it wasn't even eerie. Apart from it being being cold, (this was January of 2005) it was all quite serene and peaceful. I would have felt quite happy spending the night in there alone.
Anyway. Friday. We passed through the churchyard, looped back on ourselves and finally entered onto the lawns at the back of Preston Manor. They had fenced off the entrance, but this was really no more than a token move to deter... Well, I'm not sure who they did wish to deter really... Whatever, it hadn't worked; the snow that covered the lawns was well trodden, a thousand footprints, packing down the snow, an infinity of paths criss-crossing. An unreadable map of some impossible region. 'The Lawns' are one of my favourite places in Brighton. (if anyone says, 'shall we go to The Lawns?', usually in warm Spring evenings, when the lengthening hours make a twilight expedition through Preston Park a pleasant possibility, it refers to here. The Lawns. A naming. And in naming the place seems to belong more to us.). On summer afternoons, when the sun is too hot, and the beaches are too crowded with holidaymakers and drunken Brightonians on a day off rom work, it is far more tempting to come here, to sit drowsing on the quiet slope of the lawns. A book lying forgotten as you slip into sleep in the half-erotic air of June, and the busy traffic on the London Road beginning to seem almost soporific, the tides of a landlocked sea. If you tire of drowsing, or reading, there is always the overgrown walkways of the pet cemetary, whose inscriptions on tiny tombstones strike a melancholy sombre tone ('killed by poison'), or even back into the churchyard, to drift in the shadows under dark yews.
Not summer though. We are far from summer here.
The three of us took photographs, wondered about the lawns. I took a photograph from very near the place where I took a photograph in October. I couldn't get to the exact spot because the gates to the pet cemetary were locked. This was back in October, and I took a photograph through the gates and onto the lawns. Zooming in the photograph, I discovered there appeared to be a figure stood by the wall that separates the Lawns from the churchyard. A blonde haired boy? Some kind of gardener? It was hard to judge size. I put it down to some kind of simulacra - some stain on the wall, some chance configuration of branch and bush, that formed itself into the figure of a person. There was nothing on the wall, that could have formed the image of a figure. Obviously, someone had wandered into shot that I hadn't noticed, and I had captured his image accidentally. What was he looking at on the ground? What was he doing in the Lawns on his own on an October morning? Questions. Mysteries. Why was I there? What was I doing taking a photograph of a walkway looking into the back ground of a Preston Manor?
The manor itself is a dour building. It is not surprising that it has garnered a reputation for being haunted. Grey walls and forever shut green shutters. Not necessarily forbidding, but it seems closed in on itself, lost in its own thoughts. Victorian seances. Bodies buried and exhumed in the gardens. Lost corridors and silence.
Looking about me; the trees, now totally stripped of leaves, the dreaming, drifting house, the harsh bright sky, fading to sunset tinged evening. The cold. I was glad to welcome the cold, had, over the last, long summer, forgotten what cold felt like. Reminded me of the first page of Jane Eyre, that description of 'raw twilight'.
This was a raw twilight too and I was glad of it.
The rest of the weekend passed without incident; a few drinks in the Evening Star on Saturday night, cups of tea in a pub on that Friday night, coffees on my own at the Meeting House cafe. The latter particularly pleasant; bright sunlight, frozen ground, watchful sea. I was quite happy, smoking cigarettes in the cold, drinking instant coffee, hypnotised by the barely moving undulations of the tide.
I went around Andy's flat last night, watched the excellent and incomprehensible Inland Empire by David Lynch. It was a slow walk back to my bedsit, sometime around midnight. The snow had mostly gone, though the pavements were treacherous and impassable, packed with ice polished by the preceding days passing walkers. I walked down the empty (gritted) road, passed by St Annes Well Park, and listened to the silence, that cathedral-hush of old winters. My footsteps seemed loud, crunching on isolated patches of snow not yet turned to ice. I remember the sky, clear and vast, no clouds, profoundly cold, and the stars and that sliver of a moon, sickle sharp, and clear as if studied under a microscope.
My footsteps, my breathing, the ice, street lamps.
The black sky.
Walking through the snow-silence, wishing, somehow, that I could walk through it forever.
I was at the pub on Thursday night when it happened, the first few flakes drifting down from implacable skies. 'It will never stick' someone said, and yet, it did. New Road, where the pub I was at, Fitzherberts, turned into a television set from a Christmas Day special. Half-drunk pub goers having spontaneous snowball fights, ripping off their shirts for 'snow-wrestling', pelting passing taxis with hastily constructed snow balls. A strange sense of glee came over me at this scene of anarachy, at the utter strangeness of it snowing before Christmas.
Had eaten too little that day and had gone to the pub straight after work; ale, jagermeisters and coke, whiskies, conversations with people I barely knew. Walked back along Western Road with Pam, delighted with the treachery of the streets, at the bus stop signs proclaiming 'all services suspended due to servere (sic) weather'. Half-drunk, and verging on nausea I collapsed quickly into sleep, a dreamless deep from which I wakened early the next morning.
Met Andy and Joe at the Meeting House cafe on the seafront. More snow had fallen but was turning quickly to ice. The Meeting House was busy, everyone excited, watching eagerly the people falling over, swapping notes on elaborate snowmen which seemed to have sprung up overnight (sea serpents, figures on benches, dragon-like monsters.)
After a coffee and numerous cigarettes we made our way to Preston Park. I wanted to see Preston Manor in the snow, the pet cemetary, the churchyard, the trees, and pretend I was somewhere far, far from Brighton.
Getting there proved to be somewhat difficult. I didn't remember this when I nwas a child. The sheer difficulty of walking, of carefully measuring every step; one foot precisely placed in front of the other precisely placed foot. A carelessly planted foot could lead swiftly to a fall. I watched other people fall. It all seemed so random. I began to imagine that this is what it was like being old, not being able to walk properly, having to think about every single movement. Reminded me of the flu that nearly killed me, almost five years ago now, dragging myself to the toilet, unable to even stand. I lived alone then as well. No-one knew I was so ill. Halfway through that week, I ran out of electricity. No food, no phone, no heat. Plagued by feverish images of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and medieval magicians, insane theories about temperature controlling the illness, controlling the atmosphere. Took me three months to recover. Over the course of eight days I had lost a stone and a half, and had eaten nothing for eight days.
We finally made it to the manor. Went through the adjoining churchyard, tombs covered with snow, church spire lost beneath arctic ghosts. The area is said to be haunted, the churchyard by a woman in medieval costume (someone found dismembered in Lovers Lane? I can't remember the story), and the numerous incursions of Preston Manor are well documented in any number of local paranormal guides. I spent a night in the church, ghost-hunting, with two friends once, paying a deposit at the local pub for the key. (I would like to say thge church is deconsecrated, but all I know is that the church is no longer used for services. Deconsecrated sounds better though.) Well, one of the people was a friend (an old landlord in fact) and the other was my old landlord's fiddle teacher. he achieved some kind of literary noteriety a few years later on the publication of his history of funerary violinists, a history that was, of course, entirely fictional. We came armed with camcorders, thermometers and all manner of hastily assembled recording equipment. Cold, dark church (we turned off the lights), altar like a sacricial stone, choir pews in which shrouded figures could easily be imagined... and it wasn't even eerie. Apart from it being being cold, (this was January of 2005) it was all quite serene and peaceful. I would have felt quite happy spending the night in there alone.
