Katy was more or less the last person I’d have expected to run into while queuing for the ATM tucked away behind the drinks section in our tiny village shop. As she mimed exaggerated amazement, rushing to kiss me loudly on both cheeks — and, in doing so shoved poor old Mrs Wigglesworth out of the way, so that she had to brace herself against cases of cut-price lager —I reflected that I probably hadn’t seen Katy in real life since someone else’s half-forgotten wedding back in the mid 1990s, if not before.
Seeing Katy in the media was, of course, something else altogether. As a sort of comms person and all-around fixer for one of our better known and, at least in electoral terms and until relatively recently, one of our more successful political parties, there had been times over recent years when Katy could be glimpsed almost daily in the background of prime ministerial walkabouts, press conferences and, not infrequently, resignation announcements.
Toby and I, recalling her all too well from university days, used to laugh about this. Governments rose and fell — Katy, with her undentable enthusiasm and utter lack of shame, endured.
And now here she was, standing in the Coop, tall and thin and antic, laughing gaily at me as I helped Mrs Wigglesworth pick up her far-scattered shopping, filling the air around her with wafts of some expensive modern scent resembling no flower that ever bloomed on earth, taking the opportunity to push ahead of me and take a great fist-full of notes out of the ATM before we resumed our conversation outside on the little lane.
“What — what is it, exactly?” asked Pamela, her voice suddenly hoarse. Having glimpsed the thing on the floor, she recoiled from it. Yet at the same time, she couldn’t take her eyes off it.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” replied Liam, slightly crouched, hands on his thighs, still struggling to catch his breath. “It’s fu —”
And then there was a pause, although whether this was because Liam was still gasping — or, possibly, because he suddenly remembered that he was standing in the sacristy of the church, hence rapidly self-censored — remains unclear.
“It’s — it’s flipping, flippingheavy!”
“It’s also quite remarkably dusty.” This was Magnus. Magnus, at any rate, was his name, although everyone in the village called him the Colonel behind his back.
On that particular October morning, Magnus happened to be wearing a pinafore, and carrying a dusting-cloth. It was this, perhaps, rather than his habit of taking charge of problematic situations, that caused him to bend down. Using the cloth, carefully and methodically, he cleared away thick cobwebs from the item at their feet.
From the door to the steps leading up to the room over the chancel, there came a draught of cold, damp air, and with it a musty smell, redolent of unused places, darkness and very great age.
Pamela shivered. With bony hands she drew her mauve cardigan more tightly around her, and pushed an errant strand of grey hair back into her untidy bun. Turning, she closed the door perhaps more emphatically than she had intended. “That’s better,” she said to no one in particular, as if to justify the loud noise, although in truth her action had made very little difference, at least as far as the musty smell was concerned.
The men, meanwhile, were still regarding the object on the ground. Now that Magnus had scraped away the largest and most insistently sticky of the cobwebs, the large block of stone was, at least, a little easier to examine.
“Is it a sort of water-spout?” hazarded Liam. “Look, you can see it has a mouth, there. Well, a sort of a mouth. But what’s that?”
“It’s a horrid old thing!” pronounced Pamela, fastidiously. She grimaced. “Why did you bring it all the way down from the tower? You’ll only have to take it back up again.”
Magnus, in contrast, was transparently delighted at the discovery. The history of his parish church was almost his favourite thing about it. Ignoring Pamela, as he so often did, he thumped Liam on the back, causing the much younger man to catch his breath. “By Jove, you’re right, you know. It’s a gargoyle! Well done for spotting it up there, Liam. Good lad!”
Liam, though, was still face-to-face with the thing on the floor, his strangely innocent-looking eyes exploring every inch of its surface, trying to figure it all out. “What is it, though? I mean, what’s it supposed to be?”
The Scarecrow? Well, therein lies a tale! Perhaps it’s best that I simply tell you all the facts, such as they are, and let you draw your own conclusions.
Jeremy and the twins invited themselves to stay up at Pagets for a few weeks. Had I told you they’d moved back to Pimlico? After Jenny died, I was hardly using the London place — maybe two or three times a year at absolute most — so when Jeremy was offered the new job, he and Mai decided that the time had come to bid sayonara to old Tokyo.
