The Last Steamer & Other Strange Tales - Bob Mann

The Last Steamer and Other Strange Tales by Bob Mann has recently been published by Longmarsh Press of Totnes. The author is a well-known figure in Arthur Machen circles and a writer on South Devon history, folklore and mysteries, and this new book collects some of his fine supernatural stories, originally shared with family and friends at Christmas.

Bob Mann understands that some of the best ghost stories are rooted in a strong sense of place, and his succinct but vivid tales set in the mysterious byways of a certain corner of Devon gain from his deep knowledge of local history and legend.

He also knows that the strangest experiences can be those that don’t quite cohere: they result from hazy glimpses, passing encounters, things we are not quite sure we saw, and he is adept at suggesting just enough, and no more.

So here are compelling accounts of an “ancient and terrible” steam boat that simply shouldn’t be there, a horned ceremony in a churchyard at night, the alluring modern manifestations of femmes fatales at a haunted castle, a citadel that hasn’t existed for centuries, the figure of a redoubtable teacher in an organ loft, and even – what a wonderful idea! - a phantom brass band.

Arthur Machen enthusiasts will also delight in finding sly allusions to the Gwent master and his work.

With each of these highly relishable yarns we feel a strong sense of the past still resonating in our time, while also enjoying the author’s wry sense of humour and light touch.

Mark Valentine

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things

The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things: Stories is available for pre-order from Zagava. Twelve previously uncollected stories, and an unpublished journal.

Contents

To the Eternal One
The Key to Jerusalem
Listening to Stonehenge
Goat Songs
Zabulo
In Cypress Shades
The Mask of the Dead Mammilius
Yes, I Knew the Venusian Commodore
The Scarlet Door
Vain Shadows Flee
The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things
as blank as the days yet to be
Notes on the Border

Mark Valentine

Season's Greetings to all our readers

Look into my eyes, look into my eyes.
You are feeling sleepy. Very sleeeepy.
You need Wormwood.
Yes, Wormwood . . .

A Harp in Llanidloes, and A Twist in the Stair

It was a grey, wet day at the end of September in the remote little town of Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire, which lies among the Cambrian Mountains in the middle of Wales. But our spirits were lightened as we entered the Great Oak second-hand bookshop by the echoing notes of a harp. In the mezzanine room at the back of the shop, a friend of the owner was rehearsing delicate old melodies. Along with the lute, the sound of the harp always conveys to me a sense of the ancient past, the days of court bards and wandering minstrels.

A favourite album of my youth was Alan Stivell’s Renaissance of the Celtic Harp (1971), which was doubly magical because its pieces drew upon Breton folklore, such as the stories of the sunken kingdom of Ys, and indeed one piece was accompanied by the slow wistful sound of waves upon the shore. Whether it was the influence of the spell of the harp, or whether it was because Llanidloes itself is a place of witchery, I certainly found some curious books there.

We had selected just a handful of titles of interest in the front of the shop, and in the two-storey outhouse reached through the back door, and were just about to take those to the counter when I noticed to one side a wicket gate at the top of some stone steps. These proved to descend into a cellar. There was a turn in the stair, and as I came to the last step, I saw ahead of me a few small bookcases with children’s books, but not much else, and I was about to return. But then I looked to my right and lo! – there were rows and rows of old hardback fiction, which is what I always want to find and, these days, often don’t.

The first book I encountered, right in front of my nose, when I began my eager browsing among these shelves was a mottled copy of Fanfaronade (1934) by Ivo Pakenham, which I have written about here before, a timeslip fantasy in which a scholar of medieval history finds himself transposed to a duchy perhaps not unlike Burgundy. And the curious thing is, and this only occurred to me a little later, that he reaches this realm by taking some stone steps downward from a secret door in the chamber of a French chateau, and following a turn in the stair. . .

Now clearly a turn in the stair of a French chateau and a turn in the stair in a Welsh bookshop are not the same thing. But even so, it still seemed slightly peculiar to find a book in the same way as the book itself begins.

