A Book of Delights

There are stories that held you as a child; they probably hold you even now. 

The Best Book in the World

When I was eight, my grandfather gave me a book for Christmas. I loved reading as a child and before and after that particular Christmas I was and have always been given books. But this book remains peerless in the lit-gift pantheon.  Its title was ‘The Box of Delights’. 

Masefield’s novel is beloved by many - doubly, triply, a hundred times so because of the 1984 dramatisation of the story by the BBC. Many of us late-thirty-/forty-somethings are still spellbound by its enchantment. And despite some voices today that decry the outdated technology and antique-synth soundtrack, I still see, hear and feel the production to be an absolute masterpiece of film.

But when I was given a hardback copy of the book - specially abridged to tie in with the TV drama, and with lustrous, glossy, full-colour plates – I was completely overwhelmed. How important it was to me: holding it and – oh! – opening those pages to reveal the picture of the Christmas Tree burgeoning with light and gifts, the glorious flight of Kay as he rides a chariot-wreath pulled by swarms of butterflies, and – best of all – the painting of Herne the Hunter deep in his Wild Wood, was a Christmas treat that has kept on giving for my whole life.

So when I lost it only two weeks after I had been given it, I was devastated. We lived in Scotland at the time and in that early January I had walked home from School with a little plastic bag containing The Book and my PE kit. Somewhere on the way home, I had put down the bag, maybe to do up a shoelace, or to talk to a friend, and I ploughed on homeward continuing my way into the very dark and the snow. 

My mum still remembers my serious distress. I can still feel it too. But I can also remember vividly staring out of the back window of our car as mum drove me back along the road I had come, and seeing poking out of a snowdrift - and almost completely covered - the plastic handles of the bag containing The Best Book in the Whole World.

We took the bag home. Snow had filled the bottom of the bag and had turned into icy water. The corners of the book had become mush, the cloth cover scuffed and worn. I was mortified by the state I had allowed it to become through my own negligence, but at least I had The Book. It had come home.

It was sacred to me; I can’t describe it in any other way. A  genuinely spiritual sacredness. It contained something which was absolutely, intensely Magic. I don’t mean ‘magic’ in the sense of ‘Oh what a magical story’ or ‘This story is about magic'; I mean something much more than that. 

The Box of Delights stands proud amongst those children’s novels that hold their readers in wintry thrall: Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe...yet unlike these books, its story rambles and meanders wildly through all kinds of implausibility and mythic reference, and reads more like a surreal improvisation by an overenthusiastic storyteller. This is why I love it above all other stories: it is massively flawed and at times quite off-putting to some (I would imagine) with its pages of seemingly pointless narrative asides, stories within stories that barely hang together, and its outlandish characters and settings that gel together about as smoothly as oil and water.

At its very depths though, in its very core, The Box of Delights taps into the roots of English Magic and Folklore. It shapes the ancient forest tales of the soil, it invokes spirits malign and fearsome and evokes the country’s bloody history; it sets up a mummers’-play-tribute to the rustic, to the eccentric, to the nostalgic. And to the lost.

What place does Arnold of Todi's lost Box of Delights have in the modern day? Whatever Masefield's motivations were for bringing old folklore bang up to date in the 1930s with flying automobiles, robbers and pistols, the clash between the old and the new is clear. The author seems to delight in overloading the story with other stories: the Green Man, Herne, the Lion and the Unicorn, the phoenix, Punch and Judy, the Trojan War...over and over and over, a palimpsest layering upon layering, until the weight of story has nigh quashed the real world.

Kay's modern slang 'I haven't a tosser to my kick' belies his true fascination with the fantastic when he 'frightfully' wants to see a Phoenix.  Except, he says, 'it doesn't exist'. (I do like to think that over this Christmas vacation, Kay managed to slough off his tougher schoolboy skin to becomes his true, wondering, eyes-wide-open self!) Masefield shows youth that what they can imagine, what they somehow just know was once real and true, is still an actuality: spin the stories, dig about a little deeper, and you'll find the truth.

The last lines of the book are almost too pat to be true after all this richness...'it was all a dream'! But it's not the totally duff anticlimax some say it is. A dream is exactly what it is. Like Shakespeare's dream-vision where myth and magic collide with the mundane to create something fresh and anew-formed:

‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’

Each one of us is part of the long line of Dreams that have formed our lineage; the stories that have made, and continue to make, our histories. Ramon Lully (aka Cole Hawlings) travels through time to be in all times: he shows that Story is told, retold, played out again and again, eternally refreshed and drawn upon.

As a child, I literally lost The Book . Then, for a time as a young adult, I lost sight of the book spiritually – I was reading other things, and the book stayed on the shelf, untouched for a while. But it was found again.  And now I read it every year at Christmas, in memory of my grandfather who gave me this gift all those years ago, and also in living memory of how such stories (and Story) can have a very special - transformational - place in all our lives.