The twins had just celebrated their fourth birthdays, so it wasn’t too late to swap school systems. Also, young children are hugely resilient, aren’t they? They thrive on change. They aren’t set in their ways like the rest of us miserable old reactionaries.
All that was left to do, anyway, was for Mai to tidy up a few loose ends in Japan, while Jeremy made a start on sorting out the Pimlico digs with the twins in tow.
Late-summer London, however, was hot and airless — especially so, one assumes, for little ones accustomed to ultra-modern, high-rise flats. I suspect they’d lived their whole lives amid artificial air conditioning — a noisy, charmless, soul-destroying abomination, if you ask me! — not that you did. Meanwhile the Pimlico flat had been taken over by a local firm of builders, along with their power tools, radios and nonstop cheeky-chappie banter. It was all too much.
Hence the improvised sojourn with Grandpa amid the quieter charms of the twins’ ancestral rural Norfolk.
It had been a while. When I’d last seen the twins — Jeremy, as you’ll recall, had offered them up as a sort of peace-offering to a dying if still alertly aware, acid-tongued Jenny — they were hardly more than two interchangeable bundles of life, sporting wild crests of raven-black glossy hair, mostly distinguishable by the differently-coloured dummies, one pink and one blue, permanently lodged within their chubby little faces. Jenny disapproved of dummies — just as she disapproved of Mai, Japan, Jeremy’s career changes and quite a lot else that came her way — but, for once, said nothing. Perhaps she had finally realised that there was, at that point, very little more to be said.
That, though, is bye-the-bye. I had better get on with the story — in particular, how the Scarecrow got mixed up with it all.
August was almost at an end. The three of them rolled up, after various delays, mid-afternoon, in Jeremy’s little car — Jeremy, Ren and a reluctant, sleepy Kitty who had to be prised out of the car like a clam from its enveloping shell.
“’Tis the solitude of the Country that creates these Whimsies; there was never such a thing as a Ghost heard of at London, except in the Play-house.” Joseph Addison, The Drummer (1716)
“I hope you will consider it no impertinence, my dear sir, that I should ask such a thing, but in truth I can no longer restrain myself. Sir, have you never felt an inclination to investigate what lies beneath that raised bank of yours, over there on the lawn?”
The Rev Mr Calthorpe paused, regarded his cousin briefly, then with infinite care and exactitude placed a slip of paper to mark the passage that he’d been reading, closed the book so gently that the gesture elicited no sound, and laid the little volume on the table next to him, where it joined the familiar company of candle, pipe, jug of claret and half-empty glass.
Mr Calthorpe did these things slowly and deliberately, not because he was old or infirm — for he was, in fact, a good decade or two younger than you would probably think him to be, were you to meet him in the high street, and in excellent health, too, thanks be to God — but because doing so gave him time to reflect, not for the first time, on why it was that the young were so full of zeal to do things.
Why not leave the raised bank behind the parsonage just as it was, and had presumably always been? Why innovate?
But because Mr Calthorpe was a very kind man, and sometimes even a politic one, he sighed, gently, and said none of this to his cousin.
The young Rev Mr Chambers, meanwhile, wondered whether he had gone too far. For all his apparent self-assurance — coaxed into being at Wykham’s two great foundations, successively if not definitively — he nevertheless remained sensible, when visiting Mr Calthorpe at his Norfolk parsonage house, that he was very much the poor relation.
For while Mr Calthorpe might appear, dozing quietly before the fire in his ancient Norfolk rectory, the simple sort of country parson whose quotidian predicaments and catastrophes might bulk out a Covent Garden farce, he was indeed, as all the world knew, younger brother and heir to Lord Calthorpe of Calthorpe Hall, Calthorpe, in the county of Suffolk — this latter personage recently promoted from Gentleman Usher Quarterly Waiter in Ordinary, to the infinitely preferable role of Yeoman of the Removing Wardrobe, no less, to His Majesty King George II.
On that afternoon when I first learned of Lucinda’s death, it was as if some sort of filter had fallen between me and the rest of the world.
