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I was first introduced to this gentle tale of an ancient haunted house via the 1986 television series, broadcast just before Christmas. I can even remember that I had a cold when it was on, which only seemed to make it better somehow, swaddled as I was in a duvet guzzling Lemsip and Lockets. Me and my brothers had been big fans of the BBCs adaptation of the Box of Delights a few years previously and this is very much in the same vein. Both feature an upper middle class boy whose parents live abroad, both go to stay with relations during the Christmas holidays and both make friends with uncanny types, and have brushes with ancient evil.


The Children of Green Knowe is an altogether more wistful, melancholy affair compared to the boisterous adventurousness of the Box of Delights. Even the approach to the Green Knowe, the house of the title is allegorically portentous - the fens have been flooded and our hero Toseland/Tolly is first carried á la St Christopher and then rowed to the house by the evocatively monickered retainer Boggis. Once sealed off from real life entirely, and in the safe custody of his great grandmother, Linnet Oldknowe, he is largely left alone to explore and make his own entertainment. In the evenings, his great-grandmother tells him stories of the house’s former inhabitants, all of whom were his relations, and particularly of three children who lived and died there in the 17th century. It becomes apparent that these three have never actually left Green Knowe and slowly reveal themselves to Tolly, befriending him, at least to the extent that a four hundred year old spirit can befriend you. As the story progresses, Tolly becomes to know more of the house’s history and his deep connection with it through the dozens of ancestors who have lived and died within its walls. Even his name resonates through the years - he’s only the latest of many Toselands of Green Knowe.


It’s a blanket of a story, a soothing wrinkle-handed stroke on the fevered modern brow for both reader and Tolly himself. He arrives alone at the house, apparently friendless, his mother dead, his father thousands of miles away, and finds that he is a part of the magnificent tapestry of the house’s history. Time itself becomes irrelevant, and the worries and bustle of the world outside fade, literally cut off by the rising floodwaters and then a heavy fall of snow. It’s a house which embraces its history to the extent that its past inhabitants forget to be dead. It’s not all sweetness and light though - the children that whisper and giggle in empty rooms died of the great plague, never to reach adulthood, and in the garden lowers the brooding demon tree Green Noah, a terrifying folkloric presence. But the easiest way to avoid him if I remember rightly is to run back inside where Granny is serving tea and cakes, just like her granny did and hers before that. Green Knowe itself was based on the 12th century (!!!) Cambridgeshire manor house that author Lucy M Boston bought in the 1930s and patently fell completely in love with to the extent that she set many of her books in it, and not only the Green Knowe series. I can’t say I blame her. After watching the series, and subsequently reading the book to my children, I’d quite like to move in myself and hang out with the ghosts, eventually becoming one myself. The TV series was not filmed there but at Crow’s Hall in Suffolk, which is Tudor in origin, but my picture does feature the original Green Knowe. As for the illustration, this was definitely one of those ones I just had to stop because it could have gone on forever. I’m not entirely happy with it, especially the ghosts who a) you can’t really see and b) look ridiculous if you zoom in on them so don’t bother. Hey ho! Onward.

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I’ll be the first to admit it, I didn’t have a clue what a tractate or a middoth was before I first read this, but obscure as it is, the title really is weirdly redolent of cobwebs and dusty arcane knowledge. Garrett, a university library assistant has a nasty encounter with a spiteful clerical ghost as he searches for a volume of the Talmud, an obscure Jewish text, for a twitchy cove called Eldred. This sets him unwittingly on the trail of a lost will, thanks to a few barely credible coincidences, and ultimately a romantically inclined happy ending, a rare if not unique occurrence in a James story.


My illustration draws heavily from the Mark Gatiss adaptation of the story from the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas strand from 2013, Gatiss’ directorial debut. Set in the 1950s, it’s beautifully shot and is so obviously saturated with the man’s love for both M R James and celluloid spookiness (yes, that IS an actual genre) - it’s an homage but he makes it his own I think. It’s kind of slight but lovely to look at and boasts a fantastic cast, including a delightful turn from Roy Barraclough as the amiable but indolent library porter.


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Or as it should be called ‘Toxic Masculinity Never Dies’. This ghastly tale by Le Fanu, first published in the Dublin University Magazine in 1839 is set in the the 17th century studio of Dutch painter Gerard Dou(w), who was the real master of the real Godfrey Schal(c)ken, who had in his turn been pupil to Rembrandt. In Le Fanu’s story, Schalken is in love with Douw’s niece and ward Rose but knows as an impoverished student he is unlikely to be seen as a suitable suitor. One evening, Schalken works into the night on a painting depicting St Anthony tormented by devils. It’s not going his way. He curses the painting and its holy subject whilst rubbing charcoal into his face like the tormented artist he is. We’ve all been there, though an iPencil doesn’t quite have the same effect. As if by this dark summoning, a stranger, Minheer Vanderhausen of Rotterdam appears with a proposition for his master Douw and commands the younger man to arrange for his master to meet with him the following evening. The upshot is he returns and offers Douw a load of cash in return for his niece’s hand in marriage, who he glimpsed in a church when Douw and Rose visited Rotterdam some weeks previously. Putting aside both his slight misgivings about the weirdness of the suitor, and that Rose might have an opinion on this, and her own ideas about who she might want to marry, Douw signs a contract, effectively selling her to the sinister Vanderhausen, who he has spoken to for a couple of minutes and who’s face he has not even seen. When we do eventually see Vanderhausen’s face for the first time, along with Douw, Schalken and the unfortunate Rose who is still unaware of what her uncle has arranged, it’s obvious he is not like other men. His skin is tinged blue, doesn’t appear to breath and moves like an animated statue. Yes, that’s right folks, he’s dead. Lucky old Rose.


That the story does not end well is not entirely surprising. I’m not sure what’s more horrifying, that Rose was married off to a revenant to set up home in his tomb or the very ease at which she was bartered in this way entirely against her will. And Godfrey Schalken did nothing, an apparently impassive witness of his supposed true love’s ruinous end. The 1979 Omnibus adaptation of the story is more censorious of Schalcken (the film, available on YouTube, restores the c to his name) and pretty much makes it clear that his ambition is stronger than his love for Rose, and his predilection for prostitutes reveals his own transactional view of sexuality and relationships, though to be fair this was pretty much de rigeur at the time. Not that that’s an excuse, especially not for selling your ward to a corpse or standing by while it happens to your sweetheart. This adaptation, stretched to a running time of 68 minutes if anything improves on the story by fleshing it out. It looks beautiful, it’s exquisitely lit and most of the scenes look like paintings themselves. It also features many of the real Schalcken’s paintings, largely of young women lit by candlelight which were the inspiration for the original story. The pace is slow and the atmosphere is unsettling, which is in no way diminished by Charles Gray’s chilling narration as Le Fanu. Did Charles Gray ever do anything except sinister and chilling? Can you imagine him playing Buckaroo? Or even eating a sandwich? No me neither.



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