The Indelible Strangeness of Suburbs - A Guest Post by Richard Hirst

Richard Hirst is a member of the publishing collective Curious Tales. With fellow authors Emma-Jane Unsworth, Jenn Ashworth and Tom Fletcher, and illustrator Beth Ward, as well as a host of collaborators, the team has been bringing us collections of spooky stories to be read on winter nights since 2013. The latest installment, Congregation of Innocents, comes with an introduction by Patrick McGrath, and pays tribute to the American author Shirley Jackson on the fiftieth anniversary of her death. Congregation of Innocents is strictly limited to 400 copies, each numbered and signed. To give you a hint of what to expect, here is a guest blog from Richard, in which he discusses the origins of his interest in sinister tales.

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I was in Ipswich recently, staying with relatives.  Late one afternoon, whilst my partner went for a nap, I strapped our baby daughter into her buggy and went for a wander around the neighbourhood. I was working on a ghost story – one set in a historical reenactment society, something I've been writing on and off for well over a year but was now at a loss as to how it should proceed – and thought a stroll might help me puzzle it out. And so I walked and thought about the constituent elements of this story, much the same as much of what I write: history, imagination, fear.

I followed a path along narrow stream for a while and then, turning down a side-street, found myself in a typical suburb: wide-open streets lined with well-manicured flowerbeds, impeccable lawns and, beyond those, rows of large dwellings sat quietly in the early dusk. For all their normalcy, there’s an indelible strangeness to suburbs, particularly in the more unsociable hours. After about fifteen minutes of walking down one long, deserted street and then another and another, each seeming to lead me somewhere without ever quite arriving there, I conceded that I was lost, vanished from the small patch of the area I knew.

I grew up in a suburb very much like to this one, another conurbation in commuting distance of a large town, and still feel very much at home whenever I visit a similarly quiet backwater. In fact, the history of such places is itself a quiet backwater in the broader story of human habitation. Although it found its locus in the interwar period, the suburb was a phenomenon of the nineteenth century middle-class boom and its genteel appeal has remained the promise of quiet order, manageable ruralness, humdrum tranquillity and, above all, security. Huddled together in their tamed acres, homes here are hard for an opportunistic criminal to stumble upon, respectable local residents being the only unlikely threat. And with so many houses – and so many interchangeable – what possible likelihood is there of ever being singled out for a break-in?

And yet fear dwells in such places. Not just in the gated driveways, hi-tech security systems and Bluetooth house alarms. Often, I realised, places such as these have always seemed to me characterised by an air of low-level mistrust.

The night had begun to gather around me – with a suddenness, as it does in Suffolk in winter – streetlights flickered on unseen, the cold began to dig in, wind blew, my daughter whimpered. Easily distracted, I had still not given any thought to the story I was trying to write, As I continued wandering alongside glowing windows figures within turned to watch me, a stranger passing by their snug-looking homes – an evident rarity – and I wondered what I must have looked like to them. A night-prowler? A drug-dealer? A dog-kidnapper whose captives are concealed in a seemingly innocuous pram? Fear is almost always experienced through fantasy, it is an instinct powered by imagination, one which finds its true potency at night. And, for some of us, those who are fortunate enough to have been born into such places, with so little to materially endanger us, the unsafe – darkness, mystery and disruption – develops something of an allure. The night, and all it represents, becomes something to be enjoyed and engaged with.

I continued, walking and singing to my daughter. After rounding one winding street onto yet another, I put the brake on the buggy and opened the map on my phone. Whilst waiting for the app to load, I looked at the house in front of which I had stopped. On the lawn there was a boat – a yacht – covered with a weathered tarpaulin sheet and sinking into the grass, the buckled wheels of its chassis visible in the fluorescent light, a rusting, mossed-over monument to the dreams of whoever lived here. I stared at the yacht for some time, still waiting for the app, but it was no good – no signal out here. I resumed walking, thinking my formless thoughts about dreams and inspiration, imagination and fears, the past and the present – where they all intersect and where they all divide.

Towards the back of my mind, I found, my thoughts had fixed on memories of a book I’d owned as a child, a slim anthology of poems for children titled Spine Tinglers, published by Ladybird and edited by Ian and Zenka Woodward, a couple (presumably) about whom I know nothing, other than that they edited a handful of similar titles: Poems That Go Bump in the Night, Witches’ Brew: Spooky Verse for Halloween, The Howling Pandemonium and Other Noisy Poems. Although, as a boy, I amassed a sizeable library of books on monsters, ghosts, vampires and the like (always reliable gifts for relatives) Spine Tinglers was a steadfast favourite, perhaps because although it contained works by dully respectable poets like Shakespeare, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, they were legitimised by the ghoulish and cartoonlike accompanying illustrations.

One Robert Louis Stevenson poem in particular which stuck with me was Windy Nights, a simple enough poem – brief and straightforward – but one which also has the capacity to lodge itself in the mind, seeming to carry an echo something more substantive and more unsettling than is initially visible.

Whenever the moon and stars are set,

Whenever the wind is high,

All night long in the dark and wet,

A man goes riding by.

Late in the night when the fires are out,

Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Whenever the trees are crying aloud,

And ships are tossed at sea,

By, on the highway, low and loud,

By at the gallop goes he.

By at the gallop he goes, and then

By he comes back at the gallop again.

Later, when I was at university, I learned that, a little like myself, Stevenson had been a nervous child, one who was prey to terrors which would today be termed sleep paralysis. He received visits from a ‘night-hag’ who would stoop over his bed and at times even seize him up by the throat. He also experienced vivid nightmares, no doubt fuelled by the gruesome tales told to him by his nurse. As Windy Nights suggests, when awake he also had a loathing for storms. ‘I remember,’ he said, ‘that the noises on such occasions always grouped themselves for me into the sound of a horseman, or rather a succession of horsemen, riding furiously past the bottom of the street and away up the hill into town; I think even now that I hear the terrible howl of his passage, and the clinking that I used to attribute to his bit and stirrups. On such nights I would lie awake and pray and cry, until I prayed and cried myself asleep.’ As an adult Stevenson eventually succeeded in putting the torments of sleep behind him, but his extraordinary dream-life – always fascinating and always to be taken with a pinch of salt (or, in his case, a pinch of cocaine) – became crucial to him as he increasingly drew inspiration from the vivid and detailed visions he would experience. Nocturnal figures, which Stevenson refers to in his memoir Across the Plains as his ‘Brownies’ and his ‘Little People’, would appear to him during his unconscious hours, presenting him with crucial imagery or piecing together loose ends of an unfinished plot. The basis for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde came, he claimed, from a single feverish dream so horrific he awoke his wife with his screams.

A storm was now congregating over my suburb: the wind had picked up, rain was beginning to fall. I pressed on quickly, passing implacable houses, until I found I was once again alongside the stream, babbling forcefully in the darkness. I followed it upstream, trying to think of my story – I could make one of the female protagonists a man, could bring a scene from later in the story to the opening, could remove a section of back-story – but I found I was unable to shake my thoughts free from Windy Nights. On the surface it is a simple descriptive verse on Stevenson’s childhood terror. But, as I took the final familiar path to the house where I was staying, free at last from the meandering ouroboros of the suburbs, it occurred to me that the poem could also easily be taken for being about inspiration, darkly assailing, receding and then once again galloping back to assail. Indeed, for many – possibly for Stevenson, certainly for those who dwell in the suburbs – the two are hardly divisible: only in safety are we free to dream up threats.