The Centenary of 'Harmer John' by Hugh Walpole: A Guest Post by John Howard

For some three decades Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was a popular and prolific author who was capable of writing (if not publishing) at least one novel per year. These were substantial books, with heft not only in weight but scope and intention: products of a man who loved the work of Victorian novelists skilled in the creation of wide worlds to be entered and explored at leisure, settings teeming with characters and incident that reflected society – even as they could also lean towards its darker and more sensational aspects. Walpole would throw himself into his own novels with an engagingly childlike enthusiasm, writing swiftly and fluently with a reliability that enabled his books to be announced and published with an almost clockwork regularity. However, there was one novel that did not follow this established routine: Harmer John, first published one hundred years ago in October 1926.

In his biography Hugh Walpole (1952), Rupert Hart-Davis described how Walpole began his new novel at the end of 1922 but had almost immediately to put it aside for work on another novel that he could have complete and published in a magazine and in book form before the more complex and reflective Harmer John could have been ready. (The ‘extra’ novel, written over a few weeks, was The Old Ladies, which became the second of the ‘Scenes from Provincial Life’ set in the Glebeshire cathedral city of Polchester, preceding Harmer John, the third.)

Problems over scheduling were not the only reason for Walpole’s atypical delay in finishing Harmer John. In 1920 he had attended a concert and heard the young Danish tenor Lauritz Melchior (1890-1973), who was ‘the joy of the evening […] quite superb. Just the voice for me’ (Hugh Walpole 197). The two men met – and Walpole embarked on one of his most important and intense voyages of friendship, one which survived, despite initial discomfiture when Melchior remarried, until Walpole’s death. It was during that period of emotional and time-consuming distraction that Harmer John was written; it was perhaps out of relief as much as gratitude that Walpole dedicated it to Melchior, under the name he always used for him, ‘David’.

Subtitled ‘An Unworldly Story’, Harmer John is the account of the Dane Hjalmar Johanson’s time in Polchester from his arrival during a storm in December 1906 to his sudden and violent departure less than a year later. It dramatizes the conflict between the unworldly and the world, narrated in hindsight from 1926 by an unnamed native of the town who later reveals himself to have met and helped Johanson at the time. Characteristically, Walpole did not only show Polchester as a community consisting of people, but broadened his gaze to also take in and involve their setting: the streets and buildings of the town with its great cathedral, under all kinds of weather and effects of sunshine and moonlight.

Johanson was an innocent and rather naïve young man when he found refuge at Mrs Penethen’s boarding house. Handsome and with a superb body, a qualified instructor in gymnastics and masseur – ‘personal trainer’ – Johanson set himself up in business. Polchester quickly seemed to catch his enthusiasm and embrace him, accepting, on the surface at least, the novelty of his foreignness even as it stumbled over his name and adopted him as ‘Harmer John’. Johanson wanted to be friends with everyone, no matter who they were – and expected the same in return. He saw the best in everyone and always tried to do the right thing: to do what he thought was right. From that basis Walpole worked out and depicted the consequences of such an attitude – especially when held by a visitor, an immigrant – in a small, isolated, rather conservative community.

Book I, ‘His Arrival’ portrays Johanson’s ambition to transform Polchester and improve its people. He will have ‘a school for sculptors and artists and painters and make this town beautiful, keeping the old lovely things and making new things in tune with them’ (66). Things seem to be going well for the new inhabitant, yet he is unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that in his drive to make his mark he has also made enemies – including the unscrupulous and driven Samuel Hogg, owner of most of the property in Seatown, Polchester’s small but shamefully nasty and repulsive slum district.

It is Seatown, rather than Polchester, that would determine Johanson’s fate. Angered by what he had heard, he goes exploring for himself and enters a house lived in by a woman nursing her dying child. Perhaps thinking him the doctor, she allows him to stroke the girl’s forehead. ‘Over all the house there stood silence. For a long time his hand moved, then, the child gently sleeping, he took her and laid her gently in the bed’ (206). Soon rumours that Johanson had healed her start to spread; and from that time Hogg takes for himself the role of ensuring that Johanson’s plans come to nothing and will lead to his departure. Johanson’s developing relationship with Polchester, and several of its key citizens, is elaborated in Book II, ‘Of How He Stayed With Us’. Setbacks occur and relationships turn sour due to misunderstanding and intransigence. To his friends Johanson still ‘has the divine gift of tenderness and compassion’ – but for all his desire to ensure the best for Seatown, he still fails to realise that many of its inhabitants hate him (350ff).

