21st-Century Yokel

door. ‘Don’t just put them on silent. Turn them off properly.’ Parry read without preamble or thanks to his audience, illuminated only by a couple of candles. ‘Some people complain it’s too dark,’ he told me afterwards. ‘But I’m afraid I ignore them. The pale light, uncertain shadows and flickers of candlelight reflect James’s storytelling method: the sense that there is something just out of sight, on the periphery of your vision, something you have to peer at to see, and even then you don’t see it clearly.’ He adds to the atmosphere with props, including old books, photographs, a vintage armchair, a leather bag containing notebooks and, often but not tonight, a bust of Zeus and an old coat stand. In the Leper Chapel he paused at turns in the narrative to take a swig of brandy and milk. His style was somehow exasperated, troubled, wry and utterly commanding all at the same time, an exaggerated amalgam of two or three very old tutors he had had at university, ‘terrifically erudite men with very dry wits and faintly satirical twinkles in their eyes’. When he deliberately, violently dropped the leather bag on the floor at a crucial juncture in Count Magnus – another James tale featuring a disbelieving, lonely academic being haunted by a terrible presence – I jumped in a manner that I hadn’t since the first time I watched Jamie Lee Curtis walk home from school through the ominous suburbia of John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween: a testament to how thoroughly Parry’s performance had transported me. Three years later, when I saw Parry perform Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad in a smart, conventionally decorated theatre in a converted early-twentieth-century factory he was equally commanding and convincing, but something was palpably missing: the vital extra element called Place.

The general thinking is that the fictional setting for Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad is based on the area around Felixstowe, but it’s Dunwich, thirty miles further north along Suffolk’s coast, that I always think of when I read the story or – particularly – see the original BBC adaptation: the drowned port, Britain’s Atlantis, the place where Scarecrow Country begins to be nibbled by the sea. When I see Michael Horden, who plays Parkins in the 1968 TV version, finding the dreaded dog whistle in the weeds and sand above the sea, it’s the crumbling cliff beyond Dunwich’s ruined thirteenth-century Franciscan priory I think of. When I have been alone, walking along Dunwich’s ever-shifting shingle, soundtracked only by the cries of terns and the rough indistinct conversation of my footsteps with a wind made garrulous by a long lonely journey over water, I can’t help thinking of Horden being chased along the beach by the white sheet ghost in his dream. ‘Who is this who is coming?’ reads the inscription on the whistle, translated from Latin. In Dunwich on a cold lonely day the something-behind-me feeling of emptiest Norfolk and Suffolk reaches its apotheosis: the sense that, while you have no place to hide here, whatever might follow you has plenty of very subtle ones. For my last decade in Norfolk it was the nearest stretch of coastline to my home, a place I visited regularly to read, to swim, to think, which got a few feet closer to me every year. When I revisited Suffolk for the first time after two years in Devon, in 2016, it was, for reasons of a magnetic nature, the first place I headed for.

I passed through Blaxhall on the way, stopping to watch corvids and buzzards weave above geometric fields. Twenty-four months had given hills enough time to alter me. I felt the full force of that dizzy, shrunk disorientation for the first time. The Blaxhall scarecrows were still not there, but outside a farm shop near Middleton I stopped to photograph a couple of others, also apparently joined in matrimony. They were good ones, especially the husband, who sat on an old camping chair dressed in a brown suit jacket and cravat, with a cheap toy scarecrow cat – Great Yarmouth gift shop was the thought that sprang to mind – on his lap and an expression on his white cotton bag face that found the middle ground between dreamy and psychotic. I’d have liked to have seen him a bit more weatherblasted but that was nitpicking. I was forty now, the age when people should be writing novels, and the written version of my scarecrow novel had still not emerged. I was much more relaxed about that fact than I used to be. It either would happen, one day, or it wouldn’t. I’d written a couple of other books in the meantime, very different books, which I felt proud of and had enjoyed writing, tuning in to a frequency that suited me. My novel, if it had happened in one of its initial forms, probably would have been inferior. I saw now that in the writing of it I’d been striving for something unreachably big while neglecting all the little stuff that was a vital part of making something reachably big or even something reachably medium. Some of us, especially if we have perfectionist tendencies, want to create our best work when we’re unblemished. But that’s not typically the natural pattern of events. Sometimes the best work doesn’t arrive until we’re a collection of wood in a mud-caked boiler suit, alone in a field, being buffeted this way and that by a cold wind. Of course we have to learn this for ourselves because one of the central characteristics of being temporarily unblemished is not having any awareness that you’re temporarily unblemished.

I’d chosen one of my old walking mixes of spooky folk songs for the drive to Dunwich, including Lal and Mike Waterson’s ‘The Scarecrow’, a song so broken it barely exists, but so ripe with death metaphor and circle-of-life awareness it cannot help but exist for ever in