I began to picture an alternative life for myself amid all this gentle, cranky beauty, caring for early-Victorian horses’ sun bonnets and corn dolly windmills and eventually inaugurating my own Scarecrow Wing in the furthest corner of the building, rescuing Zombie Marilyn from an East Norfolk household waste recycling centre when the Hollywood Legends Diner met its palpably imminent end, giving her a home for eternity where she could graduate from nightmarish to downright wake-up-screaming-for-your-mother-in-the-night terrifying. But in total honesty I had reservations about my pedigree as a curator of folk artefacts. I had been genuinely thrilled to find a five-foot wicker man at Myhills Pet and Garden in Swaffham in 2003, but in time I had taken him for granted. Over two winters, uncherished, forgotten, he had rotted into my hedge until he was nothing but a couple of brittle brown ribs, barely distinguishable from the twigs around him. A true social history archivist would not have allowed such a demise to take place. There will always be generously sized garden centre wicker men, I’d thought, much like people before me probably thought, There will always be rudimentary Edwardian traffic lights, or, There will always be rusty Georgian mantraps. I’d looked high and low at garden centres across East Anglia for his replacement, but no dice. Wicker geese? Yes. Wicker owls? Certainly. Wicker men? No. I replaced him with Warren the scarecrow, lovingly stuffing and clothing him, vowing to be a better mannequin parent, but he did not last. In the same spring that I proudly worked as an archiver of rural folk objects, I set Warren alight on my garden bonfire. I saw this as ritualistic, a ceremony marking my decision to move away from Norfolk, the end of this physical folk-horror book I’d lived inside, this era of straw men. But there was a more basic desire at work too: I just really liked burning stuff.
I do not class Cambridge as part of true folk-horror East Anglia, nor its surrounding villages, which are more Camberwick Green than anything you see in even the most genteel stretches of Norfolk or Suffolk. Cambridge is a different drink, served in fragile bone china with milk and two sugars. But it is still an early gateway to the Badlands of the East, a point where a rustic wheel very slowly starts to turn after miles of patchy post-London almost-countryside and repressive commuter sprawl. It was a very convenient base for M. R. James to make the excursions north-east that inspired his stories. On the coldest day of 2013 I went to the Leper Chapel of St Mary Magdalene, on the city’s harsher, less leafy north side, to watch a man called Robert Lloyd Parry – another Cambridge academic – spend an hour and a half pretending to be James. Parry’s one-man theatre company, Nunkie, doesn’t settle for simply reading aloud the stories that James wrote in the first three decades of the last century but attempts to recreate the experience of the author himself reading them to rapt students and fellow scholars at King’s or Eton College in the final part of his life. Parry’s shows invariably sold out well ahead of opening night. He was only forty-two but looked uncannily like James did in late middle age, albeit much taller, his huge shoulders crammed into a waistcoat and jacket, with thin-rimmed round spectacles and a slicked-down flick of receding mousy hair. He’s toured the eight stories in his repertoire all over England, but tends to favour old buildings in East Anglia. ‘Remember to wrap up warm,’ he told me before I set off for the Leper Chapel to see him perform the stories Count Magnus and Number 13. I took this for nothing but a pleasantry, something anyone would say to another going anywhere on a snowy January evening, but it turned out he really meant it. Nine centuries old, with no heating and a ceiling of such a towering nature that its finer details remain a mystery, the building smelled like every damp cellar that I’d ever been in had got together and formed a damp cellar supergroup, but also like the damp itself was suffering from hypothermia and needed help. The temperature inside hovered an elk’s hair above freezing. At the interval everyone in the crowd of fifty or so got up, not because we had anywhere to go – in a toiletless one-room building like the Leper Chapel there isn’t anywhere to go – but because we needed to stamp our feet to bring some semblance of circulation back to our legs. Candlelight waltzed up walls, illuminating the drooping tongues of gargoyles. Not your everyday gargoyles, but serious, primal gargoyles who remembered a time before clocks. I began to realise that the performance had been mismarketed. It was not a solitary show after all. There were two performers here, both equally vital: Parry and the building.
In the century and a bit since James’s first stories emerged, human brains have been voluntarily reprogrammed: they flit between forms of entertainment at an infinitely higher speed, distracted by the tyranny of choice. In an era of compressed attention spans how do you get an audience to focus on James’s slow-moving world of solitary academics weekending in off-the-beaten-track hotels and admiring the cupolas on Suffolk churches? Parry’s method is to make as few concessions to the present as possible, pulling you with a primitive thud back to the dark of an early-twentieth-century room then, in his storytelling itself, pulling you even further back to an earlier era – typically the 1880s or 1890s. ‘Turn off your mobile phones,’ we had been told by the man on the