In Book III, ‘How He Left Us’, despite the escalating gossip and misinformation about him, Johanson does not lessen his ambitions for change (422f). Johanson’s visit to a dying woman in Seatown and her death while there, gives Hogg and his associates an opportunity not to be missed. The incited riot is a fine example of one of the outbursts of violence and physical expressions of hatred and abuse that occur throughout Walpole’s work, as if he had been saving and impounding them for release at climactic moments. Left for dead, Johanson is thrown into the river: but his body is never found. Years later rumours still persist that ‘Harmer John’ did not die – and might return.

The date of Johanson’s death is given as 7 October: as well as the date of a fictional death, was it also that of a real birth? Walpole’s dedication to ‘David’ also included the date ‘October 7th, 1920’. Was this the date, a fortnight or so after Walpole first saw him, that he considered the inauguration of his deep friendship with Lauritz Melchior, another handsome blond Dane? Walpole always maintained a special fondness for Harmer John, one of his most ‘intensely personal books, into which he felt he had put more of himself than he had bestowed on any of his others’ (Hugh Walpole 358f). Friendship is never wasted.

(John Howard)

The Haunted Quarters of C.E. Ward: A Guest Post by Christopher Tompkins

C. E. Ward appears as a man who has stepped out of a different time and from another world. And because of that, his ghost stories are always welcome. Ward writes as great authors once did. His love of the English language and its grammar is manifest in every paragraph. His artful use of parts of speech and syntax are refreshing in an era in which adjectives have become endangered species and clauses identify as complete sentences.

Additionally, Ward consciously writes within a tradition. It is not quite enough to say that he is Jamesian, but rather, he is the orthodox Jamesian. (That modifier is intended in its deepest entomological meaning.) Yet, as a mature writer, Ward is not simply another M. R. James mimic, but a figure that has consistently exhibited an individual talent and voice.

A Ghost & Scholars alumnus, Ward has produced four collections of short stories: Vengeful Ghosts (1998), Seven Ghosts and One Other (2010), Malevolent Visitants (2016) and An Unheavenly Host (2022). All of his books have been published through Sarob Press, which means high quality and short supply. In the last decade, Ward has experimented by crafting five novellas. The longer length is employed by the author to great effect in terms of plot, atmosphere and tension. These novellas can be found in two volumes: Legionnaire (2019), a single story, and Ghostly Quarters (2025).

The second volume was printed in a limited edition of 325 copies and sold out rather quickly. As of writing, there are still few copies floating among online vendors. Naturally, there is an inflated price point by this time, but the show is worth the price of admission.

The first quarter, “Promenade Walk,” is a strong opener presenting the reader with an intriguing puzzle of death, revenge, deformity and occult hi-jinx. Incorporating the inherent weirdness of both a Punch and Judy show and an aging waxworks, we follow the reminiscences of the narrator who pays several visits to a seaside town, initially with his parents at ages ten, then sixteen, and finally, as a grown man with his partner. With each succeeding holiday, occurring from the late 1960s to 1990, the town has decayed and dilapidated further. More than once, he is attracted to a closed junk shop, but mysteriously denied entry. As the narrator slowly learns the strange history of the shop and its owners, the story gently flows with increasing tension until the final pages when the character gets his wish with a horrifying result. Ward adds vibrant motifs throughout the story such as the reoccurring vision of first his mother, then his partner Susan, standing away from the store with looks of apprehension. One mustn't expect a neat solution. As with all effective ghost stories, the mystery remains.

As the title of the next story may indicate, “Some Episodes of a Family History” conforms closest to the themes and affectations of the tradition. Though more conventional in approach than the previous tale, it is nonetheless a welcome read due to Ward's erudition and phrasing. As with many of his stories, the writer works within two arcs of time: one in the remoter past, and one closer which affects the main characters. Each period remains comfortably distant from the present day. This technique allows repetitions in tragedy as long as the haunting continues. It is a tragic tale, unrelenting and terrible for those involved.

