Randalls Round (22 page)

After the war Helen became a full-time teacher, and this eventually blossomed into her main career (from the 1930S onwards) as a Vice-Principal, and later Principal, of a teacher training college in Oxfordshire.

Her first ghost story to appear in print was ‘The Room, a well- constructed example of the standard “haunted room” sub-genre which had reached its apex in Lanoe Falconer’s classic
Cecilia de Noel
(1891). Credited to H. M. Leys, ’The Room’ made its debut in the prestigious
Cornhill Magazine
in October 1923.

Although H. M. Leys never reappeared in the pages of the
Cornhill,
‘The Room’ was obviously much liked by the publishers and readers alike, as it was soon reprinted by the anonymous editor Leonard Huxley in his anthology
Sheaves from the Cornhill
(John Murray, 1926; reissued 1928).

The career of ‘Eleanor Scott’ as a mainstream novelist covered barely seven years, beginning with the controversial
War Among Ladies,
published by Ernest Benn in 1928. This is an extremely heartfelt and angry work on school life, written with great feeling by one who was obviously very familiar – on a daily basis – with the subject matter. The story’s heroine, the unfortunate Miss Cullen, may be strongly autobiographical. As a professional teacher, Helen Leys naturally had to disguise her true identity completely under a
nom de plume,
and the link between the two names was never revealed publicly in her lifetime.

The anonymous reviewer in the
Times Literary Supplement
declared that
“War Among Ladies
is not so much a novel as a piece of propaganda. Miss Eleanor Scott’s chief purpose is to move our indignation against the evils of the High School system. She uses her imagination as a weapon of offence, and not for its own sake… She makes us live for a time in Besley High School and understand as if from our own experience the half-insane hostilities which are possible in such a place. Miss Scott describes this peculiar atmosphere at least as vividly as Mr Hugh Walpole in
Mr Perrin and Mr Traill.”

The novel received several other good reviews including V. Sackville-West’s observation that “Miss Eleanor Scott is a very able writer”; and these probably encouraged Ernest Benn to publish
Randalls Round
in the following year. ‘The Room’ from the
Cornhill
was here joined by eight previously unpublished stories and a short foreword which memorably described the origins of these tales in her terrifying dreams.

When
Randalls Round
was published in September 1929 it was not marketed as a horror collection, and the phrase “ghost stories” appeared nowhere. The jacket picture portraying the title story (with dancing villagers around the pole surmounted by an ox’s head and shaggy hide, the man in bull’s head standing behind the mysterious white-shrouded figure) conveyed no terror at all, almost giving the appearance of a bucolic children’s book.

No reviewers of the time seemed to appreciate that these stories, especially ‘The Twelve Apostles’, At Simmel Acres Farm, and
‘Celui-là’
(rather than being a mere pastiche of ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’) were superlative uncanny tales and ghost stories in their own right; but the
Times Literary Supplement
asserted that the author’s disturbing dreams in one or two cases had a traceable literary origin – “for instance, ‘The Old Lady’ puts one in mind of a story by Walter de la Mare” (‘Seaton’s Aunt’), “and her giant slugs and wicked Latin manuscripts are not without parallel”!

Honor Yorke in ‘The Old Lady’ and Annis Breck in ‘“Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?”’ are both emancipated young Oxford women clearly based on the author herself, while
sacrificium hominum
is a recurring theme in the majority of these tales, especially in ‘The Cure, At Simmel Acres Farm,
‘Celui-là’,
and the title story.

If Eleanor Scott’s stories do not fully convey the horrors of her nightmares, as she suggests in her pithy foreword, those nightmares must have been terrifying indeed! Perhaps the publication of the nine tales in
Randalls Round
helped to exorcise the horrors in her dreams, as apparently she wrote no more stories of this kind after 1929.