The bright September sunlight was suddenly dim, irresolute. The shadows lost their crisp autumn rigour. They became almost apologetic. When, on a whim, I went to the edge of our garden, from which one could just about glimpse the distant chimneys of the large house in which Lucinda had lived (“and, indeed, in which she had died — where she’s probably lying dead even now” the unhelpful voice inside my head stipulated), the battered corn-stubble, which at lunchtime had look as if it were picked out in purest old gold, was dun-coloured, dull — devoid even of its habitual population of gleaning rooks and wood-pigeons.
One lumpy little cloud hung pointlessly in the sky. I found myself disliking it, because it added nothing to the scene and looked wrong there. How ridiculous to dislike a cloud! Almost as ridiculous, in its way, as disliking death, although most of us do that all the same.
It’s not as if, I should perhaps add right away, I had known Lucinda terribly well — not as if we were the closest of friends. We were certainly not.
For several years now, I’ve shared examples of my short fiction here on this website.
Today, though, sees the start of something new — the publication of The Lammas Ghosts, a collection of fifteen of my own original, Norfolk-based short stories in printed form. You can find out more here.
For me, ghost stories have, first and foremost, been a way of talking about two specific places — often, the North Norfolk coast, and later occasionally the Marshland area, just to the south and southwest of King’s Lynn. They’re what happens when history, topography, folklore and errant day-dreaming run up against the dry stuff of everyday life, fizzing over into uncanny narrative.
Sometimes, the stories give voice to the very real anxieties and frustrations of life in these places. At other points, I hope they evoke the beauty and magic of localities that have, even now, by no means lost their distinctiveness.
Mostly, though, they convey a real truth about East Anglia — that it’s a place where the past is always present, unfailingly ready to leap out and surprise us just when we least expect it — but perhaps also when we need it most.
This is not a ghost story, at least not in any normal sense of that term. Nor is it much of a history. It answers no important questions. Nor does it make a satisfying progress from A to C, stopping smartly upon arrival, with B folded neatly into the middle.
Instead, what follows is an attempt to know something about a woman who bore the name Martha Moore. She was born in 1603 and died in 1669. She lived in various places, including but not limited to Norfolk.
I can tell you now that her story is not a remarkable one. She interests me, for various reasons, but I know for a fact that others find this sort of thing infinitely tedious. They may well be correct.
A few years ago, I wrote a story in which someone very like her plays a central role, which you can read here.
Yet because Martha Moore interests me, I have continued, ever since, to find out all I could about her — and, having done so, it seemed wrong simply to close away my notes, such as they were, forever. To quote (as I’m well aware that I do far too often) a favourite passage from an essay by one of Martha Moore’s near-contemporaries, Sir Thomas Browne, in his Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial; or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk,
We were hinted by the occasion, not catched the opportunity to write of old things, or intrude upon the antiquary. We are coldly drawn unto discourses of antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things, or make out learned novelties. But seeing they arose, as they lay almost in silence among us, at least in short account suddenly passed over, we were very unwilling they should die again, and be buried twice among us.
This is exactly what I feel about the various scattered fragments I’ve gathered together while looking for Martha Moore.
Here, then, for what it’s worth, is an attempt to piece together her story.
* * *
Let us consider the parish church of Wiggenhall St Germans, a little village four miles south of the port of King’s Lynn.
Wiggenhall St Germans is in Norfolk, but it straddles the Great Ouse, a large and at that point strongly tidal river. West of the Great Ouse are the parishes of Freebridge Marshland. The “free bridge” stood, and stands, in Wiggenhall St Germans — unlike the ferry service that also conveyed people across the river from at least the 13th century onward, there was, at least at an early point, no charge for it.
Marshland, in turn, was previously a vast, flat, mysterious realm of what might were they not saline, casually be termed fens. Reclaimed by drainage projects in the 17th century, the area is now composed mostly of arable farms and nondescript hamlets.
Until the 1950s, Marshland flooded frequently and catastrophically. Perhaps it will again.
The parish church of Wiggenhall St Germans, with its graceful little tower and decayed brick porch, perches just east of the river bank, a good eight feet or so below the normal high tide mark of the river.
