In Ghostly Company (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

IN GHOSTLY
COMPANY

Amyas Northcote

with an introduction by
David Stuart Davies

In Ghostly Company
first published by
Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2010

Published as an ePublication 2011

ISBN 978 1 84870 402 2

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For my husband
ANTHONY JOHN RANSON
with love from your wife, the publisher
Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,
not just for me but for our children,
Simon, Andrew and Nichola Trayler

INTRODUCTION

The writing of ghost stories has attracted more talented amateurs than any other form of literature. By the term ‘amateur’, I mean those individuals whose main occupation in life is not writing, but those who take up their pen or sit at their typewriters in their idle hours between the demands of their normal profession. The list of candidates in the ghost story genre includes M. R. James, Sir Andrew Caldecott and A. C. and R. H. Benson. Another name to add to the list, one which is forgotten today by all but the most knowledgeable aficionado of supernatural fiction, is Amyas Northcote.

Northcote remains a shadowy figure, and not a great deal is known about him or what prompted him to create this delicious collection of ghost stories. He was born on 25 October 1864 into a privileged background. He was the seventh child of a successful politician, Sir Stafford Northcote who was lord of the manor at Pynes, situated a few miles from Exeter. During his childhood years, all the great Tory politicians, including Disraeli, Lord Salisbury and Randolph Churchill, were guests at the house. Sir Stafford was a great devotee of the theatre and literature. He had an especial fascination for ghost stories and the tales of the Arabian Nights and needed little encouragement to spin yarns of magic, wizardry and the fantastic to his children. No doubt this influenced the young Amyas Northcote in his reading tastes and sowed seeds of inspiration which were not to flower until many years later.

Amyas attended Eton and was there at the same time as that doyen of ghost story writers M. R. James. It is not known if the two young men knew each other at this time, but the ancient and academic atmosphere that they breathed in together finds its way into both of their writings. Amyas followed the typical route from Eton to one of the Oxbridge Universities: Oxford in his case. In his story ‘Mr Mortimer’s Diary’ Northcote makes the following observation which could easily apply to himself.

Mr Roger Mortimer was a gentleman born of well-to-do parents . . . and was educated according to the usual practice of well-to-do folk; Eton and Oxford claimed him . . .

Shortly after his father died in 1887, Amyas emigrated to America where he set up in business in Chicago and, in 1890, married Helen Mary Dudley, from Kentucky.

During this period he developed his talent for writing. These were journalistic pieces full of political comment and wry observations rather than fiction, but they revealed that he had the ability to present his ideas and opinions in a cool and deceptively unemotional fashion, which later became a stylistic feature of his ghost stories. His time in America was a happy one and he held great affection for the country and its people. In one of his newspaper articles he affirmed:

The United States is my abiding place; my warmest friends are Americans . . . No foreigner who has not himself experienced it can be made to understand the kindness and hospitality with which Americans of all classes treat the stranger within their gates.

Northcote returned to England at the turn of the century, owning properties in London and the Chilterns. Little is known about his activities at this time except that he took on the role of Justice of the Peace in Buckinghamshire. Then, it would seem, out of the blue he brought out a collection of ghost stories in 1921.
In Ghostly Company
was published by John Lane, Bodley Head in November that year, just in time for Christmas, the season when it seems ghost stories come into their own.

The book received mixed reviews. The
Times Literary Supplement
referred to the author’s ‘unemotional style’ but added ‘in several of the stories, there is a subtle didactic touch which is not overdone.’

Indeed, the key words here are ‘subtle’ and ‘unemotional’. If the reader is in search of stomach-churning, heart-stopping violent horror, he will not find it in the stories of Amyas Northcote. His style is most akin to that of M. R. James in the sense that it is measured and insidiously suggestive, producing unnerving chills rather than shocks and gasps. After reading Northcote’s tales one is unsettled and disturbed. This is partly due to the fact that the hauntings or strange occurrences in his stories take place in natural or mundane surroundings – surroundings which would be familiar to most readers but ones never before thought of as unusual or threatening.

Consider for example the story ‘In the Woods’, which takes the form of a dream-like anecdote. It has no resolution and like many of Northcote’s stories no explanation either. He does not follow the path of many ghost story writers by explaining why or how the haunting has taken place. To do that, he seems to suggest, removes much of the mystery and the fear. The real point of fear is that there is no rational explanation.

In essence, there is no plot to ‘In the Woods’. The central character, a girl whose name we are never told, communes with nature and at first finds peace and tranquillity. ‘The woods enthralled her’ is a phrase used several times in the text and subtly the meaning of the word ‘enthralled’ changes from the implication of enchantment to enslavement. Northcote delicately and yet tangibly transforms this pastoral idyll into something dark and sinister. The woods become a character, and a threatening one at that: ‘The firs stood dark and motionless, with a faint aspect of menace in their clustering ranks . . . ’

Nature is a living thing with hidden undercurrents of danger.

Sadly
In Ghostly Company
proved to be Amyas Northcote’s only collection of ghost stories – his only published volume of any kind in fact. It has been suggested that it was his family name and his connections that persuaded the original publisher to accept the book. Certainly a slim volume of ghost stories by an unknown author was not going to make them a huge profit, but we shall never know the truth regarding this theory.

Amyas Northcote died very suddenly just eighteen months after the collection was published and no further stories were found amongst his papers. It is perhaps because of this brief flare on the literary scene, this limited contribution to the genre, that the book as a whole was neglected for so long. The publishers, not able to build up a readership for the author because of his untimely death, paid little attention to the volume and never republished. It was only because certain stories, ‘Brickett Bottom’ in particular, found their way into various anthologies, that Northcote’s name was remembered at all.

‘Brickett Bottom’ was championed by the great supernatural scholar Montague Summers who featured it in his classic
The Supernatural Omnibus
in 1931. It is typical of Northcote’s approach to the ghost story. It features, as several of his other tales do, a disappearance. It is a simple tale set in the seemingly harmless lush English countryside but before the reader is fully aware of it, the author has begun to build the tension and suspense. One of the major commentators on the British ghost story, Jack Adrian, thought that ‘Brickett Bottom’ ‘ . . . is far, far better than simply a good tale well told . . . it plumbs the most profound depths of horror and despair’. Adrian maintains that ‘there are a good many giants of the genre from that golden late-Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian period, who never wrote anything half as excellent.’

Another story that features a disappearance is ‘The Picture’. This tale is particularly Jamesian in style with all its historical detail and takes Northcote away from his typical
mis en scène
of the English countryside to Hungary. Here we are given a wicked Count and an old castle as elements in this tale of cruel love.