Anyway. Friday. We passed through the churchyard, looped back on ourselves and finally entered onto the lawns at the back of Preston Manor. They had fenced off the entrance, but this was really no more than a token move to deter... Well, I'm not sure who they did wish to deter really... Whatever, it hadn't worked; the snow that covered the lawns was well trodden, a thousand footprints, packing down the snow, an infinity of paths criss-crossing. An unreadable map of some impossible region. 'The Lawns' are one of my favourite places in Brighton. (if anyone says, 'shall we go to The Lawns?', usually in warm Spring evenings, when the lengthening hours make a twilight expedition through Preston Park a pleasant possibility, it refers to here. The Lawns. A naming. And in naming the place seems to belong more to us.). On summer afternoons, when the sun is too hot, and the beaches are too crowded with holidaymakers and drunken Brightonians on a day off rom work, it is far more tempting to come here, to sit drowsing on the quiet slope of the lawns. A book lying forgotten as you slip into sleep in the half-erotic air of June, and the busy traffic on the London Road beginning to seem almost soporific, the tides of a landlocked sea. If you tire of drowsing, or reading, there is always the overgrown walkways of the pet cemetary, whose inscriptions on tiny tombstones strike a melancholy sombre tone ('killed by poison'), or even back into the churchyard, to drift in the shadows under dark yews.
Not summer though. We are far from summer here.
The three of us took photographs, wondered about the lawns. I took a photograph from very near the place where I took a photograph in October. I couldn't get to the exact spot because the gates to the pet cemetary were locked. This was back in October, and I took a photograph through the gates and onto the lawns. Zooming in the photograph, I discovered there appeared to be a figure stood by the wall that separates the Lawns from the churchyard. A blonde haired boy? Some kind of gardener? It was hard to judge size. I put it down to some kind of simulacra - some stain on the wall, some chance configuration of branch and bush, that formed itself into the figure of a person. There was nothing on the wall, that could have formed the image of a figure. Obviously, someone had wandered into shot that I hadn't noticed, and I had captured his image accidentally. What was he looking at on the ground? What was he doing in the Lawns on his own on an October morning? Questions. Mysteries. Why was I there? What was I doing taking a photograph of a walkway looking into the back ground of a Preston Manor?
The manor itself is a dour building. It is not surprising that it has garnered a reputation for being haunted. Grey walls and forever shut green shutters. Not necessarily forbidding, but it seems closed in on itself, lost in its own thoughts. Victorian seances. Bodies buried and exhumed in the gardens. Lost corridors and silence.
Looking about me; the trees, now totally stripped of leaves, the dreaming, drifting house, the harsh bright sky, fading to sunset tinged evening. The cold. I was glad to welcome the cold, had, over the last, long summer, forgotten what cold felt like. Reminded me of the first page of Jane Eyre, that description of 'raw twilight'.
This was a raw twilight too and I was glad of it.
The rest of the weekend passed without incident; a few drinks in the Evening Star on Saturday night, cups of tea in a pub on that Friday night, coffees on my own at the Meeting House cafe. The latter particularly pleasant; bright sunlight, frozen ground, watchful sea. I was quite happy, smoking cigarettes in the cold, drinking instant coffee, hypnotised by the barely moving undulations of the tide.
I went around Andy's flat last night, watched the excellent and incomprehensible Inland Empire by David Lynch. It was a slow walk back to my bedsit, sometime around midnight. The snow had mostly gone, though the pavements were treacherous and impassable, packed with ice polished by the preceding days passing walkers. I walked down the empty (gritted) road, passed by St Annes Well Park, and listened to the silence, that cathedral-hush of old winters. My footsteps seemed loud, crunching on isolated patches of snow not yet turned to ice. I remember the sky, clear and vast, no clouds, profoundly cold, and the stars and that sliver of a moon, sickle sharp, and clear as if studied under a microscope.
My footsteps, my breathing, the ice, street lamps.
The black sky.
Walking through the snow-silence, wishing, somehow, that I could walk through it forever.
Saturday 19 December 2009
Stone, Ghosts and my Grandfather's House in Stanklyn Lane part II
...It's two days later now, Brighton has become blanketed with snow (now turning rapidly into impossible-to-walk-upon ice) and, apart from Monday, am not back at work until January 4th. I'm sat in an internet cafe on Western Road, afternoon turning to twilight, wishing I'd had another cigarette before continuing Thursday's entry. Ah well.
My grandfather's house.
Often over summers, my family would be joined by various cousins; John and Anne spring to mind more than any other. I remember a few 'ghost hunting' expeditions with them (up the stairs to the mysteriously opened toilet window, into the back room where 'noises' were heard), but the next real ghost stories, of a kind, that I remember came about over the Christmas of 1983 when my Nan died.
She had smoked her entire life, so, in her sixties she had developed lung cancer. She did not go into hospital but elected to stay at home. We had been down since the beginning of December, and the month leading up to Christmas was full of relatives, most of whom I didn't know very well. She died on New Years Eve ('do you want to say goodbye to Nanny Stone, she won't be here very long'). Remember that day so well, the appropriately funereal atmosphere in the house, my father looking glumly into a cup of tea by the fire.
She was buried a week later. i remember hearing my Aunt Linda say to my mother that she heard footsteps at night. My mother's admonishment to not 'tell the kids'. Footsteps at night. My sister and myself digested this information. If you believe in ghosts, then the explanation would be that it was the spirit of my nan, waiting for her body to be buried, but somehow in my mind, it became all mixed up with the atmosphere of the house, that soporific, hypnotic quality, grey stairs, unquiet angles on the landing. A soft darkness, both consolatory and disquieting.
I remember waking up one morning while it was still dark. half asleep, thinking I could hear the sound of hammering. 'Workmen' I thought to myself, before realising how absurd this was. The sound of hammering again. I pulled the blankets up over my head, but I couldn't get the thought out of my head that these were ephemeral 'night-workmen', phantasmal labourers, caught somewhere in the architecture of the house.
We spent the Christmas of 1985 down there as well, and the one thing I remember, more than anything, was the morning when we started the long drive back to Scotland. It was still dark. Black winter darkness, the snow sharpened into ice, and the stars looking like needles. Looking back at the house as it receded down the drive, and being relieved that I didn't have to sleep there any more. I didn't know how my grandfather could stand it, being in an empty house that always seemed so busy, someone always in another room that was empty, the dark steps promising to lead up or down to somewhere other than the hallway or landing.
My grandfather died in late December 1993. My parents had bought him the house, and at some point in the week after he died I found myself there with my parents, sorting through his stuff. There was nothing really to sort out. My grandparents were not collectors, and the rooms were mostly empty. I remember coins spilling out onto a windowsill in my grandparent's room, the air thick with memory and a warning nostalgia. The house belonged to abandonment now. To the hauntings the house seemed to generate.
For a while, my Aunt and her daughter, Ann, stayed there. My aunt, at my sister's wedding three years ago, told me that Ann was convinced the house was haunted, and the she too had 'seen things'. I had lost touch with Ann, and over that Christmas, I nearly ran into her in Kidderminster, missing her by five minutes. I hadn't seen her for years. I remember writing in my diary 'looks like I'll never see Ann again' jokingly. I had wanted to catch up with her for years. Cruel presience, for once an unfaulty and unwanted premonition. A few days later she had died. Panadol and alcohol. Twenty years old. No-one, to this day, knows what happened.
What did she see though? What was it that she knew and I knew about the house?
I remember being at the churchyard where she was buried, the one on the hill, along with my grandparents. Another January, can't remember when. Staring into the adjacent field. Frost, sheep, sunset-sky, and it seemed that time had paused. Writing in an old notebook that night 'timelessness, as I stared into that field, tine no longer existed.'
My parents sold the house soon afterwards. They were talking to the neighbours. In the week after Ann died, and before she was buried, they heard the sounds of movement in the house, of music playing.
