From the city of Sheffield in the southernmost tip of Yorkshire there is a minor railway line, an unexpected survival, which makes its way through small village stations and halts, into the rugged terrain of the Peak District in Derbyshire. I would sometimes take this route to visit a friend who lives in that region, and at the ticket office I would ask for a return to Hope. Wouldn’t we all like that, I used to think, but it was the name of the village nearest to him with a station.
The official description was in fact Hope (Derbyshire): there are two opportunities to find Hope on Britain’s railways, the other being Hope (Flintshire) in North Wales. The trains to Hope (Derbyshire) were never very full: there might be a dozen passengers at the hours I travelled. Some of the waiting rooms and old station-master’s offices had white scalloped woodwork like 17th century lace collars, but mostly there were only platforms.
So when I came upon a book that begins with a journey on this very line, going out from the un-named but obvious city into the empty country, it at once aroused my interest. It was grandly named Saraband for Conquerors by Phyllis Carroll (1950: the title is a quotation from Conrad): and I see from the pencilled price that I paid £1 for it. The author had also written Quintessence of Dust, five years earlier in 1945, but there are no other books by her, at least under this name. I have not been able to find a copy of this earlier book or any information about her.
The torn dustwrapper was loosely enclosed inside, and it announced, ‘A tense drama set in the Peak District’, with a picture of an improbable grey crag with a Gothic castle perched on top of it and a silver river rushing below. This was a somewhat romantic depiction of the real Peveril Castle, a Norman fortress which does indeed stand high above the village of Castleton, where the heroine goes to stay.
I like stories that begin with train journeys, and I like stories where a stranger goes to remote country they do not know and encounters mystery there (I have written a few myself). Sometimes they have been told to have a break or a change of scene or a rest by a wise old doctor or colleague. Usually the stranger is a writer, a scholar, or a dedicated public official, and I find them agreeable company. This book was on the face of it in that sort of vein, but with a difference.
The young woman protagonist in the novel, Linda, is a poet and an essayist and she has indeed been advised to get away from it all by her doctor, to forestall a nervous breakdown: but she leaves behind, not the study or the common room or the Whitehall office, but a placid husband, infant daughter and interfering mother-in-law.
The poet alights at Hope, and makes her way to an old inn where she is to say. The young rustic chambermaid who takes her up to her room tells her: ‘there’s some rum goings-on in these out-of-the-way places’ (I am very glad to hear this) and adds that out-of-season, once the cheery hikers and beer-drinkers of summer have gone, ‘only the queer ones is left’. Everyone at the hotel, she avers, is either crazy or shady, and she is not sure which is worse.
As a blandishment for the establishment, her remarks might be thought somewhat lacking in allure, and scarcely reassuring for a convalescent with nerves, but they at least offer the reader some possibilities of ominous doings.
One of those doubtless labelled by the chambermaid as a ‘queer’ one is a bitter, abrasive young man, who still suffers nightmares from his service in the Second World War. T E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is quoted, about how the old in charge after the war betrayed the young men who fought it (the First World War, in his case). The poet is sympathetic. We seem to be moving towards the ‘holiday romance’ genre. There is also a rather chilly woman artist who seems to have an enigmatic background.
But the protagonist also soon encounters rough types and villainous activities in the hills and begins to wonder which of her fellow guests are implicated. There are seemingly uncanny dimensions involving strange lights and noises too. It’s all a rather bold melee, mingling the romance and thriller genres with snippets of psychology and literary and artistic dimensions too. In the main, without giving too much away, this is closest to those crime thrillers which make use of the darkly mysterious but without fully committing to the supernatural, similarly to some of the work of Gladys Mitchell. I had hoped for more supernatural aspects given the Gothic set-up, and the ending is rather conventional: but it’s a hectic, crammed sort of book, well-realised in its craggy setting and with plenty of eerie, vivid scenes.
(Mark Valentine)
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