Apple anyone?

This is a curious bit of synchronicity I thought I'd share with you.

I noticed that Stephen King has incurred the wrath of many a teenage girl, by saying that Stephanie Meyer 'can't write worth a damn.' Brave man.

I'll set my kittens on you!

We went to Lavenham on the way back to Cambridge on Sunday. I haven't been to Lavenham for years and my son had never been here. We almost lived here before he was born. When we decided to move out of London in 1993 we were looking for somewhere to rent and looked at a place in one of Lavenhams ancient houses.

Goodness knows what it would have been like to live in such a tourist trap (although Cambridge is not without the odd visitor, come to think of it). Lavenham could easily be dismissed as twee and chocolate boxy, but it never feels that way to me. The architecture is just too extraordinary for that: the way the houses seem on the verge of collapse - as they must have done for hundreds of years. If it was in France or Italy, the same people who get snooty about somewhere like Lavenham would be raving about the colours and the textures and snapping away like crazy. Yes, Lavenham is a bit clean and neat and precious - but is that really so terrible?

Anyway Lavenham always has another association in my mind. As we walked into the market square in a lovely low evening light, I was reminded of the fact that this was the location for a witch being burned at the stake in Michael Reeve's grisly 1968 movie Witchfinder General, starring Vincent Price as Matthew Hopkins.


Suffolk does seem to have had an historical obsession with witches. The witchfinders did indeed come to Lavenham. Hopkins' assistant John Stearne came here in 1645, welcomed by the firebrand rector, William Gurnall. One Anne Randall confessed to having familiars - one called Jacob, the other Hangman - which she sent to kill the horse of a man who had refused her wood and the pig of a man who had cursed her. Which might be a little bit chilling had these familiars not been in the form of...kittens. Yes - kittens. Aaaaaargh!

These demonic kittens didn't make it into to the movie, sadly.

And by the way, witches were not burned in England, though filmmakers refuse to accept this. We roasted heretics with periodic enthusiasm, but not witches. They were hanged (though they were burned in Scotland) and then only if they had been found guilty of maleficium - harmful magic used to bring about destruction or death.

I do know of one witch who was supposedly burned at the stake - Margaret Read in King's Lynn in 1590. Her heart is said to have leaped from her burning body, smacked against the wall of a nearby building (the place is still marked) and then bounced down the street to jump into the River Ouse.

But this is unlikely. The burning I mean. The bouncing heart, who knows? Some people think that the heart story should actually be attached to the story of a servant girl who was burned in King's Lynn - but not for witchcraft. She was burned for petty treason. She was found guilty of causing the death of her master and this (like the killing of a husband) was deemed to be a kind of regicide (the man being king of his house) and the punishment for a woman for this crime was burning. Right up until 1790, amazingly.

The skulls of Orford

We went to Orford on the Suffolk coast last Saturday to eat some very tasty food in the Butley Orford Oystery. After a wander round the castle we had a look in the church and graveyard. I have photographed these wonderfully grim headstones before - many years ago in the days before digital. In amongst them, was this more modern and much more chirpy slate marker.

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.