The house was, of course, empty.
Fifteen years or more since I last saw that house. It comes back to me in dreams though frequently, always haunted, always with an extra room, a secret stairway, a forgotten corridor in the attic, always that sense of something else being there. Calling me back, and one day I shall go back, though what I will do when I get there I don't know. Ring on the doorbell, ask the occupants if they've seen a cowled figure.
I've only got five minutes left before my time is up in the cafe, so I must make this end briefer than I would have liked.
An epilogue.
A ghost story and a dream.
My grandfather's house. At the top of the garden where the chicken coop was when I had known it, I dreamt that there was a dog buried there because it had gone mad. I recounted this dream to my aunt, who said, with a strange air of resignation, that yes, there was a dog buried there, long years before I had born, because it had gone mad.
I had probably overheard this when I was a child, and what I had heard had got lodged somewhere in dream mechanisms. Nothing supernatural, no ghost story.
Like so much to do with that house though, that one word, that one word that keeps recurring:
-But-
I'll probably return to my grandfather's house in the future.
After all, it keeps returning to me.
My grandfather's house.
Often over summers, my family would be joined by various cousins; John and Anne spring to mind more than any other. I remember a few 'ghost hunting' expeditions with them (up the stairs to the mysteriously opened toilet window, into the back room where 'noises' were heard), but the next real ghost stories, of a kind, that I remember came about over the Christmas of 1983 when my Nan died.
She had smoked her entire life, so, in her sixties she had developed lung cancer. She did not go into hospital but elected to stay at home. We had been down since the beginning of December, and the month leading up to Christmas was full of relatives, most of whom I didn't know very well. She died on New Years Eve ('do you want to say goodbye to Nanny Stone, she won't be here very long'). Remember that day so well, the appropriately funereal atmosphere in the house, my father looking glumly into a cup of tea by the fire.
She was buried a week later. i remember hearing my Aunt Linda say to my mother that she heard footsteps at night. My mother's admonishment to not 'tell the kids'. Footsteps at night. My sister and myself digested this information. If you believe in ghosts, then the explanation would be that it was the spirit of my nan, waiting for her body to be buried, but somehow in my mind, it became all mixed up with the atmosphere of the house, that soporific, hypnotic quality, grey stairs, unquiet angles on the landing. A soft darkness, both consolatory and disquieting.
I remember waking up one morning while it was still dark. half asleep, thinking I could hear the sound of hammering. 'Workmen' I thought to myself, before realising how absurd this was. The sound of hammering again. I pulled the blankets up over my head, but I couldn't get the thought out of my head that these were ephemeral 'night-workmen', phantasmal labourers, caught somewhere in the architecture of the house.
We spent the Christmas of 1985 down there as well, and the one thing I remember, more than anything, was the morning when we started the long drive back to Scotland. It was still dark. Black winter darkness, the snow sharpened into ice, and the stars looking like needles. Looking back at the house as it receded down the drive, and being relieved that I didn't have to sleep there any more. I didn't know how my grandfather could stand it, being in an empty house that always seemed so busy, someone always in another room that was empty, the dark steps promising to lead up or down to somewhere other than the hallway or landing.
My grandfather died in late December 1993. My parents had bought him the house, and at some point in the week after he died I found myself there with my parents, sorting through his stuff. There was nothing really to sort out. My grandparents were not collectors, and the rooms were mostly empty. I remember coins spilling out onto a windowsill in my grandparent's room, the air thick with memory and a warning nostalgia. The house belonged to abandonment now. To the hauntings the house seemed to generate.
For a while, my Aunt and her daughter, Ann, stayed there. My aunt, at my sister's wedding three years ago, told me that Ann was convinced the house was haunted, and the she too had 'seen things'. I had lost touch with Ann, and over that Christmas, I nearly ran into her in Kidderminster, missing her by five minutes. I hadn't seen her for years. I remember writing in my diary 'looks like I'll never see Ann again' jokingly. I had wanted to catch up with her for years. Cruel presience, for once an unfaulty and unwanted premonition. A few days later she had died. Panadol and alcohol. Twenty years old. No-one, to this day, knows what happened.
What did she see though? What was it that she knew and I knew about the house?
I remember being at the churchyard where she was buried, the one on the hill, along with my grandparents. Another January, can't remember when. Staring into the adjacent field. Frost, sheep, sunset-sky, and it seemed that time had paused. Writing in an old notebook that night 'timelessness, as I stared into that field, tine no longer existed.'
My parents sold the house soon afterwards. They were talking to the neighbours. In the week after Ann died, and before she was buried, they heard the sounds of movement in the house, of music playing.
The house was, of course, empty.
Fifteen years or more since I last saw that house. It comes back to me in dreams though frequently, always haunted, always with an extra room, a secret stairway, a forgotten corridor in the attic, always that sense of something else being there. Calling me back, and one day I shall go back, though what I will do when I get there I don't know. Ring on the doorbell, ask the occupants if they've seen a cowled figure.
I've only got five minutes left before my time is up in the cafe, so I must make this end briefer than I would have liked.
An epilogue.
A ghost story and a dream.
My grandfather's house. At the top of the garden where the chicken coop was when I had known it, I dreamt that there was a dog buried there because it had gone mad. I recounted this dream to my aunt, who said, with a strange air of resignation, that yes, there was a dog buried there, long years before I had born, because it had gone mad.
I had probably overheard this when I was a child, and what I had heard had got lodged somewhere in dream mechanisms. Nothing supernatural, no ghost story.
Like so much to do with that house though, that one word, that one word that keeps recurring:
-But-
I'll probably return to my grandfather's house in the future.
After all, it keeps returning to me.
Thursday 17 December 2009
Stone, Ghosts and my Grandfather's House in Stanklyn Lane
My Grandfather's house, a semi-detached red brick council house in the tiny village of Stone, lay deep in the Worcestershire countryside, somewhere south of Kidderminster. My grandparents were the first people to live in the (then) new house, sometime in the 1950s. Previously they had lived on a farm in Harvington, where my grandmother met my grandfather (my step-grandfather really, I never knew my real grandfather) over the course of the second world war. He was an Italian POW, captured in Ethiopa, and stayed in England the rest of his life, dying in early 1994, ten years after my grandmother.
The house, 116 Stanklyn Lane, runs like a spine through my life, a knobbly backbone of a thing, pushing its bony intrusions into my dreams and memories. Haunts me, perhaps, more than any other place, probably because out of anywhere in my life it was the one I knew the longest, 22 years. My father was in the RAF and we moved about a lot when I was a child.
Perhaps there are other reasons too.
We lived there for a year in 1977, after we had returned from my father's posting in Malta. I went to the small village school, and shared the back room with my sister, and it was here that I saw a ghost, perhaps sparking off my lifelong interest in ghost stories and the paranormal. I think my interest in such things was probably inevitable though, but my experience in that house certainly deepened my interest. Well, I was five years old, six by the time we left, already deeply impressed by such things as Doctor Who, Star Trek, Space 1999 and Scooby Doo (a great influence on my childhood ghost hunting epeditions...) One night, I had a nightmare, bizarrely enough about Sesame Street. It featured the Count Dracula character, in a darkened room. He was counting dragons, the outlines of which could be seen on the walls. As he loudly counted each dragon ('One dragon! Two Dragons!') each dragon lit up, accompanied by a flash of lightning and a clap of deafening thunder. I have no idea what was so frightening about this nightmare, but the whole dream was terrifying. When he reached 'four dragons!', I woke up in a fit of terror and relief, pleased that my nightmare of the Count Dracula and the dragons were over. I opened my eyes, and there at the end of my bed was a figure, sideways to me, looking out of the window. It was dressed all in black, some kind of long robe, such as a monks habit. The hood covered its head, obscuring the face from me. I remember I screwed my eyes up tight, pulled the blankets over my head and promised myself that I would never open my eyes at night again.
