21st-Century Yokel

of the horizon. There are so many hiding places for the malevolent in an undulating landscape it is almost as if the brain refuses to accept them. In East Anglia the malevolent hides in subtler places, nearly in plain sight, which is ultimately more troubling. It’s the camouflage-enthused kid in a hide-and-seek game who eschews the big wardrobe on the far side of the house and instead blends seamlessly into a long vintage rug two feet in front of you. This aspect of Norfolk and Suffolk tells you a lot of what you need to know about why the nuanced ghost stories of M. R. James are the scariest and most enduring ghost stories of all, and why he usually chose these two counties as the setting for them. James, who was provost of King’s College Cambridge between 1905 and 1918, liked to use the crumbly seascapes, old manor houses and mildly sloping heaths and lings of eastern East Anglia as settings to supernaturally taunt the lonely academic sceptics often at the centre of his stories, and had a recurring interest in the malevolent capacity of inanimate objects. Perhaps he had noticed that inanimate objects radiated that capacity more here than elsewhere. James wrote of Parkins, the protagonist in Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad, which, both in its written and original TV form, successfully reproduced that ‘followed’ feeling I felt on many of my walks, ‘the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night’. The main demonic object in this case was not a scarecrow, however, but an old dog whistle, found by Parkins while digging around on a monastic site on a Suffolk cliff top. I did not do any DIY excavation as an East Anglian walker – I would defy anyone to be brave enough to, after watching my favourite M. R. James adaptation, Lawrence Gordon Clark’s 1972 BBC version of A Warning to the Curious, with its unforgettable barked instruction from beyond the grave, ‘No digging here!’ – but there always seemed to be at least one cabbalistic metal object gnashing its teeth at me from the edge of a bridleway or thicket during my hikes through the silent parts of Norfolk and Suffolk: forgotten robots of the fields, their purposes becoming ever more recondite as they sank into their surroundings, contravened by iron oxide and weeds.

What those with an overactive imagination, such as M. R. James or myself, might have seen as malevolent was of course nothing more than practical to many. All those old drag harrows and tractor wheels and Allen Scythes and hay tedders served an everyday purpose before they were left to rot and get groped by nature. Scarecrows, too, were not just there to enhance the folk-horror film-cum-art-gallery in my head. They warded off birds, even though there are crop scarers to do the same job now (which, for all their monotony, can add an aptly spooky and unexpected Pop! to that engulfing lowland silence). But I was convinced there was more of this ominous, backward-looking aspect of agriculture here. Even if it hadn’t been agreed upon in a barn somewhere with a handshake, it was a trend that had spread visibly – perhaps in a classically Norfolkian, taciturn way, prompted by clandestine farmerly nods, not words. In the other twenty or so counties outside the east of England where I’d walked, I’d seen scarecrows and toothy rusting metal monsters but never nearly as many as here, and it surely wasn’t just because they had bigger humps and bumps to hide behind in other parts of the country. When it came to necromantic mannequins and unwholesome, rudimentary heads in particular, Darkest East Anglia seemed to have a unique affinity that went beyond just scarecrows. Norfolk’s sole waxwork museum, the Louis Tussauds House of Wax in Great Yarmouth, had for several decades been full of shoddy monuments to the power of the inadvertently macabre, showcasing, among others, a Neil Kinnock which looked like someone had simply burned the hair off a Margaret Thatcher waxwork and made do, and a Michael Jackson which gave an impression of what the King of Pop would have looked like if he’d aged naturally from 1982 onwards, died in 1997, been buried then dug up a fortnight later and stung by a passive-aggressive remark. In this alternative universe, far more entertainingly odd than any scarecrow festival I’d attended, Daley Thompson in his prime was no longer the figure my mum once cited as the Most Attractive Famous Man of the 1980s but a slightly melted version of Burt Reynolds with zombie ears.

In 2012, at the end of a straight sixty-mile line west of Yarmouth where the last vestiges of the Brecks tumble into the Fens, three friends and I walked to the village of Stow Bardolph, opened a mahogany cupboard in the church and were confronted by the funerary wax effigy of Sarah Hare, an eighteenth-century member of the wealthy Hare family, who owned the Stow Bardolph estate from the 1500s onwards. Following an Oliver Cromwellesque line of thinking, Hare had requested to have her appearance rendered exactly as it was in life, without prettification, so wax Sarah remained in her precise mid-1700s state, with the exception of the original whalebone in her corset, which had been devoured by insects. As we perused her warts and zombie hair, we were kind of nonchalant. Our insouciance could be blamed on context. Less than an hour earlier we’d chanced, unwarned, upon a more chilling humanoid, or perhaps scarecroid or even zomboid: the macabre, huge-mouthed, broken-lipped Marilyn Monroe dummy at the deathly quiet Hollywood Legends Diner off the westbound carriageway of the A47 near Narborough. Normally if you look at a dead woman in a cupboard you’re going to be able to say unequivocally that that was the most disturbing part of your day, but this was a different kind of