Story is never lost. It holds us forever.

A Haunted Haunted-House

HAUNTED HOUSE by Jan Pienkowski (Heinemann, 1979)
THE HOUSE OF MADAME M by Clotilde Perrin (Gecko Press, 2019)

As thunder peals, a swathe of bats darts in front of a dilapidated Queen-Anne-style house, its darkened windows lit up by a flash of lightning. A Hammond organ cranks into life to accompany scenes of secret panels creaking open while evil eyes glow from the shadows...

This - the opening titles for Scooby Doo - is for many, the quintessence of the haunted house: a creepy old pile in the middle of nowhere, festooned with dust and cobwebs; and very enjoyable such tropes are - you know where you are with this sort of house.

But if our youthful interest is piqued we might explore a bit more as we grow older, and eventually find ourselves on the doorstep of Bly or Paramore (Henry James), Hill House (Shirley Jackson), or Hundreds Hall (Sarah Waters). In these 'grown-up' haunted houses, the oppression is palpable - they have a hold on someone in the story and will not let go. Bly and Paramore stifle a governess and an heir respectively, both of whom are obsessed (though for different reasons) with the family's seat; Hill House is vitalised by the psychic energies of its damaged visitors; and Hundreds Hall casts its spell via a malign Englishness, nostalgia and class tensions translated into the victim's obsession. People who visit these houses are already haunted by themselves; the houses give physical substance to their spiritual anxiety. Like Rebecca's Manderley, the atmospheres of the buildings  become deeply impressed on our psyches; they cast long shadows; you don't quite know where you are with this sort of house.

There is a pop-up book, Haunted House by Jan Pienkowski, that I think does for the child's mind as do those 'grown up' houses described. It may seem at first glance to be the usual haunted-house-for-kids fodder, with its sheeted ghosts and spiders and a gigantic (vampire?) bat, though it lingers stickily in the mind long after childhood; there is an atmosphere to it. Don't get me wrong, it's a very entertaining and darkly humorous book: I adored it as a boy (and still do!) and continue to see children today discovering its amusing weirdness with the same sense of delight. But it's also a disconcerting read.

Maybe it's something to do with the narrator. They are talking to a visitor - a doctor - and claim to be suffering from some kind of illness, though this is never properly defined. There's also a conflict between the words and the pictures (as in Pat Hutchins' Rosie's Walk): the narrator seems blithely unaware that their symptoms may be a result of the weird goings on in each room. The reader feels that something is wrong straight away and is complicit in the knowledge that the hauntings are the reason for the tummy problems, sleeping sickness and aching bones. The reader travels through the house, observing all the time, wanting to shout out to the owner "It's behind you!"...until they finally reach the attic. Now the doctor has disappeared. Where have they gone? Who is in the trunk? The book is closed; questions are left unanswered.

A disturbing ending. The house seems to have had the last laugh. As Bly did too, in its turn - and Paramore...Hundreds Hall...Hill House....they all have that last, hollow, satisfied laugh: there is no evading - or escaping - their grip.

This year, Clotilde Perrin has produced another haunted house, another interactive picture book, for a new generation. The House of Madame M, is doubly haunted - it strongly evokes the feel of the earlier Pienkowski title (and even echoes the cover with a slimy tentacle appearing from within the front door of both) as well as adding its own macabre take on the genre. This is not a stereotypical spook-house; it's weird, not altogether friendly nor comfortable, and all the better for this.

In The House of Madame M we are on another tour, this time of a witch's house. Our guide is an odd creature -  a mixture of reptile and bird -  who appears to reside there with a host of other strange inhabitants. Like Pienkowski's visiting alien and resident gorilla, they are not the stock characters associated with a traditional haunted house. There are the usual skeletons and ghosts, yes, but these things loom out of the pages with oversized eyes, gigantic hairy arms and leering grins. Their surreal presence is just as unnerving. 

The last page, as with Haunted House, leaves us with questions that will never be answered. In this book, though, it's the ultimate question - Eternity. The ailing owner of Pienkowski's house is now, forty years on, reflecting on death and the afterlife and a black humour stalks the rooms: there's a Vanitas  hanging on the sitting-room wall, mocking the emptiness of video consoles, hamburgers and mobile phones; the toilet door sports graffiti that speaks of a distinctly existential angst; the Totentanz is demonstrated by the cavortings of human skeletons. Additionally, the goddess Kali is found glaring from a bathroom cabinet beneath a picture of Persephone; anti-wrinkle cream, an elixir of youth and a 'calendar of eternity' all point to the inevitable; while a Decomposition chart in the kitchen gives a pretty accurate (but bleak) message: 'Let it happen'!