Rationalist explanations abound of course; a dream, an hypnopompic hallucination, that it was my mother, misidentified as I woke from sleep. But. There is always a but though - Hooded figures are common in ghost sightings, and where would I, as a child, have discovered this? I had seen a classic ghost, long before I had started reading about them. But. There was an advert at the time, showing a grim reaper figure, warning children to stay away from ponds, that bore a remarkable resemblance to 'The Black Phantom' (as I ended up christening it). But. My sister claimed she had seen it too. But. She was probably influenced by mt telling of the tale. But. I found out that my cousin had also... and so on and so on, ad nauseum. Notions of truth in any ghost sighting become irrelevant in the end, it is more the nature and effect of the experience that is important. Ghost stories are an integral part of human experience.
Another important influence on me that year was a documentary on the television about ghost hunters. I remember watching it on the television in my parents room, the same room I was enrapt by the Doctor Who story 'The Horror of Fang Rock' ('I've made a terrible mistake Leela, I haven't locked the creature out there, I've locked it in, with us...'). The documentary was about ghost hunters, they investigated an old church, recorded strange noises in the darkness, found secret rooms and hidden weapons. Perhaps because of this documentary, I associate grey, windy afternoons with ghost stories, the weather when I was watching it, the light fading to evening, that feeling, that resonance of a far more mysterious world beneath our own...
After 1977 we moved to the highlands of Scotland, where my interest in the paranormal crystallised into a lifelong fascination. We lived there until summer of 1985, and my childhood there is a history of ghost and monster hunting investigations; the strangling tree, the old abbey, werewolves, vanishing cars, mutants that lived in the river (or the 'burn' as we called it), a school haunted by the green hand, the blue mist and the Bloody Mary. This fascination has never really left me.
Because we lived so far away, trips down to England were a rarity, usually once a year. A week at one set of grandparents, then a week at the others. There was a certain wildness about my grandfather's house. Nowadays small villages are associated with second homes, picture-postcard serenity, small tea shops and affluence. I don't remember Stone being like this. It was surrounded by farming country, and my grandparents worked, until they retired, in the factories in town. Gypsy country, rural mafias, remote farmland dramas, lost in their own obscurity...
I remember a dream my sister had that has always stayed with me. She dreamt one night that my grandfather's house was under siege by rabbits, only these rabbits were armed with knives, and used ladders to try and gain access to the house. She sdaid that the rabbits had come from the fields that my grandfather's house backed onto. I think this dream was triggered by the discovery of a dead rabbit in the coal shelter at the front of the house. There was no central heating in the house, just a coal fire that was used for years, then replaced by a wood fire. Hours spent in long evenings watching the flames in the grate, creating burning empires out of the miniature infernos. because of this, the upstairs of the house was always cold. A panoply of blankets, pulling them over you, not to ward off ghosts, but to ward of the cold. When the bed was suitably warmed, often with the addition of a hot water bottle, it became the most comfortable and longed for place in the world.
There were few street lamps in the village, so when night fell, it felt like some great natural disaster. The use of the word 'village' is somewhat out of context too. It denotes some sense of community, but the houses were scattered too far apart to have a sense of community of warmth; streets split by woods and field, forgotten strips of bushes, and signs on fences warning that 'trespassers will be prosecuted'.
There was a shop, somewhere, in the village, a church on the hill, with adjoining churchyard, a school across the lane from the church where I attended in 1977. I had an overactive imagination as a child, and became convinced, for some reason, that a Tyrannosaurus Rex, whilst piloting a Spitfire (!) had become trapped in the tower of the Tudor building that was our schoolhouse-
(I'm actually writing this at work, and apparently I have work to do; proof reading scripts, calling customers who can't speak English, call to monitor. Going to have to continue this later. Forgive all the typographical errors...)
The house, 116 Stanklyn Lane, runs like a spine through my life, a knobbly backbone of a thing, pushing its bony intrusions into my dreams and memories. Haunts me, perhaps, more than any other place, probably because out of anywhere in my life it was the one I knew the longest, 22 years. My father was in the RAF and we moved about a lot when I was a child.
Perhaps there are other reasons too.
We lived there for a year in 1977, after we had returned from my father's posting in Malta. I went to the small village school, and shared the back room with my sister, and it was here that I saw a ghost, perhaps sparking off my lifelong interest in ghost stories and the paranormal. I think my interest in such things was probably inevitable though, but my experience in that house certainly deepened my interest. Well, I was five years old, six by the time we left, already deeply impressed by such things as Doctor Who, Star Trek, Space 1999 and Scooby Doo (a great influence on my childhood ghost hunting epeditions...) One night, I had a nightmare, bizarrely enough about Sesame Street. It featured the Count Dracula character, in a darkened room. He was counting dragons, the outlines of which could be seen on the walls. As he loudly counted each dragon ('One dragon! Two Dragons!') each dragon lit up, accompanied by a flash of lightning and a clap of deafening thunder. I have no idea what was so frightening about this nightmare, but the whole dream was terrifying. When he reached 'four dragons!', I woke up in a fit of terror and relief, pleased that my nightmare of the Count Dracula and the dragons were over. I opened my eyes, and there at the end of my bed was a figure, sideways to me, looking out of the window. It was dressed all in black, some kind of long robe, such as a monks habit. The hood covered its head, obscuring the face from me. I remember I screwed my eyes up tight, pulled the blankets over my head and promised myself that I would never open my eyes at night again.
Rationalist explanations abound of course; a dream, an hypnopompic hallucination, that it was my mother, misidentified as I woke from sleep. But. There is always a but though - Hooded figures are common in ghost sightings, and where would I, as a child, have discovered this? I had seen a classic ghost, long before I had started reading about them. But. There was an advert at the time, showing a grim reaper figure, warning children to stay away from ponds, that bore a remarkable resemblance to 'The Black Phantom' (as I ended up christening it). But. My sister claimed she had seen it too. But. She was probably influenced by mt telling of the tale. But. I found out that my cousin had also... and so on and so on, ad nauseum. Notions of truth in any ghost sighting become irrelevant in the end, it is more the nature and effect of the experience that is important. Ghost stories are an integral part of human experience.
Another important influence on me that year was a documentary on the television about ghost hunters. I remember watching it on the television in my parents room, the same room I was enrapt by the Doctor Who story 'The Horror of Fang Rock' ('I've made a terrible mistake Leela, I haven't locked the creature out there, I've locked it in, with us...'). The documentary was about ghost hunters, they investigated an old church, recorded strange noises in the darkness, found secret rooms and hidden weapons. Perhaps because of this documentary, I associate grey, windy afternoons with ghost stories, the weather when I was watching it, the light fading to evening, that feeling, that resonance of a far more mysterious world beneath our own...
After 1977 we moved to the highlands of Scotland, where my interest in the paranormal crystallised into a lifelong fascination. We lived there until summer of 1985, and my childhood there is a history of ghost and monster hunting investigations; the strangling tree, the old abbey, werewolves, vanishing cars, mutants that lived in the river (or the 'burn' as we called it), a school haunted by the green hand, the blue mist and the Bloody Mary. This fascination has never really left me.
Because we lived so far away, trips down to England were a rarity, usually once a year. A week at one set of grandparents, then a week at the others. There was a certain wildness about my grandfather's house. Nowadays small villages are associated with second homes, picture-postcard serenity, small tea shops and affluence. I don't remember Stone being like this. It was surrounded by farming country, and my grandparents worked, until they retired, in the factories in town. Gypsy country, rural mafias, remote farmland dramas, lost in their own obscurity...