Nor was Fanfaronade the only good find down in the cellar. Here were also three books by Claude Houghton, including a 1938 edition of his first novel, Neighbours (1926). There was also Arminel of the West (1909), a Devon romance, in pictorial boards, by the often distinctly odd John Trevena. Then there was a Yorkshire rural saga, The Cliff End (1908) by Edward Booth, in the Holderness edition of his novels, named after the coastal eastern corner of the county where his books were usually set.

This author was praised, and I had noted his name for this reason, by the American Machen enthusiast Paul Jordan-Smith in one of his volumes of bookish essays, probably For the Love of Books: The Adventures of An Impecunious Collector (1934). (That collector, incidentally, would have been much cheered by the prices of the books in the cellar, which were moderate indeed.) The dustwrapper flap of Booth’s book tells us it is “an unashamedly sentimental, old-fashioned, novel,” while J.B. Priestley (also a Yorkshireman) is quoted as saying it is “not unlike an interior by an old Dutch master doubly based on close observation and deep feeling.”

And my fingers also found their way to a desert adventure yarn tinged with occult elements, The White Knights (El Firsan El Bied) (1912) by T.G. Wakeling. Now, Wakeling was the author of a book I acquired a while ago because of its irresistible title, Forged Egyptian Antiquities (1912). Largely anecdotal, it gave interesting sidelights on the differences between forgeries and the genuinely ancient, and made the point that some of the fake artefacts were worth having simply as well-made art objects, even without their alleged antiquity.

As we made to leave Llanidloes, we noticed a most unusual architectural feature which at once took our fancy. An old red-brick shop had drainpipes in a pleasing shade of powder blue – but not only that, these were barley-twist drainpipes, a shape in rainwater columns neither of us had ever seen before, which gave them a distinctly eccentric, Gothicky look. Thoughts of a monograph on “Curious Drainpipes of Mid-Wales” at once began to take form.


Mark Valentine
Photographs: Jo Valentine

A Map of Old Dunwich, and Egypt in England

The county of Norfolk is well-blessed with second-hand bookshops, so I can’t now recall exactly which one led me to the book called Dim Corridors (Wymondham: Geo. R. Reeve, 1948), but surely no-one with an antiquarian cast of mind could resist such a title? It suggests at once hushed passages in some ancient hall, or wanderings at dusk in hollow-ways through lonely country. My interest was further quickened when I opened up the book and found the first page was a fold-out street map of Old Dunwich, the medieval city that is now beneath the waves.

This showed the town as it was in the 16th century, in an engraving from 1753 for the Society of Antiquaries. I like maps in books and a map of a lost world even better. The chart has neat letters marked on it, and on the reverse a key to these is a roll-call of the vanished: the Black Friars, the Grey Friars, the Temple, St James Hospital, the Maison Dieu, the Cock Hills and the Hen Hills, the Windmills, St Francis’ Chapel, and the Sea Fields. That last name was suitably ominous since sea was what so many fields indeed became.

In his foreword the author, R.D. Clover, says that though the articles in the book are “built upon a framework of history” they are “first of all, impressions” of the lesser-known parts of East Anglia. Places have different atmospheres, he notes, and he has attempted “to grasp something of this intangible thing “atmosphere” and put it down on paper.” This is perhaps an unusual idea for the time, at least so particularly stated, and Clover’s approach might be seen as a precursor of the “earth mysteries” writers of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, the psycho-geographers of slightly later and the “new landscape” writers of today.

But it must be said that Mr Clover does not stray all that far from the sort of sense that any keen visitor might get of the places he discusses. His essay on the lost town is entitled “Dunwich – A Place of Ghosts” and begins, “Dunwich is not an easy place to find.” He had to make his way through half-forgotten lanes to the last street left, and scramble around war debris, put here to deter invaders, to get to the beach. The atmosphere, it will not be surprising to learn, was distinctly melancholy. The author certainly conveys this mood convincingly enough: “I picked up a fragment of skull and looked at it. What sort of brain once lived within that bit of hollowed bone? . . . I looked up and down the beach; not a soul was in sight. Nothing moved but a little chilly wind and the restless sea. Dunwich was dead.”

