Seaburgh

We visited Aldeburgh twice - once to have some of the best fish and chips in England at The Fish and Chip Shop in the high street on Friday evening and then again on Sunday lunchtime when we wandered along the shingle, throwing stones into a calm sea before having lunch and continuing on to Lavenham and then home to Cambridge.

Of course, M R James followed us here too. This is a photograph of the shingle beach, looking south towards the martello tower. It was along this stretch of beach that Paxton fled at the end of A Warning to the Curious:

The notion of Paxton running after - after anything like this, and supposing it to be the friends he was looking for, was dreadful to us. You can guess what we fancied: how the thing he was following might stop suddenly and turn round on him, and what sort of face it would show, half seen at first in the mist. . .

M R James' Seaburgh is a thinly disguised Aldeburgh:

A long sea-front and a street: behind that a spacious church of flint, with a solid western tower and a peal of six bells.

Seaburgh/Aldburgh is such a jolly, English seaside town, with it's brightly coloured houses and holiday-makers. And yet M R James was on to something using this place as a location. It was a holiday destination in his day too. But there is something about the light here - intense somehow even when overcast, the constant growl of the shingle, the way your feet struggle to find purchase on the stones, the wide horizon and huge sky above.

M R James understood that open spaces are potentially just as scary as confined spaces. On a beach there is nowhere to hide. He used the same sort of device in Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad (though the setting for that is Felixstowe). That story was filmed by Jonathan Miller in the sixties with Michael Horden. It's great.


This is a modern take on the story, influenced by the Jonathan Miller film.

A warning to the curious

We drove across to the Suffolk coast to stay in this superbly situated National Trust property at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge. It was the owner of this house - Mrs Pretty - who instigated the excavations by a Suffolk antiquarian called Basil Brown, of the nearby burial mounds where, in 1939, they found the extraordinary 7th century Anglo-Saxon ship burial and iconic helmet (among many other things). The buried man was clearly very important and most people seem to think he was Raedwald, king of East Anglia.


I wonder if Basil Brown had ever read any M R James. If he had he might have been less keen on digging about in ancient barrows. It is hard to believe that a Cambridge man like Charles Philips who took over control of the excavation did not know his work. M R James (an antiquarian himself) wrote his classic ghost story A Warning to the Curious with this part of the world in mind. It predates the discovery at Sutton Hoo but has weird echoes of it. James even mentions Raedwald.

It tells the story of an man called Paxton who digs into an Anglo-Saxon barrow and finds a crown: a crown of one of the ancient kings of East Anglia. But the grave has a guardian of course. . .

And when I actually laid it bare and got my fingers on the ring of it and pulled it out, there came a sort of cry behind me - oh, I can't tell you how desolate it was!

M R James description of this guardian is brilliant in its precise vagueness:

Sometimes, you know, you see him, and sometimes you don't, just as he pleases, I think: he's there, but he has some power over your eyes.

A Warning to the Curious has been a favourite story of mine ever since I saw the BBC adaptation in the Christmas of 1972. They transpose the story to Norfolk and the chase sequence with Peter Vaughan running across the beach at Holkham, the thing visible as a blur over his shoulder has always stayed with me. It is such a clever piece of direction (by Lawrence Gordon Clark): so simple, yet so effective.





That story (and the Sutton Hoo burial) was in my mind when I wrote Redwulf's Curse, one of the my Tom Marlowe books I did for Random House in which an ancient guardian of a royal burial seems to have been awakened in the salt marshes of the North Norfolk coast. I returned to the theme of barrows and curses for the story called The Island in Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth to be published in October.

In The Island, two brothers decide to investigate an 'island' of trees in a farmer's field of barley. The trees are growing out of a mound. As one of the boys tries to take a closer look the mound collapses and they discover that it is a barrow.

But the bones buried inside are not human. They are of some strange animal. And there is a spear sticking out of the skeleton. . .

With that, he threw the spear and it flew in a shallow arc, landing with a thud in the ground between them.

But Henry did not see the spear land because as he had released it into the air, there was a noise behind him that made him turn in alarm. Something large seemed to have shifted noisily nearby. He wondered if another part of the barrow had collapsed.

'Henry!' Martin shouted crossly. 'That was really stupid. You might have broken -'

Henry looked back across the barley towards his brother, but Martin was no longer there.

He stared around in confusion. It was as if Martin had simply vanished mid-sentence. But then he detected a movement some way off, near to where he had last seen his brother. The barley was being flattened in a narrow channel coming back in a wide arc towards the island. . .

And so it begins. . .

I suppose all writers are a teeny bit mad, and writers of uncanny tales possibly crazier than most. But it still came as a shock when I was printing out some photos and my ink jet printer seemed to be saying 'Do it now! Do it now!' over and over again.

I await further instructions. . .