A. D. Marks, the managing director of Ernest Benn at the time of
Randalls Round’s
publication, became a director of Philip Allan & Co. Ltd. in 1930. This company published the bestselling series of ‘Creeps’ anthologies from 1932 to 1936, and it is tempting to surmise that Marks may well have encouraged Eleanor Scott to contribute several new supernatural horror stories under different pseudonyms. Some of the ‘Creeps’ tales, especially those by the unknown N. Dennett, are very similar in style to those in
Randalls Round;
but this conjecture is impossible to prove now after seventy-five years.

Eleanor Scott’s second novel,
The Forgotten Image,
was published by Benn in April 1930. The title alludes to the image described by St James as the “natural face” which a person sees in the mirror and at once forgets. The story is set in an East End settlement, Frobisher House, and details the vocation of Alison Chambers for social work and her friendship with Beryl Chambers, who in turn has a deep infatuation for an older woman, Pauline Frobisher.

This book made little impression and, like its two predecessors, was quickly remaindered. Following the departure of A. D. Marks, Benn was no longer interested in any more fiction by Eleanor Scott, and there was a hiatus of nearly three years before Helen could find another publisher, Hamish Hamilton, who issued her last three novels in quick succession:
Swings and Roundabouts
(March 1933),
Beggars Would Ride
(October 1933) and
Puss in the Corner
(November 1934).

Puss in the Corner
was an insightful study of a widowed mother and her two unmarried daughters. This mother, Ianthe Fraser, has always enjoyed the adoring affection of her husband, a well-known popular author. At his death she is left with two daughters in their late teens, Karen and Anna. Eventually Karen takes a position at the local school while Anna goes to teach at some distance away, but neither girl is happy. Anna is entangled in an unwelcome love-affair and longs for home. Karen finds the strain of teaching at school while keeping house for an untidy and selfish mother too much for her, and the girls change places. One can only speculate on how much of this story-line was autobiographical, or pure fiction.

Following the poor sales of her novels, Eleanor Scott found a much wider market with her two forays into non-fiction – the only real “bestsellers” in her brief writing career -
Adventurous Women
(1933) and
Heroic Women
(1939), Volumes 18 and 54 in the ‘Nelsonian Library, both gift-books nicely produced by Thomas Nelson with colour plates. In 1937 she was awarded first prize in Nelson’s competition for the best introduction – under her own name, H. M. Leys – to a volume in their series of literary classics. This essay, on Daniel Defoe’s
A Journal of the Plague Year,
was also printed in
John o London’s Weekly
on 13 August 1937.

By the time Helen Leys had completed her last book, her elder sister Mary was achieving much acclaim for her academic historical studies. The books of M. D. R. Leys (as she was customarily known) include
Men, Money and Markets
(1936),
Between Two Empires: France, 1814-48
(1955), and
Catholics in England, 1559-1829: A Social History
(1961). She also wrote the definitive study on
A History of London Life
(1958) in collaboration with her sister-in-law Rosamund J. Mitchell (Mrs Alan Leys). Among R. J. Mitchell’s best works are a biography of
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester
(1938), who was both William Caxton’s patron and Britain’s nearest equivalent to Vlad the Impaler during his reign of terror in Ireland; and
The Spring Voyage
(1964) on the Jerusalem Pilgrimage in 1458, in which Tiptoft also participated.

After the Second World War, the two sisters Mary and Helen lived together for several years in Oxford, and (following their retirement) then moved to Burton Lodge in Exmouth, Devon. Helen died at the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital on 15 March 1965.

Eleanor Scott’s tales of terror and the supernatural were unjustly neglected for many years until the 1970s when Hugh Lamb reprinted the finest examples in his excellent anthologies, beginning with
A Tide of Terror.
Both the 1929 first edition and the 1996

Canadian edition (Ash-Tree Press; limited to 500 copies) are now highly sought-after collectors items, fetching three figure sums.

In this new edition, the first to be published in Britain for over eighty years,
Randalls Round
should once again bring “an agreeable shudder or two” to new readers, and delight all connoisseurs of the early 20th-century ghost story.

Richard Dalby