In fact, the remaining village of Dunwich is not in the least dead now, as it receives quite a few visitors attracted by its mystery and romance, and has an excellent little museum and interesting ruins, quite apart from its long if often windswept shore with its beachside chip shop shack. A short walk will also take you to sighing pine woods and crumbling clifftop walks, to be negotiated with care, since the sea has not quite finished with Dunwich yet.

The other essays in the book discuss old abbeys, churches, castles and towns, often then little-known and not much visited. There is an aura of wistfulness. R.D. Clover was, so far as the sources show, otherwise only the author of local history monographs. One of these was St. Mary's Parish Church and College of the Holy Cross, Attleborough, Norfolk: A history with notes on famous Attleborough families, published by the author in 1960.

Another was Tales of an area : a village study and history of Croxton, Kilverstone, and Barnham and the infancy of Thetford (Thetford: the author, 1975), for which he also supplied pen-and-ink drawings. Dim Corridors has three articles on Thetford, the first describing it as “an ancient capital” of East Anglia, the other two entitled, somewhat surprisingly, “Egypt in England I and II”. This proves to be an exciting variation on the notion that the Phoenicians visited England in ancient times—I am a connoisseur in a small way of such theories—only here having Ancient Egyptian voyagers discovering these islands on the edge of the world instead.

In part I of the Egypt discussion, Mr Clover summarises the ideas of H J Massingham, in his book Downland Man (1926): “Mr Massingham believes Avebury was built by people or rather descendants of people from the Nile Valley in Egypt . . . He sees a kinship between Megalithic England and Egypt in . . . the terraced cult of the hills; study of the heavenly bodies in the orientation of megaliths; chambered barrows, and sun worship; the resemblance between a Trilithon of Stonehenge and the postern of the Lion Gate at Mycenae . . .” And so, Silbury Hill at Avebury, that great cone of grass-covered chalk, the largest human-made mound in Europe, might be “the memory of a pyramid.”

What has this to do with Thetford? Well, says Mr Clover, let us go by Spring Walk in the town, “that lovely quiet backwater beside the Little Ouse . . .and so on by Nun’s Bridge to Castle Lane (old Icknield Way) and so through the gate in the wall and on to the green where westward, up the slope half smothered by trees, stands Thetford mound.” And in Part II of “Egypt in England”, he considers the various ideas about this prominent earthwork. It is a place, he avers, “still carrying an aura of antiquity, a singular impressiveness begotten in remote times.” Could it be “the remains of a chalk pyramid”?

Curiously enough, another book I acquired not long after this one, Prehistoric London, Its Mounds and Circles by E.O. Gordon (London: The Covenant Publishing Co Ltd, 1932) is also concerned in part with the nature of sacred hills in Britain, particularly those which might be seen to be somewhat in the shape of a cone, and has speculations as to their ancient purpose. However, a distinctly sceptical annotator in my copy has noted that most of these are now thought to be Norman mottes: and indeed Thetford Mound is regarded as an early 12th century earthwork for a medieval castle.

But the story may not end there, for more recent archaeology has now found that some of these fortifications were built on much older mounds and banks. And Thetford Mound has certainly attracted legends: that it was made by the Devil, that there is a palace beneath it, or buried treasure, or six silver bells from the ruined priory. So perhaps, even if ‘Egypt in England’ is too picturesque a theory, R D Clover might, in pursuing his avowed intention of recording some of the atmospheres of places, have not been quite so far off the mark after all.

Mark Valentine

R.I.P. Harold Billings 1931-2017

I'm saddened to report that I've just learned of the passing, on November 29th, of the eminent bookman, and biographer of M.P. Shiel, Harold W. Billings. His writings on Shiel span decades, though his three volume biography of Shiel came out more recently as M.P. Shiel: A Biography of His Early Years (2005), M.P. Shiel: The Middle Years (2010), and An Ossuary of M.P. Shiel (2015). He was proud of the small press volumes of his own fiction, A Dead Church (2014) and The Monk's Bible (2014). He also contributed to Faunus, the journal of the Friends of Arthur Machen.  His health declined in later years, and he was especially saddened by the passing of John D. Squires in 2012, his long-time friend and fellow Shiel authority. An obituary covering his professional career can be found here.