I finally sent off the corrections and amendments on the proofs for Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth. A couple of days late, but it is more important that they are right. I'll talk to Isabel next week and go through them with her on the phone. Then that will be that until October.

I wonder if David Roberts has done any illustrations yet. I saw a rough for the cover when I was in Bloomsbury and that looked great. When I get a proof of that I'll show you what it looks like.

I also emailed Ian Lamb at Bloomsbury just to confirm that I am shortlisted for the North East Book Award and he assures me I am. There is an awards do at the end of April in Newcastle. So Uncle Montague is still up for the Carnegie, the Calderdale and the North East Book Awards. Surely it must win something?

Surely?

Swedish tales of terror

I think I'm right in saying that the Swedish edition of Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is published today by Raben and Sjogren, which is great. I haven't seen a copy yet, but I hope I will soon.

I have been going through the proofs for Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth yet again. I am still finding errors, so it is worth doing. But Isabel Ford got in touch from Bloomsbury today asking if I'd finished with them, so I need to get them sorted once and for all. I'll quickly get to the end, then write up all the errors and changes and get them back to her.

Then I will be able to devote all my time to new stuff. I am working on a synopsis for Bloomsbury and once I have that done I will write a couple of chapters. I am also working on some short stories I have had rattling round in my head for some time. They are very different from the Tales of Terror stories. I will tell you more about them another time.

Of course, if I am the only person who thinks there is any value in these stories, you may never hear about them again.

Papworth

A strange day today. I took my son to football and his team was playing a village near Cambridge called Papworth. Papworth is home to a hospital famous for transplant operations here in the UK and it was at that hospital - which we passed on the way to the ground - that my brother, Paul, died of an infection following a heart and kidney transplant (his second heart transplant, in fact). That was getting on for twelve years ago. I felt a dropping sensation as I drove by, as though I was coming down on a swing that had swung too high.

It was especially poignant to be driving past with my son. He was born very close to when my brother died. They never met.

You wait ages for a bus and then...

Can I add my thoughts to the whole there is/probably isn't a God bus advert controversy here in the UK? For those of you reading this in another part of the world (though I gather this phenomenon is going global), the British Humanist Society put ads on buses saying There's probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life. The Christian Party responded in kind.

Is There's probably no God an atheist statement at all? I understand why there's a 'probably' but it sounds a bit lame. The Christian Party don't do doubt, of course. They 'know' there's a God. An equally unequivocal There is no God would no doubt have caused outrage. You are only allowed to be certain that God exists - not that he doesn't. But in any case rationalists baulk at certainty. And does any of this matter anyway?

Well I think it does. Thousands - millions - of people have died and are dying still because someone somewhere 'knows' that their religion is best, 'knows' their version of it most authentic, 'knows' their country uniquely blessed, their people alone beloved by God, their actions divinely encouraged, condoned or forgiven. Unshakable religious belief is not necessarily benign, particularly when coupled with an equally unshakable political belief.

We live in a world where religious wars still rage and yet, despite thousands of years of religiously motivated terrorism, oppression, cultural obliteration, genocides and pogroms, a religious belief (be it affected or otherwise) is still taken as a kind of moral masonic handshake - even, weirdly, among those who do not subscribe to that belief. A US Presidential candidate, for instance, would not stand any chance of getting elected if they admitted to being an atheist.

This is important stuff. Is it not possible to have a more grown-up debate about it than one had via the medium of adverts on the sides of buses?

Unredeemed shores

Just one more look at New World related books on my shelves. There are the two volumes of documents about to the colony published as The Roanoke Voyages by Dover. These are real documents related to the enterprise - letters, reports etc - and absolutely fascinating if you like that kind of thing. And I do.

Lee Miller's Roanoke and Giles Milton's Big Chief Elizabeth both tell the Roanoke story in different ways, Milton's being the more readable probably, and it obviously makes an appearance (albeit brief) in both biographies of the flawed, complex and charismatic Sir Walter Raleigh (he was a very busy man). Raleigh - contrary to common belief - never personally set foot in North America. And it should actually be spelled Ralegh and pronounced Rawley. No, really.

Incidentally Elizabeth called Raleigh Water, as a comment both on his buccaneering spirit and because that was what his name sounded like when imitating his thick Devon accent. New Worlds, Lost Worlds by Susan Brigden and Unredeemed Shores by Michael Foss also cover Elizabethan attempts to colonise the Americas.

The Elizabethan secret service plays a big role in my New World book, as does Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's spymaster and both are subjects of books by Alan Haynes. John Bossy's Giardano Bruno and the Embassy Affair and Under the Molehill are both really interesting books about 16th century espionage.

But the best book on this subject by far and a candidate for the best book on my shelves is Charles Nicholls' The Reckoning, about the events leading up to the death of Christopher Marlowe in a pub in Deptford. It is an absolutely gripping book. Nicholls also wrote the excellent The Creature in the Map about Raleigh and the his ill-fated search for gold in South America, just visible on the right.