I remember a dream my sister had that has always stayed with me. She dreamt one night that my grandfather's house was under siege by rabbits, only these rabbits were armed with knives, and used ladders to try and gain access to the house. She sdaid that the rabbits had come from the fields that my grandfather's house backed onto. I think this dream was triggered by the discovery of a dead rabbit in the coal shelter at the front of the house. There was no central heating in the house, just a coal fire that was used for years, then replaced by a wood fire. Hours spent in long evenings watching the flames in the grate, creating burning empires out of the miniature infernos. because of this, the upstairs of the house was always cold. A panoply of blankets, pulling them over you, not to ward off ghosts, but to ward of the cold. When the bed was suitably warmed, often with the addition of a hot water bottle, it became the most comfortable and longed for place in the world.
There were few street lamps in the village, so when night fell, it felt like some great natural disaster. The use of the word 'village' is somewhat out of context too. It denotes some sense of community, but the houses were scattered too far apart to have a sense of community of warmth; streets split by woods and field, forgotten strips of bushes, and signs on fences warning that 'trespassers will be prosecuted'.
There was a shop, somewhere, in the village, a church on the hill, with adjoining churchyard, a school across the lane from the church where I attended in 1977. I had an overactive imagination as a child, and became convinced, for some reason, that a Tyrannosaurus Rex, whilst piloting a Spitfire (!) had become trapped in the tower of the Tudor building that was our schoolhouse-
(I'm actually writing this at work, and apparently I have work to do; proof reading scripts, calling customers who can't speak English, call to monitor. Going to have to continue this later. Forgive all the typographical errors...)
Wednesday 16 December 2009
The Eeriest Part of a Winters Day
It's that hour before twilight. Those few short hours of December light give way to a pale washed out quality. Just went for a cigarette outside of work. Couldn't concentrate on reality, yet being, somehow, hyper-aware of that reality; the cyclist who had to stop before a car, the man selling bird whistles on the corner, the ubiquitous Christmas shoppers, the ragged man who stared at me a bit too long. Everything has that slightly unreal quality, a fluid miasma that threatens to flow and form into pools, wherein may lie vast seas, crossed by haunted navigators with faulty maps and ramshackle boats... When twilight falls in December, and in December, twilight never fully leaves the sky (that reddened strip just above the horizon), our thoughts turn to home, to sleep, to shutting the curtains against the night, forgetting the darkness, seeking our nepenthe in alcohol and television... Need to call in at the chemists after work, call down the angels of Paroxetine to help stem this insiduous stream of depression. Time fragmenting. Each breath taken in the cold air redolent of a thousand other remembered breaths in cold air; Ruth's house in Worcestershire, my parents house in Cornwall, travelling by train, racing the night across the country, trying to get home before darkness falls. The present time seems superceded by past times, ghost-times, and our soul seems stretched across decades. Eleven minutes before I'm on the phone again, carrying out a survey talking to people whose grasp of English is, to say the least, basic. Shall I go out for another cigarette, or content myself with the one I have just had? The sky is continuing to grey outside the window, tinged with deep winter blue. Tom is talking to me about claustrophobia; 'would you ever go caving?', Pam has just left the office. Four minutes to four pm. The eeriest hour of a winters day coming to an end, and night has begun her ascendance. I shouldn't shut the curtains against the night, but go out into those dark streets, lose myself in those pools of abandoned lamplight, blossoming in night swells...
Another Dream of my Grandfather's House
Fell asleep last night, without meaning too, watching the old Doctor Who story 'The Hand of Fear' (I didn't even get past episode two). I woke up at 12:30am, strangely relieved. I had had another nightmare in my 'Grandfather's House' series of dreams. Of course, I should have made the effort then, got up, found a notebook (I have a plague of notebooks around) and written the dream down, but, I turned off the light (and the television) and went back to sleep.
It wasn't just my Grandfather's house, but my Grandmother's house too (Nanny and Grandad Stone, -Stone from the name of the village they lived in- to differentiate them from my paternal grandparents, Nanny and Grandad Mole). My grandmother, Nanny Stone died in 1983 when I was ten, while Grandad Stone died in 1994, hence why I tend to refer to it as my Grandfather's house. We lived there for a year in 1977, when we had just returned from Malta, and I was five. It was there that I saw -or thought I saw- a ghost - a cowled monk figure stood at the end of the bed. I always found the house, a nondescript semi-detached council house in a small Worcestershire village, to be possessed of a dreaming, eerie quality. I was not alone in thinking this; my Aunt, talking a few years ago said that, when she was a child, she always found upstairs frightening, and said that her daughter, my cousin Anne, had 'seen things too'.
I say all this because perhaps it is a contributing factor to its recurrent appearance in my dreams; secret attic rooms, hidden stairways, always that haunting unnerving atmosphere.
My dream last night was typical. Though it was undeniably my Grandfather's house, it also bore no relation to the house in waking life. There was a low kitchen, attached to a long living room. It was night, and outside the windows, an urban street. I had to stay alone in the house, which I was not pleased about. I think our old dog, an orange mongrel called Bruno, was with me at this point. I tried getting other people to stay but to no avail. I thought that the only way I could cope with staying in the house on my own was by getting drunk. The next point in the dream i remember was waking up in the sitting room. I had managed to fall asleep after all. There was a quarter empty bottle of something called 'Drinking Alcohol' on the table. I started drinking again. There was a woman with me now. I can't remember who she was (a silver dress, blonde almost white hair) but I knew her in my dream. Stood at the open door looking into the street. I said to her 'Shenstone is haunted', some kind of statement whose importance now escapes me. In waking life, my Grandfather;s house was in Stone, though there was a nearby village called Shenstone. I stood with the woman at the windows. A procession of people passing by. They looked like teenagers, or students. Somehow, they got into the house, began to hold some kind of party, though the party was moderate and well behaved. I started to become concerned that there were people I didn't know in my Grandfather's house, particularly when I saw some of them start to go upstairs, up into the depths of the house. I said to someone that perhaps it was time for them to leave.
That's it. That's all I can remember. A particularly uninteresting dream, compared to some I've had, but it's that atmosphere that stays with me; that haunting, invisible presence of something unseen that permeates the atmosphere.
An atmosphere, of course, that I remember in the house in life.
It wasn't just my Grandfather's house, but my Grandmother's house too (Nanny and Grandad Stone, -Stone from the name of the village they lived in- to differentiate them from my paternal grandparents, Nanny and Grandad Mole). My grandmother, Nanny Stone died in 1983 when I was ten, while Grandad Stone died in 1994, hence why I tend to refer to it as my Grandfather's house. We lived there for a year in 1977, when we had just returned from Malta, and I was five. It was there that I saw -or thought I saw- a ghost - a cowled monk figure stood at the end of the bed. I always found the house, a nondescript semi-detached council house in a small Worcestershire village, to be possessed of a dreaming, eerie quality. I was not alone in thinking this; my Aunt, talking a few years ago said that, when she was a child, she always found upstairs frightening, and said that her daughter, my cousin Anne, had 'seen things too'.
I say all this because perhaps it is a contributing factor to its recurrent appearance in my dreams; secret attic rooms, hidden stairways, always that haunting unnerving atmosphere.