At Much Wenlock, These Charming People

The little town of Much Wenlock in Shropshire is most known as the birthplace of the modern revival of the Olympics. It is also linked to A E Housman, for the road on Wenlock Edge, the high escarpment with its troubled wood made famous by his poem, leads to the town. It does not have a railway station and it is not near any major roads, so in some ways it is left to itself. As sometimes happens with characterful secluded places, it is, however, often busy with interesting things. It has a small outdoor market hall where local crafts, foods and hand-made goods are offered. There is an art gallery, a pottery and an antiques shop, and, more unusually, an ecclesiastical outfitters. If you need a cope or a chasuble, or a pyx or a thurible, here is your place.

And it also has two second-hand bookshops. At the first of these, my colleague in assiduous book collecting, Mr John Howard, spotted tucked inside a book by Dennis Wheatley, an old set of four joined tickets for sixpenny afternoon beach chairs. As will presently appear from a story yet to be published, I have a certain interest in old tickets – the printing and design and the faded colours, together with idle notions about the previous owners, appeal to me. Also, not all that many survive: tickets are not the sort of thing people keep, unless for sentimental reasons or by chance when they are used, as perhaps here, for a bookmark. This example includes on its reverse, as an extra delight, the rather plaintive injunction, ‘PLEASE DO NOT SIT IN CHAIR IN WET COSTUME’.

I am sorry to say I did not much fancy the Wheatley book, but I did like the tickets, so I negotiated with the bookseller to transfer these ephemera to a copy of Rose Anstey by Ronald Fraser, in dustwrapper, which I was very pleased to find. Of course, now I wonder if I did the right thing. Ought not the tickets to have remained in the book where they had been for who knows how many years? Perhaps some lingering spirit of romance linked the tickets and the book, which I have now severed. Who were they, that family of four, or that quartet of friends on a spree, or those two pairs of lovers, who held those tickets long ago? What waves did they watch together, seated on their four borrowed striped canvas deckchairs, which were (we trust) unsullied by damp posteriors? I don’t doubt that if I go back to the shop and the Wheatley is in its place I shall have to get it and reunite it with its ticket, trusting that this pious intention, at least, will assuage the lingering sad ghosts that may still be pining within.

At the second bookshop in Much Wenlock, Mr Howard secured half a row of a nice reprint of E F Benson’s ‘Mapp and Lucia’ novels, while I alighted upon a very battered copy indeed of These Charming People by Michael Arlen. This collection of witty, debonair, slightly melancholy tales was a delighted discovery for me, after I was introduced to it by my esteemed friend P J Beveridge, the editor of Crash Smash Crack Ring zine, the gentleman who recklessly accepted some of my earliest writing.

Here’s what I said about it once before:

“These Charming People (1923) . . . [has] a splendid sub-title, Being a Tapestry of The Fortunes, Follies, Adventures, Gallantries and General Activities of Shelmerdene (that lovely lady), Lord Tarlyon, Mr Michael Wagstaffe, Mr Ralph Wyndham Trevor and Some Others of Their Friends of the Lighter Sort. The fifteen stories are quicker in wit and cleverer in storyline than his earlier work and their twist endings and elegant, sardonic style suggest a strange hybrid of the American short story master O. Henry and the epigrammatic, quintessentially English Saki (H. H. Munro). For the first time, Arlen introduces fantasy and the macabre to his tales, and the bizarre adventures his characters find in the London streets suggest the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights . . . the book also introduces 'The Cavalier of the Streets', a gentlemanly blackmailer and burglar somewhat in the Raffles style, whose caddish conduct is usually found to mask some higher purpose. All the tales are laced with fine irony and understatement, and a kind of bantering tone with the reader which was becoming Arlen's hallmark.”

So pleased was I by Mr Arlen's book that I soon founded the world's idlest literary society, also called These Charming People, which has no aims, no rules, no activities and no publications, but does not discourage the reading of Arlen or the invention and consumption of exotic cocktails.