Although located in Norfolk, it’s part of the diocese of Ely. As with most Church of England churches in the area, it’s the community’s deep memory expressed in physical form: a pleasingly unconsidered jumble of absolutely first-rate late medieval bench ends, stairs winding up towards a rood loft that hasn’t existed for almost half a millennium, raunchy mass-market paperbacks sold four-for-£1 in aid of the church fabric, and a light-soaked chapel where veneration of St Thomas of Canterbury has now given way to a pragmatic little galley kitchen suitable for sustaining long meetings on the part of the PCC. This is a village that used to be extremely prosperous and rather self-important, but that is now peripheral, friendly and, often, apparently slightly sleepy. I don’t get the sense that anyone minds this very much.
We will pass by the book stall, the table carefully stocked with informative leaflets, those bench ends with their entirely recognisable depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins enacted in the gaping mouths of large fish, and — as the PCC meeting commences in the chapel next door — make our way into the relative dark of the chancel.
The enshrining of historical ‘facts’ is a curious business.
It is generally believed these days — by all sorts of people, which is to say, those who know very little about the Norfolk village of Blakeney and those who know quite a lot — that the chancel of the church of St Nicholas was built and used by the Carmelite friars who were at that time established in our village. This explains why the chancel and nave appear unrelated, why the standard of work in the chancel is so good, even why the priests’ door faces northward. But when pressed for additional details, silence descends. In truth, the case for Carmelite involvement with the chancel makes very little sense, isn’t supported by the evidence, and is almost certainly wrong.
My purpose here is to spell out why the Carmelite explanation doesn’t really work, and also to provide what seems to me a far more likely alternative backstory for the chancel at St Nicholas, Blakeney.
St Nicholas, Blakeney as seen from the east
The origins of the Carmelite theory
Let’s look first, though, at how the Carmelite story got started.
The first evidence I have seen for this line of argument appears in the Blakeney church guide prepared in 1954 by the Rev. C. L. S. Linnell, incumbent of the nearby parish of Lethringsett. In this he acknowledges help from, inter alia, John Page ARIBA, architect of Blakeney’s newer rectory, built in 1924 and demolished in 2019, all which tells us something about Blakeney’s unsentimental attitude towards its own ecclesiastical heritage.
The Rev. Charles Laurence Scruton Linnell, for his part, was no casual clerical scribbler.
In 1086, when the Domesday Book was composed, what is now the little village of Langham in Norfolk — in our own time, a small place of fewer than 400 souls — already had two churches. These two churches stood only about 300 meters distant from each other. Langham had long been divided into two main manors, which probably explains the two churches and their foundation well before the date of the Conquest.
One of these churches — St Andrew, associated with the manor variously called Langham Magna, Langham Episcopi or Langham Bishop — still exists today, under the dedication St Andrew & St Mary. The building stands on a little ridge at the centre of the present-day village, with the land sloping away to the sea to the north, towards a little stream to the south. The other — St Mary, associated with Langham Parva — was located a short distance down the road towards Binham, apparently always outside the main settlement. It was probably the fact of this ridge and the road running along it that gave the village its unremarkable name, shared with parishes in Essex, Suffolk, Rutland and Dorset.
Yet St Mary disappears from the records at some point between the creation of the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, where it features, and the national inventory of church goods of 1552, where it does not.
What happened? Of these two churches, St Andrew seems always to have been the more prominent. By the twelfth century it was a vicarage, under the control of the bishop of Norwich. The bishop also had a “palace” in the parish, to the west of the road to Field Dalling alongside what is now known as the Ford, which may — if one accepts local opinion on these things — have previously been the site of a Roman villa. Certainly Roman material has been found at the site. Meanwhile part of the flooded moat of the bishop’s palace is still visible, set in a damp sort of meadow with horses grazing nearby and some working farm buildings immediately next to it. (Peter Tolhurst, Norfolk Parish Treasures: North and West Norfolk, Black Dog Books (2014), p. 91.)
The ecclesiastical taxation of 1291-92 assessed the bishop’s church, St Andrew, at £3 10s 0d. St Mary, in contrast, where Sir John Cokefield, a layman, was patron, was only worth at 10s. (See here) As for the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535, it assessed the value of St Andrew at £4 11s 8d per annum, while St Mary was worth £3 10s 5d. These were, incidentally, both relatively poor livings by wealthy north Norfolk standards. The Valor Ecclesiasticus assessed neighbouring Blakeney, for instance, as worth a clear £27 13s 4d per annum. But then Blakeney was, at the time, one of a trio of thriving Glaven ports, while Langham remained, as it always has been, primarily agricultural.