My dream last night was typical. Though it was undeniably my Grandfather's house, it also bore no relation to the house in waking life. There was a low kitchen, attached to a long living room. It was night, and outside the windows, an urban street. I had to stay alone in the house, which I was not pleased about. I think our old dog, an orange mongrel called Bruno, was with me at this point. I tried getting other people to stay but to no avail. I thought that the only way I could cope with staying in the house on my own was by getting drunk. The next point in the dream i remember was waking up in the sitting room. I had managed to fall asleep after all. There was a quarter empty bottle of something called 'Drinking Alcohol' on the table. I started drinking again. There was a woman with me now. I can't remember who she was (a silver dress, blonde almost white hair) but I knew her in my dream. Stood at the open door looking into the street. I said to her 'Shenstone is haunted', some kind of statement whose importance now escapes me. In waking life, my Grandfather;s house was in Stone, though there was a nearby village called Shenstone. I stood with the woman at the windows. A procession of people passing by. They looked like teenagers, or students. Somehow, they got into the house, began to hold some kind of party, though the party was moderate and well behaved. I started to become concerned that there were people I didn't know in my Grandfather's house, particularly when I saw some of them start to go upstairs, up into the depths of the house. I said to someone that perhaps it was time for them to leave.
That's it. That's all I can remember. A particularly uninteresting dream, compared to some I've had, but it's that atmosphere that stays with me; that haunting, invisible presence of something unseen that permeates the atmosphere.
An atmosphere, of course, that I remember in the house in life.
Monday 14 December 2009
An Afternoon in the Industrial Zone
Met Joe in an internet cafe in Western Road. He had left his jumper there on the previous day. It was only about 1:00pm, which was quite early for a Sunday walk. I had only had two pints the previous night, and Joe had been too hungover to even think about drinking. A common ritual with us is the 'walk' or 'stomp'. Highly ritualised and refined over the years. It usually begins with meeting up in the early afternoon, with a pre-set destination (or to be more accurate) journey in mind. After meeting up, food and drink needs to be bought, often from a newsagent or other kind of corner shop; samosas, crisps, chocolate bar, diet coke. On this occasion Joe needed to purchase some kind of hat, as he had lost his last one in an internet cafe in Amsterdam. This necessitated a trip to a charity shop, where Joe duly bought his hat, and I bought the 1990 remake of 'Night of the Living Dead' for £2:99, which I was quite pleased with, despite the fact I would then have to carry this for the rest of the trip.
We had decided on our journey the day before. Our last stomp had been to Falmer, back in October, as had the 'Other Side of The Marina' walk. In September, we had investigated the scrubby Sussex Downs environs of 'Benfield Valley park', but had failed to locate the observatory which had been promised on the map. We had settled this time for 'Industrial Zone Shoreham', with the possible destination of Shoreham itself in mind, (though we were as liable to turn back from this if we got bored, tired or distracted. As it happens we did make it to Shoreham). We had only 'done' this walk once before, the end of July 2007, the day before I started working at the call centre. That had been a rididulously hot day and the industrial zone was strange; a mysterious and illicit nudist section past the private beach where bodies keep being washed up. Naked bodies of indeterminate sex, rising from the sea like zombies, whilst, seemingly oblivious, families walked their children and dogs on the paths just above.
Hmm.
Stomps are punctuated by incidents, splitting the walk into chapters. The prologue to this walk, consisted of the discovery of a small cafe, just past the King Aldred swimming pool, called something like 'Mr Bumbles'. I've walked past here numerous times, but never noticed this before. A small hut, the interior bedecked with Christmas decorations and tasty looking pies. We sat on the plastic chairs outside, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, debating whether to go back to the garage to get some rizlas as we had already used our last two.
We decided not to and pressed on.
What do they call this place? Celebrity Beach? Something like that. Millionaires row maybe. A private beach anyway. There was something bleak and desolate about it though, the houses looking all empty and haunted in their seemingly abandoned air. I am always glad when we have left the private beach behind. As I said above, bodies seem to keep being washed up here. I wonder if the celebrities feel haunted by it all. If they live here ever. We saw no-one. I couldn't stand to live here.
After clambering over a rocky bluff, we enter into the industrial zone proper. The beach is a mixture of sand and pebbles. Scraggy grass grows up the slope that leads to the factories, dockland machinery, warehouses and locks behind us. The beach is littered with empty drinking bottles and bits of industrial waste; rope covered with rust, rusty cans of factory effluvium, rusty tracks, rusty wood. Anything here becomes infected with rust.
The beach was empty (we only saw one other person, a dog walker with two admiringly friendly dogs). The sense of isolation was heightened by the factory walls that lined the beach, giving it a claustrophobic air. I don't know if the factories are ever used, but they have that same abandoned air as the celebrity houses we had just passed.
Two great iron columns (rust covered of course) rose from the beach, relics from some forgotten industrial revolution. Bits of seaweed and barnacles. Against a pleasingly glowering sky they looked like gallows, or lost temples dedicated to some savage, polluted god.
The landscape of the industrial zone behind us was as strange. Great machines like magnified crows hunched over unseen prey, odd little huts, a thousand pipes and chimneys. It was all a hypnotising jumble of mess; piles of bricks left here, a clutch of pipes abandoned here, a repository of feral, broken objects.
All this led to the beach accunulating an almost M.R.James-esque ghost story atmosphere; the lonely walkers on the beach (and we felt far, far from Brighton here), the too-still sea, and the too-busy sky, and yes, you could imagine something following you from groyne to groyne... Not a white sheet as in 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You', but a ghost born of factories and power stations; a sheet of corrugated iron, walking jaggedly toward us across pebble and oil drum littered sands. There were no seagulls, only an infinity of crows.
After we had passed the base of the power station chimney, we came to some kind of wharf leading out over the water. It was covered with black barnacles and seaweed, and at the end of this strangely purposeless wharf, another great rusting pillar, or column, rose up into the sky.
This was very pleasing, more so as I discovered a few rizlas in my pockets so were able to smoke as we sat at the end of this narrow wharf, looking out to sea. We both wrote a poem. It wasn't a very good poem I wrote but the line 'the bleak Sunday shores offer a consolation' parallelled Joe's line about 'the sea soothes my troubled soul'. We had a discussion about his line afterwards. His criticism was that it was a cliche, which it was, but it was also true. Neither of us are particularly happy with out lives at the moment, but being out here, watching the lapping brown water under portentious skies...
We moved on, passing by a small cafe, situated deep in the industrial heartland of the zone. What was it doing here? Why was it still open on a cold Sunday afternoon in December? Come to that, why was this section of the Industrial Zone so busy with families and dog walkers? Actually, I could see why. Industrial architecture is always interesting, and the maze of walkways and corridors, docks and bridges so tightly packed together became a veritable outsider artist drawing, all chaos, precision and neurosis. A faulty cartography for unmappable climes.
We worked our way through the interior of the Industrial Zone and onto the road to Shoreham, scene of the infamous January 2006 walk, where Joe, Andy and myself entered a state of existential boredom walking along here.
Nothing to see here, just MFI warehouses, scraggy strips of grass, trundling, deafening traffic, advert hoardings. And it goes on so long. Even yesterday, when we joined the road about halfway down, the walk to Shoreham just seemed to take... forever.
Nearly dark by the time we arrived.
Shoreham is an interesting place in its bleakness, probably because I usually only come here in Winter, which only adds to it's 'end-of-the-world' air. The shops were closing by the time we arrived, but Joe was able to buy a 'meat square' in the co-op, because he hadn't adequately bought enough provisions for the journey. We crossed the covered walkway over the river. The tide was out (the is always out here, the river only a rumour, and this only adds to the sense of dreamy desolation). Small boats lay stranded, rotting on islands of scraggy grass, sinking into the dangerous looking mud. A horror comic landscape.