The covers of the Much Wenlock copy are really most remarkably knocked about and marked. There is the ghost of a tea or coffee cup stain which looks like the outline of a distant half-known planet. Some of the other spots and splashes have eaten away at the green cloth – what bitter acidic substance was once casually spilt upon it? The spine has lost almost all its verdant hue in exchange for a colour like old brass or the stalks of dead flowers in winter. On the back cover there is a network of white scratches as if some discontented creature had vented its claws upon the book. In certain lights, though, they seem to suggest a map of ancient landscape markings seen from the air and made for imponderable reasons by a lost people.

This copy was published in The Green Leaf Library by Collins, and the copyright page proclaims it the Eighteenth edition, August, 1932, following another reprinting only two months before. The long column listing earlier editions is proof of how popular Arlen continued to be. And there is further evidence in the book that this warmth for his writing continued for quite a long time after that. For this volume has come from what was probably a private lending library: there is an oval stamp on the title page in a sort of violet-blue, of which the only word that has made it through the impress is ‘Chelsea’. The library has also pasted on the spine its own title panel in sable and gold, with the flourish of a fleuron too, suggesting it aspired to a certain distinction.

However, instead of affixing a sticker for recording return dates for the book, the library has rather casually bashed them straight onto the free front endpaper, both recto and verso. The first date is 26 July 1941 and the book was scarcely out of someone’s hands all through the Summer and Autumn of those days of the Blitz until Christmas. Eager readers resumed taking it out in March 1942 and carried on pretty frequently until interest begins to peter out a little in the late Forties.

Even then the book still had its readers, a few a year, until the last date recorded, 26 January 1970. Perhaps it then retired to the dimmer shelves while the affection for Michael Arlen’s books waned in the later 20th century, or it languished in some sort of reserve stock. What happened between then and it finding itself in a corner bookshelf of the upper floor of a bookshop in Much Wenlock, waiting to see if its Charming People would ever parade again before the eyes of an eager reader, probably only its pages will ever know.

Mark Valentine

The Greenwood Faun - An Interview with Nina Antonia

"Nina Antonia's The Greenwood Faun is a haunted, haunting work. Summoning up Lucian Taylor, the hallucinated hero of Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, Nina channels the curious, captivating story of what happened to Lucian's literary masterpiece after his death, and how it both saves and destroys those who come across it after it is posthumously published. Shot through with decadence, poetry, opium, and incense, with the ghost of Lionel Johnson as psychopomp and the Great God Pan heavy in the fields, this is a beautifully written proem: witty, crepuscular, enchanting, surprising."
- David Tibet

Egaeus Press are now taking orders for The Greenwood Faun by Nina Antonia, a novel of the Eighteen Nineties. We asked the author to answer a few questions about the book.

What drew you to the Eighteen Nineties as the setting for The Greenwood Faun?

It’s a sublime period for literature and art, steeped in dreams, decadence and romantic notions. Like a particularly potent perfume, it was very heady. There was a unique flowering of talent, including Yeats, Beardsley & Wilde, although I tend to favour those who might be considered ‘minor’ as rather more intriguing, for example Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson and the artist Simeon Solomon. The corner had not been turned into modernity as we understand it. It was this strange juncture where central London still had fields and one could see both horses and early motor cars on the roads. The 1890’s was the era of peacocks with a green carnation pinned to their lapels and haunted poets possessed of a dangerous taste for absinthe. It was also tinged with melancholy, as if they knew they were holding on to something that couldn’t last. ‘The Hill of Dreams’ couldn’t have emanated from any other time, even though it was published in book form, after the century had passed, almost like an elegy. ‘The Greenwood Faun’ is similarly a lament for a very lovely but ephemeral era.

On the face of it, Arthur Machen and Lionel Johnson may seem very different characters. But did you see some shared affinities between them?

They both possess a very strong Celtic influence, responding to the landscape with the soul. Lionel spent some of his formative years growing up in Wales. His family owned a great crumbling mansion in Rhual. Johnson loved taking long walks, getting lost in wild countryside, hearing what the breeze was saying. Although Machen and Johnson were very different characters, both related to mystical, ancient themes and desired to go beyond the surface. They were searchers for the transcendent, explorers of the mysteries, believers in the supernatural.

