I have a fondness for old, long out-of-date town and district guides, found in boxes in bookshops and at book fairs. They have the interest of minor provincial history, the sort that gets left out of the more sonorous studies of grand events. There are often quaint sidelights of lore or legend, and they conjure up a lost time. For example, in one, for a district in Sussex, I found an advertisement for a tea house with a previously unrecorded model village, which set me wondering what became of it.
If you enjoy interwar mystery novels, the sort of story where a stranger turns up in a far-flung place, perhaps to convalesce, and becomes involved in strange goings-on, well, these guides can give you an exact, contemporary picture of just such settings. The design, with its Arts & Crafts flourishes, or even sleek Art Deco lettering, can also be redolent of its time.
Here, for example, is a guide in tattered terracotta wrappers entitled Arnside, At the Foot of Lakeland, An Ideal Holiday and Health Resort, Official Guide 1929, and on the half-title, A Short Sketch of Arnside, with a note that it is printed and published by The Arnside Advancement Association ‘with indebtedness to Mr. J.D. Wilson’ for his words and pictures.
Arnside is a coastal village on the Kent estuary, which is not in Kent, but in North West England, on the cusp of Lancashire and Westmorland. Most of the time it looks out onto a great expanse of wet sand, often treacherous, which can only be crossed with a guide. There is a solitary rocky outcrop, Chapel Island: sometimes, emerging from mist, this seems to hover in an insubstantial silver void, not quite in this world. At certain high tides, a great rolling roil of sea, the Arnside Bore, swoops swiftly across the bay.
From the village, a narrow railway bridge crosses the estuary to genteel Grange-over-Sands, with its promenade, pleasure gardens and tea shops. Arnside itself is noted for wooded knolls rising above the town, offering staunch walks and grand views, yet it is not all that well-known: visitors do not often divert here from the Lakes. The guide says: ‘Arnside is the lodge at one of the principal entrance gates of Westmorland . . . and at its back there lurk unsuspected depths of sweet seclusion.’ It has a slightly ominous air to it, that lurking.
This impression is fortified by a piece of word-painting in the manner of Arthur Machen about the end of an autumn day here: ‘when the sun had disappeared . . . the water in the channel seemed transformed to glowing molten metal . . . appearing to bubble when the breeze ruffled it, as steel bubbles in a Siemen’s furnace . . .the hull of a boat on the edge of this fiery stream was jet black, and a flag-pole and the branches of some trees were thrown into the same sharp black relief against the sky, but the windows of the houses on the front were all kindled into flame, and even the paint of the seats on the promenade caught and flashed back the gleam’. The transmogrification of a seaside bench! Even so, we are allured.
Where should we stay? With Mrs Thornton of Willowfield; Mrs Monk of Hare Hill; Mrs Vickers of Hazel Grove; the Misses Dodgson of The Laurels; or Mrs Davies of Kirk Bank (Near the Station)? They all sound highly respectable and yet with a hint of a Walter de la Mare story about them. And where to eat? The Dainty Café on Arnside Hill (‘Noted for Ices’); or The Green Café in Silverdale Road (‘High Class Bakers and Confectioners’). What about gifts? Well, there is The Arts and Crafts Depot at Sunnycote, ‘for Choice & Distinctive Art Goods . . . Things Not Found Elsewhere We Offer to Visitors’. What sort of things, exactly, we wonder, rather uneasily. However, reassurance returns with the advertisement for J.D. Wilson, Bookseller Stationer Newsagent Post Office. Ah, civilisation! Particularly when their emblem is a lighted candle by an opened book with the terse motto: READ MORE BOOKS.
(Mark Valentine)
. . .
The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things is low in stock at Tartarus Press
In Votive Offerings (Sarob Press), a long story, 'Roman Masks'
The Magus of Mexico: Malcolm Lowry, Magic and Myth is available in paperback (Zagava)
At Black Nore Review edited by Ben Banyard, a poem, 'Summer Harbour'
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