We soon arrived at the houseboats. A strange tourist attraction these. Great hulks of old ships, precarious gangways leading from walkway to decks. Welded messes, repositories for junk; planks of wood, washing machines, a streetlamp fused onto one ship, an actual bus, or coach, part of the hull of another. Many of them are painted by, seemingly, old hippies, proclaiming peace, love and cannabis. Such statements are out of place here. The boats have a far more brooding quality, a feeling of ancient-ness. Who lives here? How much do they cost? Do the floors slope inside? I preferred the more nameless hulks, vast military-ghosts, portholes allowing no insight, no access, no information. They seemed to suggest places of nocturnal and occult conspiracy.
The walkway was interesting too, a raised platform between the boats on one side and an undergrowth filled ditch on the other. Tall houses beyond the ditch cut you off from the rest of Shoreham. Trees, well, small bushes really, sloped over the path, giving the impression of a tunnel, and the regularly placed lamps cast pools of orange light. It all gave the quality of a strange dream, only half remembered in the morning. The quality of a background in a surrealist painting. Something hyper-real, too lucid, and ultimately, without reason, haunting.
At the end of the walkway, we stopped, looking across the road and into the fields beyond.
'The walks over' Joe said.
he was right.
We headed back into Shoreham proper, had a pint at the Duke of Wellington before catching the bus back to Brighton. Not that we went back to our respective homes straight away, but to Brighton Pier, on deserted days, a place with a not dissimilar atmosphere to some of the places we had been that day. The closing ritual to the stomp. We played 'House of the Dead IV' and did disgracefully, not even getting to the end of level one, before having a cup of tea, and finally heading back to the less than pleasant buildings where we live.
We had decided on our journey the day before. Our last stomp had been to Falmer, back in October, as had the 'Other Side of The Marina' walk. In September, we had investigated the scrubby Sussex Downs environs of 'Benfield Valley park', but had failed to locate the observatory which had been promised on the map. We had settled this time for 'Industrial Zone Shoreham', with the possible destination of Shoreham itself in mind, (though we were as liable to turn back from this if we got bored, tired or distracted. As it happens we did make it to Shoreham). We had only 'done' this walk once before, the end of July 2007, the day before I started working at the call centre. That had been a rididulously hot day and the industrial zone was strange; a mysterious and illicit nudist section past the private beach where bodies keep being washed up. Naked bodies of indeterminate sex, rising from the sea like zombies, whilst, seemingly oblivious, families walked their children and dogs on the paths just above.
Hmm.
Stomps are punctuated by incidents, splitting the walk into chapters. The prologue to this walk, consisted of the discovery of a small cafe, just past the King Aldred swimming pool, called something like 'Mr Bumbles'. I've walked past here numerous times, but never noticed this before. A small hut, the interior bedecked with Christmas decorations and tasty looking pies. We sat on the plastic chairs outside, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, debating whether to go back to the garage to get some rizlas as we had already used our last two.
We decided not to and pressed on.
What do they call this place? Celebrity Beach? Something like that. Millionaires row maybe. A private beach anyway. There was something bleak and desolate about it though, the houses looking all empty and haunted in their seemingly abandoned air. I am always glad when we have left the private beach behind. As I said above, bodies seem to keep being washed up here. I wonder if the celebrities feel haunted by it all. If they live here ever. We saw no-one. I couldn't stand to live here.
After clambering over a rocky bluff, we enter into the industrial zone proper. The beach is a mixture of sand and pebbles. Scraggy grass grows up the slope that leads to the factories, dockland machinery, warehouses and locks behind us. The beach is littered with empty drinking bottles and bits of industrial waste; rope covered with rust, rusty cans of factory effluvium, rusty tracks, rusty wood. Anything here becomes infected with rust.
The beach was empty (we only saw one other person, a dog walker with two admiringly friendly dogs). The sense of isolation was heightened by the factory walls that lined the beach, giving it a claustrophobic air. I don't know if the factories are ever used, but they have that same abandoned air as the celebrity houses we had just passed.
Two great iron columns (rust covered of course) rose from the beach, relics from some forgotten industrial revolution. Bits of seaweed and barnacles. Against a pleasingly glowering sky they looked like gallows, or lost temples dedicated to some savage, polluted god.
The landscape of the industrial zone behind us was as strange. Great machines like magnified crows hunched over unseen prey, odd little huts, a thousand pipes and chimneys. It was all a hypnotising jumble of mess; piles of bricks left here, a clutch of pipes abandoned here, a repository of feral, broken objects.
All this led to the beach accunulating an almost M.R.James-esque ghost story atmosphere; the lonely walkers on the beach (and we felt far, far from Brighton here), the too-still sea, and the too-busy sky, and yes, you could imagine something following you from groyne to groyne... Not a white sheet as in 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You', but a ghost born of factories and power stations; a sheet of corrugated iron, walking jaggedly toward us across pebble and oil drum littered sands. There were no seagulls, only an infinity of crows.
After we had passed the base of the power station chimney, we came to some kind of wharf leading out over the water. It was covered with black barnacles and seaweed, and at the end of this strangely purposeless wharf, another great rusting pillar, or column, rose up into the sky.
This was very pleasing, more so as I discovered a few rizlas in my pockets so were able to smoke as we sat at the end of this narrow wharf, looking out to sea. We both wrote a poem. It wasn't a very good poem I wrote but the line 'the bleak Sunday shores offer a consolation' parallelled Joe's line about 'the sea soothes my troubled soul'. We had a discussion about his line afterwards. His criticism was that it was a cliche, which it was, but it was also true. Neither of us are particularly happy with out lives at the moment, but being out here, watching the lapping brown water under portentious skies...
We moved on, passing by a small cafe, situated deep in the industrial heartland of the zone. What was it doing here? Why was it still open on a cold Sunday afternoon in December? Come to that, why was this section of the Industrial Zone so busy with families and dog walkers? Actually, I could see why. Industrial architecture is always interesting, and the maze of walkways and corridors, docks and bridges so tightly packed together became a veritable outsider artist drawing, all chaos, precision and neurosis. A faulty cartography for unmappable climes.
We worked our way through the interior of the Industrial Zone and onto the road to Shoreham, scene of the infamous January 2006 walk, where Joe, Andy and myself entered a state of existential boredom walking along here.
Nothing to see here, just MFI warehouses, scraggy strips of grass, trundling, deafening traffic, advert hoardings. And it goes on so long. Even yesterday, when we joined the road about halfway down, the walk to Shoreham just seemed to take... forever.
Nearly dark by the time we arrived.
Shoreham is an interesting place in its bleakness, probably because I usually only come here in Winter, which only adds to it's 'end-of-the-world' air. The shops were closing by the time we arrived, but Joe was able to buy a 'meat square' in the co-op, because he hadn't adequately bought enough provisions for the journey. We crossed the covered walkway over the river. The tide was out (the is always out here, the river only a rumour, and this only adds to the sense of dreamy desolation). Small boats lay stranded, rotting on islands of scraggy grass, sinking into the dangerous looking mud. A horror comic landscape.
We soon arrived at the houseboats. A strange tourist attraction these. Great hulks of old ships, precarious gangways leading from walkway to decks. Welded messes, repositories for junk; planks of wood, washing machines, a streetlamp fused onto one ship, an actual bus, or coach, part of the hull of another. Many of them are painted by, seemingly, old hippies, proclaiming peace, love and cannabis. Such statements are out of place here. The boats have a far more brooding quality, a feeling of ancient-ness. Who lives here? How much do they cost? Do the floors slope inside? I preferred the more nameless hulks, vast military-ghosts, portholes allowing no insight, no access, no information. They seemed to suggest places of nocturnal and occult conspiracy.