The best realized story in the collection, “Where His Feet Pass,” traces the history of a set of faulted but sympathetic characters. At the center, the Reverend Giles Rumney is a haunted figure, both by his experiences of the recently-ended world war, and an older and unconfessed sin. Doomed by his cowardice, Rumney is instantly horrified by the sight of a mural within the church of his newly appointed position in the parish at Betton St. Anthony. The painting by an unknown, and probably sinister Renaissance artist, acts as a mirror of the spiritual state of the observer, at turns showing St. Anthony either triumphant over a demon, or terrorized and flailing. This is certainly the collection's most theologically profound tale - the risk of spiritual destruction being the greatest terror. This is ground which Ward, and most other contemporary supernatural writers, seem hesitant or uninterested in exploring. The theme is well-handled here and benefits from a slow build-up afforded by its length.

In comparison with the preceding stories, “Warlock's End,” the final quarter, is a weak closer to the excellent volume. “Lucien Starlight,” the warlock of the title, is more a comic book villain than a ghostly menace. The narrative has the feel of a Hammer film which surely the author knowingly incorporated. Interestingly, the story contains characters from a few of Ward's previous short stories and perhaps the concept may have performed better in that format. Nonetheless, it is an entertaining ride with some genuinely nice touches.

Of course, nothing is perfect. Ward demonstrates his “ticks,” that is, the overuse of certain words or phrases: “impedimenta,” “momento mori,” and an archaic use of “remove.” This can be quite distracting and may momentarily pull the reader out of the narrative. Some of his bogies, such as the one found in “Where His Feet Pass,” are described in detail that is too reminiscent of James's specters. Depth of character development is variable. Admittedly, these are mostly minor complaints.

In regard to writing longer stories, Ward once wrote, “ . . . it just isn't easy to sustain either interest or atmosphere in such a specialist field as the ghost story beyond ten to twelve thousand words.” Yet, in tackling the novella format, Ward has succeeded beautifully in the goal of writing a longer, better ghost story. He has accomplished that difficult task more than once.

The above quote comes from the author's introduction to Legionnaire, perhaps his greatest work to date. That excellent story deserves more space on a different day.

(Christopher Tompkins) 

The Centenary of 'Crewe Train' by Rose Macaulay: A Guest Post by John Howard

 Novels can be journeys of discovery for their characters – and sometimes readers. Some describe development and bring revelation, while others expand on and confirm what has already been stated, perhaps early on. Among the latter is Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). First published one hundred years ago, Macaulay’s fifteenth novel seems to have been in demand. There were four further impressions that year. The copy I read, discovered on the crowded shelves of a bookshop in Southeast London, was the sixth, dated June 1927. Full of wry and dry observation and comment, Crewe Train is one of those novels that cries out to be described as a ‘comedy of manners’. It is that, along with much else, including tragedy, misunderstanding – and love at cross-purposes. And perhaps above all, of a tremendous loneliness.

Denham Dobie – ‘named for her mother’s favourite Buckinghamshire village’ – was the daughter of a clergyman. Mr Dobie gave up his calling after his wife’s death because ‘he was tired of being so busy, so sociable, and so conversational, […] calling on parishioners and asking them how they did – an inquiry the answer to which he was wholly indifferent.’ Wishing to get away, he moved to Mallorca, taking his daughter, then seven, with him: ‘abroad you are less surrounded by inquisitive and sociable persons who wonder why you do nothing, and insist on conversing with you.’ After several years he found Mallorca had become too busy with visitors, so moved to Andorra, because it was difficult to get to. Rather to his surprise, Dobie married again and had two more children. But he still felt plagued by visitors who had discovered the ‘Hidden Republic’. Then he suddenly died.

Denham’s maternal aunt, Evelyn Gresham, who was visiting at the time, carries Denham, now 21, off to London – which from the outset she dislikes intensely. Denham, who had grown up to not like people and talking, must adjust to a crowded and frenetic life in London. She had been taken into a large and loud family of high achievers. In effect swallowed alive, Denham is embarked on an odyssey: that of an unconventional young woman made to feel that she must seek the ‘Higher Life’: the constant activity of socialising and talking, reading and playgoing, parties and dinners and weekends at country houses that is normality to the Gresham family.

In Crewe Train places are more than just settings, backgrounds. In such a character-driven novel they take on some aspects of characters, their own distinctions, especially the vibrant all-embracing London of crowds and incident that Denham detested and longed to escape. (This is in contrast to the tired. shattered London of Macaulay’s penultimate novel The World My Wilderness [1950], in which Denham would have felt much more at home.)