Here, there's no softening of what a haunted house really is. The jokes may be dark but, hey, the supernatural is not meant to be light work! Very few children's books manage that knife-edge balance between sly humour and outright horror that characterises some of the greatest horror fiction. There's a double caution too in children's literature by way of the question of appropriate-ness for its intended audience, so it's an even rarer beast that manages to entertain and unnerve children in equal measure. It is books that do this that are likely to spark the inclination to read horror fiction in later life; the kind of stories that linger in the mind long after reading, that shift the status quo in one's inner world, that make one question the everyday, and open the eye to those hitherto 'undreamt-of things in Heaven and Earth'.

So, if I may: don't just stick with 'fluffy' ghosts, hairy spiders and skeletons that wiggle their eyeballs for a cheap laugh this Hallowe'en - in literature, it's the truly haunted haunted-houses that you want to search out and visit.

A 'GHOSTS' STORY

Christopher Maynard: All about Ghosts 
(Usborne, 1977/2019)

Childhood is a kind of half-world, where real-life often blurs into the imaginary and fantastic. I can't remember a time when I was young when I didn't believe that everything read or seen in books was true: witches, demons, Norse mythologies, the gods and monsters of Ancient Greece and Egypt were all just as plausible as the everyday-ness of pencils, toothpaste and cornflakes - I just hadn't seen any such supernatural beings. But, boy, that never stopped me from being totally in awe of them or from believing in them.

I was about ten years old when I first came across the book that helped to shape a huge part of my life. It was a dark Tuesday evening, autumn- or winter-time. I'd had my fishfingers, spaghetti hoops and Angel Delight (child of the 80s!) and I was ready for that regular, glorious trip to the local library, pleasurably searching for something to read at bedtime. As I arrived, the fluorescent lights of the library and the gentle murmur of other bibliophiles going about their bookish business lulled me into the usual happy sense of security. Tonight, however, that feeling was to prove false.

Wandering through to the children's section, I found myself gazing up at a book face-out on a high shelf. 

Ooooh! That looks rather good: 
'Ghosts'. 

I like spooky things. 
It looks quite 'safe' too - 
colourful, 
a picture book...
actually an information book: 

it's good that it's an information book - 
FACTS don't mess 
with the imagination so much. 

Let's borrow it!

Let's look inside!

No...I'm not sure I'm liking this. 
A freaky dog with one eye 
that looks very weird...
a picture of a hanging man...
those skulls they've drawn 
look like they are watching me...

The pictures, as I turned the pages, started increasingly to alarm me: more than that, actually - they were deeply, viscerally frightening. I felt real fear and something very much out of my control: I could not stop looking at the book. The greatest horror appeared near the end - a photograph of a monk, three metres tall, stretched out in some inhuman way, with a sheet over its face and two dents marked in the cloth, baleful eye-sockets glaring. Even now I look at it and think there's something very wrong about it.

I don't think I ever took the book out of the library: in all honesty, I believed it was cursed.  I did however, manage to read (and enjoyed reading!) the whole thing a number of times over the following few years, until I had moved on in my head, when I'd finally discovered mundane reality was more obviously 'real'.

That book, 'Ghosts' by Christopher Maynard, still scares me. Why? I'm now a 'grown up', not a terrified child. It's not like I live in Borley Rectory or in a remote marshland - my home is a warm, modern semi- on a new estate. Yet that house is filled with volumes and volumes of spook stories, folktales, mythology and the like that I have collected over the many years since that ten-year-old boy found that original book of ghosts. By being terrified of their ilk as a child, I now give them shelter and physically live alongside my fear. They are talismanic; their horrors comfort me.

There are only a very few supernatural stories which manage to scare me nowadays. But addicted to this search for that rare feeling - and why on Earth do I want to experience it anyway?! -  I go on looking for another source of that intense literary fear I first experienced in 'Ghosts'. If you were a reader as a child, a book will almost certainly have frightened you too. For some, it is Grimm who manages it, or maybe it's the death of Aslan, or Dahl's Grand High Witch. None of those scared me (although the moon-like, staring eyes of Sendak's Wild Things come high in my list of literary horror) - no, for me it was that monk. And I wish I knew why...maybe if I could pinpoint that, then I'd learn something about myself.

Does growing up ever diminish the power that childhood reading has on us in the long-term? I'm not sure it does, and certainly not if we embrace the fact that those things we read as a child form indelible and intricate, vital mechanisms of our 'grown up' minds and senses. And of those senses, fear is a potent and very necessary animal instinct.

I'm not going to say that books are a safe way to experience that fear and work through it - because they aren't. Books aren't safe and nor should they ever be. For the child me, what I read in books was perfectly real: if there was horror in it, it was danger; if there was danger, it was a warning; if there was a warning, I should heed it. It was that simple: books helped teach me to be afraid.

And I'll be forever grateful to the one book in particular that - for me - did it first.