The walkway was interesting too, a raised platform between the boats on one side and an undergrowth filled ditch on the other. Tall houses beyond the ditch cut you off from the rest of Shoreham. Trees, well, small bushes really, sloped over the path, giving the impression of a tunnel, and the regularly placed lamps cast pools of orange light. It all gave the quality of a strange dream, only half remembered in the morning. The quality of a background in a surrealist painting. Something hyper-real, too lucid, and ultimately, without reason, haunting.
At the end of the walkway, we stopped, looking across the road and into the fields beyond.
'The walks over' Joe said.
he was right.
We headed back into Shoreham proper, had a pint at the Duke of Wellington before catching the bus back to Brighton. Not that we went back to our respective homes straight away, but to Brighton Pier, on deserted days, a place with a not dissimilar atmosphere to some of the places we had been that day. The closing ritual to the stomp. We played 'House of the Dead IV' and did disgracefully, not even getting to the end of level one, before having a cup of tea, and finally heading back to the less than pleasant buildings where we live.
Sunday 6 December 2009
Cabin Fever
Sunday morning, 11:18. Am sat in some internet cafe near Sackville Road. Empty cellar room. Just the sound of the keyboard, and a clock ticking on the wall in front of me. Sunny outside, though that winter sun that seems somehow desolate. At least it makes a change from the rain, not that I mind rain too much.
Finally got the keys to my bedsit; a small room on the second floor looking out onto the street. Not moved in yet though, have to find some means of getting my stuff over there, and people to help me move it, but everyone has gone away for the weekend, so I've stayed at Andy's flat on my own. Joe, when he first saw the bedsit said 'this is the room of a writer who ends up killing themselves'. We turned off the light, just to see what it was like. The window frame made a rather portentious crucifix shape, outlined against the streetlight. Deep, dark shadows. The darkness almost palpable.
A decade full of bad flats and cursed houses. I'm getting sick of it.
Went out with Joe and people from work on Friday. Had three absinthes which is far too many, amongst other things. Walking back through driving rain, stoned and soaking (we had gone round T's house after the pub), half-lost in unfamiliar streets. Fascinated by the gutter-rivers, mini floods cascading down drains, over dams of drowned leaves, watching a plastic fork turn up, get stuck, be devoured.
Strange day yesterday. Didn't see anyone, bought lamps and lightbulbs, moved some stuff over to the bedsit. Hollow, empty room. Be glad when all my stuff is there, next weekend apparently. Sick of this transient phase. Homeless with a home. As twilight fell, a sense of isolation fell over me. A. is away up north, so I am staying in his flat -the Capsule- on my own. Couldn't rest. Didn't feel like listening to music. Nothing on television. Eventually fell asleep at about 10pm. Don't remember dreaming. Maybe I do. yes I do. Canalboats and sunny days. A feeling of untraceable anxiety.
Half an hour until midday.
I'll be glad when Sunday is over.
Finally got the keys to my bedsit; a small room on the second floor looking out onto the street. Not moved in yet though, have to find some means of getting my stuff over there, and people to help me move it, but everyone has gone away for the weekend, so I've stayed at Andy's flat on my own. Joe, when he first saw the bedsit said 'this is the room of a writer who ends up killing themselves'. We turned off the light, just to see what it was like. The window frame made a rather portentious crucifix shape, outlined against the streetlight. Deep, dark shadows. The darkness almost palpable.
A decade full of bad flats and cursed houses. I'm getting sick of it.
Went out with Joe and people from work on Friday. Had three absinthes which is far too many, amongst other things. Walking back through driving rain, stoned and soaking (we had gone round T's house after the pub), half-lost in unfamiliar streets. Fascinated by the gutter-rivers, mini floods cascading down drains, over dams of drowned leaves, watching a plastic fork turn up, get stuck, be devoured.
Strange day yesterday. Didn't see anyone, bought lamps and lightbulbs, moved some stuff over to the bedsit. Hollow, empty room. Be glad when all my stuff is there, next weekend apparently. Sick of this transient phase. Homeless with a home. As twilight fell, a sense of isolation fell over me. A. is away up north, so I am staying in his flat -the Capsule- on my own. Couldn't rest. Didn't feel like listening to music. Nothing on television. Eventually fell asleep at about 10pm. Don't remember dreaming. Maybe I do. yes I do. Canalboats and sunny days. A feeling of untraceable anxiety.
Half an hour until midday.
I'll be glad when Sunday is over.
Tuesday 1 December 2009
Three Dream Fragments.
I.
C. had joined a Christian Cult. AM, her boyfriend was not too pleased at this. JW and I were investigating this cult, as part of unspecified studies. As part of our studies we have to go through a 'rebirthing ritual'. I am suddenly concerned at this, and am worried that going through this ritual may somehow mean that I will become brainwashed. Standing in a queue with JW, voicing our sudden concerns.
II.
A flooded industrial room, open to the outside. Wading through knee deep water. Pipes. Long oblong pieces of machinery. With A. Turn one of the pieces of machinery over. Am pleased to see that it is some kind of sideboard for a bedroom. Realise I am in a bedroom. The water seems to drain away. It would make quite a nice bedrrom I think. I am suddenly sad because I have to leave it.
III.
Looking back over a stile at a field. On the other side of a field is another stile. There is a sequence of fields connected by stiles. I have just come across the fields and over the stiles. Summer night. With someone else, possibly JW. The sequence of fields looks very alluring, and I am please with the sudden revelation that I can come back when I am alone.
C. had joined a Christian Cult. AM, her boyfriend was not too pleased at this. JW and I were investigating this cult, as part of unspecified studies. As part of our studies we have to go through a 'rebirthing ritual'. I am suddenly concerned at this, and am worried that going through this ritual may somehow mean that I will become brainwashed. Standing in a queue with JW, voicing our sudden concerns.
II.
A flooded industrial room, open to the outside. Wading through knee deep water. Pipes. Long oblong pieces of machinery. With A. Turn one of the pieces of machinery over. Am pleased to see that it is some kind of sideboard for a bedroom. Realise I am in a bedroom. The water seems to drain away. It would make quite a nice bedrrom I think. I am suddenly sad because I have to leave it.
III.
Looking back over a stile at a field. On the other side of a field is another stile. There is a sequence of fields connected by stiles. I have just come across the fields and over the stiles. Summer night. With someone else, possibly JW. The sequence of fields looks very alluring, and I am please with the sudden revelation that I can come back when I am alone.
Lines Written in a Notebook, Bystander Cafe 7:30pm approx
Long day at work. Nine hours. Transient time. Cup of tea in the Bystander Cafe opposite Brighton station. Waiting for Brighton Poetry Society night at 8:00pm. A tangle of buses, taxis, people coming out of Brighton Station. Shifting lights -blue, purple, orange - lighting the path that leads under Trafalgar Street underpass. Everyone wrapped up, pointing towards December. Year-end. Decade-end. A fractious energy haunting us all, nervy, hysterical. I think it's the end of the decade, reviewing the first ten years of the century, new millennium chapter. Time passing. Needing to expel accumulated poison. Necessary but unpleasant. Damp but cold through the day. Now a dry Christmas cold. 'Kansas before the storm hits' (who wrote that?) Feels like Kansas. Hope this is the storm already here. Melodrama and over exaggeration - my two main talents... Drink tea. Think of smoking a cigarette on the way down to the Sanctuary Cafe. Waiting for sleep. Hoping the bedsit turns out okay. Remember I used to live round here. Studio flat in Buckingham Street. Three and a half years - 2003 - 2007. Black sky, clear air, autumn done with. Only winter remaining. Drink tea and watch the televised gameshow reflected in the Bystander Cafe windows.
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