Denham remained an outsider: ‘Into their gay, urbane civilisation Denham returned, like an explorer from solitary places, full of secret, savage joys and cares’ (173). Crewe Train explores how someone such as Denham can live in the world – and the world live with her. Late in the book, a cousin speculates: ‘Suppose…that people always did literally and precisely what they were bidden to do, took what was said to them at the foot of the letter, what a different world it would be, and how oddly it would behave. A world of people all behaving rather like Denham, who was at present perhaps the only literal adult person in it’ (269).

This is the Denham who has fallen in love with Peter Gresham’s publishing partner, Arnold Chapel. They marry, Denham having converted to her husband’s Roman Catholicism. Her loathing of London does not decrease, but her husband’s work dictates that he must live there. Denham finds and furnishes a cottage in Cornwall, but holidays are not enough. In love but deeply conflicted, the couple come to find themselves periodically living separate lives. Questionings occur. ‘Perfect freedom was never attained, never while you had a companion. […] Did one, then, never break down the prejudices of the well-bred about how to live? Did there never come a day when the well-bred said, “Dash it all, we won’t wash to-day, neither our persons nor the plates and cups?”’ (191)

Eventually Arnold and Denham buy a house in Metro-land Buckinghamshire – within commuting distance of London. In a sense Denham has come to where she started, named before the beginning of the novel by a family member the reader never meets. She gets back, ‘numbly acquiescent, to acceptance of the Higher Life’ and becomes resigned. ‘Love broke one in the end, ground one down, locked the fetters on one’s free limbs. […] You might struggle and rebel but in the end love got you’ (299). Faced with the prospect of her life being run to a timetable, Denham ‘thought of it…’ (307)

Perhaps only a reader as literal-minded as Denham Dobie would wonder about the title Crewe Train: although there are trains in the text, none of them go to Crewe. On the title page Macaulay quoted two lines from the music hall song “Oh Mr Porter” in which – as it’s surely not possible not to know – a young female train passenger laments: ‘Oh Mr Porter, whatever shall I do? / I want to go to Birmingham, but they’ve sent me on to Crewe!’ The lost young lady had found herself on the wrong track. She had missed her intended destination and ended up somewhere that only existed because it was a vast junction.

It was not Denham’s fault that she had the same experience: her father, through his outlook and example, had determined her direction and then abdicated all responsibility. Rose Macaulay dedicated Crewe Train to ‘The Philistines, The Barbarians, The Unsociable, and those who do not care to take any trouble’ – and showed that Denham was one of them. At the other, far, end of the book Denham came to a halt as if having hit the buffers. Or will she realise that the terminus was a junction after all and it might still be possible to change and set out again on the right track? Or was remaining on the platform, lost among the branching tracks, the only way for Denham to be true to herself? Any journey is made at a cost. Whatever should she do?

(John Howard)

The House That Vanished

  

It was reading avowedly 'true' ghost stories when young that led me to enjoy their fictional counterpart and then to prefer these, because they require more literary style and can offer more ambiguity and atmosphere. But the Rougham-Bradfield St George case is in many ways a beguiling story, of a kind that is quite often found in supernatural fiction, where such concepts as timeslips, parallel worlds and other dimensions are invoked.

The essentials of the story have been widely repeated, often in bare summary and without reference to the original source. Here I want to look at the particular context, which is not usually fully explained and is, I think, important.

It was about one hundred years ago this month (so far as she recalled) that Ruth Wynne, a young woman tutor, and her charge Evelyn Allington, saw a Georgian mansion in between the Suffolk villages of Rougham and Bradfield St. George that wasn’t there the following spring. It had apparently vanished.

They were not the first, nor the last, to witness a similar mysterious Georgian style country house in this area: there are accounts from 1860 and 1912, for example: and there have been several later accounts too. In addition, researchers think they have found good evidence that there was indeed an early 19^th century house, long since demolished, in the area of the sightings.

About eight years later Ruth Wynne recalled the experience in response to a 1934 BBC radio programme, subsequently adapted for a book, Sir Ernest Bennett’s Apparitions and Haunted Houses: A Survey of Evidence (1939), now quite rare. Her account is plain and direct, with circumstantial details, and gives an impression of sincerity. Notably, she does not invoke any of the common sensations often associated with the supernatural, such as coldness, sudden silence, a strange atmosphere or a feeling of foreboding. Ernest Bennett traced her pupil, who confirmed the account.

