In the Cambridge Folk Museum I saw arguably the most disturbing inanimate quasi-humans of all: two Aunt Sallies. Angry wooden heads on sticks, black-painted, thick-lipped, buck-toothed, penis-nosed. A male and a female, the difference in gender signified only by a bonnet. At village fairs in the 1800s people would jeer and throw rotten fruit at them. From the perspective of the early twenty-first century, they are deeply unsettling, drenched in provincial racist fear and angry carnality. But who knows? There was probably a point when they seemed far more innocently comical. Time has a way of coating the mildly disturbing in an extra layer of darkness. I heard it in a lot of the songs I listened to when I drove to the starting points of my East Anglian walks: acid-folk tracks intentionally tinged with the occult when they were recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, enhanced by an extra patina of mystery in the decades since, as if the sounds themselves had been left in an an unused room to gather dust. The 1970 song ‘Graveyard’ by the short-lived Lincolnshire band Forest, for example. At the time Forest were ghost-obsessed kids barely out of their teens, messing about on recorders and violins in a budget studio, but by 2012 they had become somehow the perfect evocation of M. R. James eeriness and solo walks in empty pockets of land shadowed by a nameless, invisible beast. Stone Angel’s self-titled 1975 debut album was recorded by the Norfolk husband–wife songwriting team Joan and Ken Saul on the equipment at Joan’s teacher training college, just south of Norwich, due to financial constraints. Only three hundred copies were pressed, and in the early 1990s Joan and Ken still had ninety of them languishing under their bed. Approached by a record dealer, they sold them all to him for £2.50 each, save for a couple they kept for themselves for sentimental reasons. One of these originals will now sell on eBay for well over £600. The fragility of the recording eerily evokes the Norfolk and Suffolk legends Stone Angel sing about: the underwater bells of the sea-sunk churches of Dunwich village which allegedly still ring beneath the waves, wind-whipped marsh reeds, smudgy light, the footsteps of a demon beast. A dog endemic to eastern East Anglia, but not a normal dog you feed and stroke and patronise with a thrown stick. Black Shuck, he has been called, or Old Shef, or – presumably by the very short-sighted – Old Scarf. He is red-eyed, made of history, the rub of the earth. Above all this, Joan’s voice is a gossamer cry on an icy east wind, coming from somewhere behind old stone. She works in a library now. Ken is the secretary of the Norfolk Moth Society. ‘Don’t get him started on moths,’ Joan told me when I met the two of them in a pub in the village of Spooner Row. ‘You’ll be here until next week.’
In 2012, when I did a short stint of volunteering at the Cambridge Folk Museum, I got more of a sense of how time could darken a work of art, particularly those characterised by minimalism or naivety. With thoughts of relocation, I was beginning to clear out my loft at the time and had noticed how much more interesting a lot of the stuff in my loft had become in the years since I’d shoved it up there. That is the big rule of lofts: everything becomes more interesting once it is in one. If you were a dull person and you spent a few years in a loft it could probably do a lot for your character. Attics aren’t quite the same, as they are posher and generally have more refined and expensive stuff in them. The museum was like a giant living loft, everything in it getting more darkly interesting all the time. It was different to Kettle’s Yard, the museum next door, which was smarter, more attic-like. If a well-groomed person in neat clothes came into the Cambridge Folk Museum, nine times out of ten it was because they’d got the wrong door. Two staircases led to the first floor. The narrower of the two functioned as a downward-only staircase. A visitor would sometimes attempt to ascend the downward-only staircase, and one of my fellow volunteers – a retiree in her late sixties – would shout, ‘STOP!’ nearly causing the visitor to fall back down the stairs in fright. Time palpably slowed once through the doors of the museum because any concept of ‘catching up’ with the world beyond the threshold was rendered moot here, since there would always be more social history to record. My job was to work behind the scenes, archiving the constant flow of new potential exhibits, sometimes guessing at what they were with wild inaccuracy. Another of the more elderly female volunteers had recently mistaken a black cylindrical candle mould of Victorian vintage for an early dildo. I was warned to watch out for vodka beetles, who had a bad habit of chewing through ancient cloth and carpet – especially, I presumed, when on one of their signature benders. I opened a box to find