Was it daunting to follow in the footsteps of these literary figures? How did you preserve your own voice?

I simply couldn’t shake the idea of what happened to Lucian Taylor’s manuscript at the conclusion of ‘The Hill of Dreams’. Rightfully, ‘The Hill of Dreams’ has been described as ‘The most beautiful book in the world’. I’ve re-read it every other year for over a decade so I think it worked its magic on me and I didn’t have a choice but to write ‘The Greenwood Faun’. Also the character of Lucian, an outsider who moves to London, who tries to make it as a writer and gets lost on the way has a poignancy that overlaps with Lionel Johnson. People who don’t have strong anchors, who are poetic and a little misty can get swept away. Writing has always been a vocation rather than a career. ‘The Greenwood Faun’ pulled me along and whispered in my ear but I wrote as an observer rather than a participant.

London is a strong presence in your novel. Do you regard the city in the same way as Machen, as a place of secret byways and curious quarters?

Certain London streets still have a Victorian resonance, especially at particular times of the day. Twilight is lovely as it gives a sense of infinity. Machen had an almost psychic sensitivity to his surroundings, which as an author is invaluable. Everywhere is haunted by the past but picking up on it is becoming increasingly difficult. In London, there seems to be a fear of standing still because if you look beneath or beyond, you might catch a glimpse of a greater purpose. That’s what is so perfect about Machen’s ‘A Fragment of Life.’ He captures the young couple’s yearning for something more, whilst they are trapped in the mundane city life. There are certain areas, say Tottenham Court Road, which used to be full of character and individuality, but are now utterly dystopian. Corporate architecture is incredibly disempowering, it pits humanity against inviolate might. Gentrified areas are similarly hollow; the challenge is in finding those odd little undiscovered avenues and forgotten lanes. The themed walk on the last ‘Friends of Arthur Machen’ meeting in London proved amply, however, that with a little research and imagination one can still find curious little walk ways into the past. A cobbled street mentioned in a story, a tiny public garden, a statue of Pan, they are still there. The couple from Bedford Park in ‘A Fragment of Life’ are long flown, just like the family in ‘The Greenwood Faun’ who I imagined lived in one of the grand houses that lead from Kensington to Portobello.

Timothy J Jarvis has commented (in Faunus 36) that the novel is among other things “an engaging family saga” with a handful of convincing but well-differentiated characters. Did you find you had to hold back any of these from taking over?

All the characters behaved very well, fortunately. Because this was my first novel, I wondered if I should devise a plot–structure. Apparently J.K Rawling spends forever creating great detailed strategies but as I can’t even plan a few hours ahead that method was unworkable. However, the characters assembled very quickly and quite naturally, like players on a stage. This seems to be the Stephen King method, to have your characters lead you. There were a couple of minor instances where I wasn’t sure what would happen next so I imagined a conversation with whoever was being awkward, only to discover that I was out of sync with them, not the other way around.

The Greenwood Faun offers a world of old bookshops, rare editions, recondite literature. Is that a sphere you enjoy yourself – and can it still be found today?

The fascination with old bookshops and bric-a-brac relates to growing up in Liverpool, where there were some wonderfully dusty yet enticing emporiums, these grandiose but moth eaten repositories of era’s past. I still have a lovely print of Daphnis & Chloe that I bought when I was 18. Untidy little treasure troves have gotten harder to find especially in London but I take the bus everywhere and in the far flung suburbs and backwater streets, they can be found. There in the box behind the paintings that no one likes and the stack of gramophone records that no one plays, if you are lucky you might just find a stash of books that no one wants but that mean everything to you. I did just find a wonderfully ‘graingerised’ book at a local charity shop, a book of poems of Alice Meynell given to Ethel Herdman (lovely book plate) by her uncle Frank, in 1914. The book contained a drawing of Ethel and two beautiful WW1 Christmas cards. I’d like to imagine that in 50 years’ time, someone might find a copy of ‘The Greenwood Faun’ in a strange little shop, with keepsakes between the pages.