Ruth Wynne, aged 29, was out for a walk with her pupil Evelyn Allington, aged 14. They lived at The Rectory, Rougham, where the tutor’s father was the Rector. “On a dull, damp afternoon, I think in October 1926, we walked off through the fields to look at the church of the neighbouring village, Bradfield St. George,” she recounted. They had not taken this walk before. 

Emerging from a farm track onto a road they found opposite them “a high wall of greenish-yellow bricks”, which they followed: walled estates are a common feature of the English rural landscape. They came to “tall, wrought iron gates set in the wall. I think the gates were shut, or one side may have been open . . . Behind the wall and towering above it was a cluster of tall trees. From the gates, a drive led away among these trees to what was evidently a large house. We could just see a corner of the roof above a stucco front in which I remember noticing some windows of Georgian design. The rest of the house was hidden by the branches of the trees.”

Miss Wynne was surprised to see the house because she thought she knew all of the country houses of the area, whose residents had called upon her parents, as was the social custom of the time: yet none had from this one. She discussed it with her parents but then thought no more of it.

The pair “did not take the same walk again until the following spring. It was, as far as I can remember, a dull afternoon with good visibility in February or March.” But this time, on emerging from the farm-yard onto the road, there was no wall: “we both stopped dead of one accord and gasped. 'Where's the wall?’”  Instead, “[t]he road was flanked by nothing but a ditch, and beyond the ditch lay a wilderness of tumbled earth, weeds, mounds, all overgrown with the trees which we had seen on our first visit.”

Not only was there no wall, “but there were no gates, no drive, no corner of a house to be seen.” However, “closer inspection showed a pond and other small pools amongst the mound where the house had been visible. It was obvious that had been there a long time.”

A comprehensive account of the Georgian house apparitions in this area is assembled in The Rougham Mystery: An Investigation into the Time Slip Phenomenon (2018) by Carl Grove, which explores all the different sightings of the vanishing house and pays close attention to the terrain, using maps and fieldwork, before considering various possible explanations.  

The reason we have Ruth Wynne’s account at all is because the BBC had begun to broadcast a series on the unexplained which invited listeners’ participation. The radio programme involved was part of a series entitled Enquiry Into the Unknown. The introduction to this, broadcast on Friday 5^th January, 1934, explained its scope and purpose: “no less than a scientific investigation into the occult—the hidden and intangible world of the mind and spirit . . .  in these broadcasts eminent modern intellects will sift and explore and examine such beliefs as spiritualism, and such things as mental telepathy, dreams and prevision, ghosts and haunted houses, the influence of the mind over the body, and the whole question of survival.”

The presenter of the introductory programme was Gerald Heard, later to be the author of two well-regarded volumes which included supernatural fiction, The Great Fog and Other Weird Tales (1944) and The Lost Cavern and Other Tales of the Fantastic (1948) and of the Jamesian novel The Black Fox: A Novel of the Seventies (1950).  Each of the following episodes in the series was headed by an authority on the subject under discussion. Heard acted as general editor.

The relevant episode for the Suffolk mystery was ‘Ghosts and Haunted Houses’, first broadcast on Friday 2nd March, 1934, at 21:20 on the National Programme. The Radio Times said: “Sir Ernest Bennett will emphasise the certainty that men and women, with sound minds and bodies, do from time to time see phantasms of both the living and the dead . . . He will tell listeners how the Psychical Research Society took a wide census of alleged experiences in 1899, discarded all narratives which could not be corroborated, and then analysed the number left which amounted to over five hundred. He will tell listeners the result of that analysis and exactly what has been learned from it; and he will ask them at the end of his talk to send in accounts of any experiences of their own, for only by investigation can still more be learned of these phenomena.”

It was presumably in response to this invitation that Ruth Wynne sent in her account of the house that vanished. The presenter was a Labour MP, and Minister, and also on the Council of the Psychical Research Society. This, then, was a nationally broadcast series headed by weighty figures and intending to adopt an objective, scholarly approach. It was framed in such a way as to encourage serious engagement. What this tells us is that Ruth Wynne still thought her experience unusual and inexplicable enough eight years later to justify her in contacting the BBC about it. This was not, we may reasonably infer, to her a mere anecdote: she thought it significant enough to tell it to this national investigation. Together with the cautious and measured account she gave, this context suggests Ruth Wynne was still calmly curious about what exactly happened on that walk one day around October in 1926.

(Mark Valentine)

Picture: Queen Mary’s Doll’s House, for which M.R. James wrote a ghost story.