For a small village, Langham St Andrew is an impressive church. The current structure was (re)built in flint in the fourteenth century, then enlarged and enriched throughout the course of the fifteenth century, with major restoration campaigns in 1868, 1900, 1906, the mid 1980s and doubtless at other times as well. From the tall tower with its late fifteenth century crenelated parapet, on the right sort of day, one can, allegedly, see all the way to Norwich. There is a general feeling, expressed by Pevsner among others, that the 1868 renovation left the church looking “lifeless”, but this seems unkind to me. On a bright spring morning, when the snowdrops are in bloom and the sunlight catches the flintwork and the old render, it’s a wholly delightful, atmospheric place, both inside and out.
Langham St Andrew, as seen from the road running from the direction of Blakeney towards Binham and Walsingham
But let us consider, for a moment, the interior of the church. One of its most striking features of St Andrew these days is its bold asymmetry. While the nave has a south aisle complete with a chapel at the end, there is no north aisle whatsoever. What there is, however, is a strange, slightly wonky filled-in arch, larger than a normal doorway, in the north wall, just east of the present entrance. On the outside, meanwhile, someone has scored into the (1980s?) render the outline of a roofline, and then a door within that. Pevsner thought that the “mysterious, shapeless” arch might signal the existence of a vanished chapel. (Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson, Norfolk I: Norwich and North-East, Yale University Press (2002) p. 584.)
Such “missing” portions of medieval churches are, of course, more usual than otherwise. The parish next door, Cockthorpe, had its chancel shortened, probably in the seventeenth century, and has blocked-up south-facing wall openings. The church of Cley-next-the-Sea, in its current form built during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, straddling as it did so the trauma of the Black Death, now has both its massive, ornate transepts blocked off — indeed, it’s possible that this may have happened soon after they were built, well before the reformation, due to the loss of a third or more of the local parishioners. And as we’ve seen, St Mary’s Langham vanished altogether.
This is an iron boot-scraper. For the better part of a century, it stood outside the front door of a Church of England rectory in a Norfolk village perched on the cusp of the eastern England, a liminal place where a vastness of greyish-lavender salt marsh softens the edges of the North Sea.
The rectory sat on a hill above the rest of the village. Next to it was the late medieval ex-rectory it had superseded in 1924, and which its design consciously echoed. Across the way and slightly to the north, on the highest ground in the village, was the parish church, a 13th century building altered by major rebuilding campaigns in the 15th, 19th and early 20th centuries. Nearby were the old schoolhouse and the newer, early 19th century parish school with modest 20th century additions. Another neighbour was a house called Highfields, an ordinary Victorian farmhouse that had been enlarged and re-ordered in the 1930s by the same architect who built the rectory — a local man named John Page, who lived in or near the village for nearly all his long life. John Page had also worked on the older rectory, just as he would go on to work on many, perhaps even dozens of other houses and buildings in the village.
Anyone traveling to the village either from the nearby market town of Holt, or indeed from the fine cathedral city of Norwich, necessarily passed between these buildings. The rectory was, more or less, the southern-most building in the village. As such, its tall chimneys, sloping tiled roof and distinctive 1920s Queen Anne roofline provided visitors with their first impression of the place they were about to experience.
In 2016, however, the rector decided that the rectory in which she and her children had lived, apparently happily, for a few years was no longer required. The diocese agreed. In 2017, the ex-rectory was sold to private owners for £1m. After local objections that went all the way to the High Court, the necessary planning permissions were obtained.
And so it happened that a year ago today — 21 January 2019, at 3.14 in the afternoon — a lone hydraulic excavator tore down the central tall chimney of the rectory. As holes were smashed into the distinctive 1920s Queen Anne roof, throwing its red sand faced Hartshill rooftiles everywhere, a strangely sweet, fresh smell settled over the area. It was the resin, suddenly released from all those 1920s softwood battens, making contact with the sharp damp air of a winter evening on the north Norfolk coast.
The smell persisted for days. It was actually very pleasant, as long as one tried to forget the act of senseless, irreparable violence that had created it.
News from Norfolk 