Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart

The self-loathing of the working class writer

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date August 25, 2024
6 Comments on The self-loathing of the working class writer

I’d have been shy about calling myself a ‘working class writer’ a decade or so ago. Which is ridiculous, with hindsight – because what else am I?

The stories in my last collection, Municipal Gothic, and in my upcoming book, Intervals of Darkness, are mostly attempts to process my experiences as a working class kid.

But if that working class kid could hear me, a university graduate and professional, referring to myself in these terms, he’d be furious.

“How can you call yourself working class?” he’d ask, “with all your privileges and relative comfort in life?”

Back then, I thought being working class was a binary state.

I read and admired books by people like Alan Sillitoe but also hated them for moving to London, or France, and becoming part of the literary establishment.

How could they write about working class life when they weren’t living it?

I was an idiot, of course.

How would Sillitoe have found the time and energy to write if he also had to do night shifts on a production line, you know, to keep his hand in?

And how long did I think it took to become middle class? It’s not an overnight process.

What I came to realise is that you don’t ever really shed working classness. It’s baked in. It shapes your attitudes to life and your perspective on the world. In the negative sense, the scars are permanent.

For the first twenty years of my life, I was steeped in my working classness, even through four years at a not-very-working-class university.

Sure, I got a desk job, wore a suit, and stopped worrying quite so much about money – but working classness continued to affect my ability to connect with people, to get promoted, and to experience basic human happiness.

If I experience the slightest financial shock – an unexpected bill, for example – I completely flip out, and revert to being an anxious child. Even if, once I’ve taken a breath and counted to ten, I can easily afford to deal with it.

My dreams were, and often still are, set on council estates and in council houses. My stories always drifted back to those same settings – pubs, terraced houses, small towns, factories… Even if I wanted to write middle class fiction, I’m not sure I could.

The characters in my stories are often aspects of my late dad, his brothers, or my mum and her family, or of people I knew growing up.

And sometimes they’re versions of me. A clue to that is if the character in question is uptight, bewildered, and slightly detached from their surroundings.

What makes a working class writer? In my opinion, they’re someone with personal, first-hand experience of working class life. (Not someone whose grandfather was a miner.) And whose writing, consciously or otherwise, attempts to make sense of that experience.

Often, perhaps too often, that can feel limiting. What if you don’t want to write grim social realism? What if you don’t want to constantly confront your own experiences of poverty? Or, on the flipside, to feel obliged to write inspiring stories about the power of working class community.

Personally, I don’t want to be a Working Class Writer. I want to be a writer. I want to write what I want to write.

And I don’t want to agonise constantly about whether I’m presenting my working class characters with sufficient nobility, or making the right political arguments.

So, sometimes, I might get it ‘wrong’. But it’s not out of stupidity or ignorance, it’s because I’m battling my own subconscious, or attempting to exorcise a ghost of my own.

Intervals of Darkness will be published as an eBook and paperback on 7 September 2024. You can pre-order the eBook now.

Tags Intervals of Darkness, municipal gothic, working class

Somerset

Obituary: Alan Newman, a lifelong bluesman from the Somerset Delta

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date August 12, 2024
7 Comments on Obituary: Alan Newman, a lifelong bluesman from the Somerset Delta

Alan Newman playing bass with The Blue Healers at Baptist Mills Studios in 2018.

Alan ‘Ginge’ Newman has died at the age of 75 after a lifetime of making and thinking about music.

He wasn’t a full-time musician, however, because like most people he had to work to support his family – that is, my mum, Eileen, my brother, Tim, and me. That he found time to pursue creative interests around night shifts, factory work, warehouse work, and even a stint digging graves, suggests just how strongly that flame burned.

He was born in 1948 at Woolavington on the Somerset Levels to Agnes and Ernest Newman, East Londoners who moved west for military service and war work and never went back. Alan loved Somerset, spoke with a wonderfully warm local accent, and flew a Somerset flag in his back garden until the day he died. Nonetheless, he felt those London roots, which manifested in an occasional imitation of his father shouting “Gertcha!” (via Chas & Dave) and his support for Arsenal.

His childhood was difficult in various ways. First, there was poverty. The Newmans lived throughout the 1950s in a rickety prefabricated house on a council estate appended to a village. He later recalled shivering beneath an Army greatcoat in an unheated bedroom with ice on the windows and he was utterly baffled by nostalgia for prefabs and post-war Britain.

Secondly, there was illness. Not expected to survive longer than a few minutes, he was named quickly by a nurse who borrowed his mother’s initials (Agnes Kathleen) to conjure up Alan Keith. He lived but thereafter spent months in hospital, and years in and out, with an undiagnosed respiratory condition.

Thirdly, there was the challenge of growing up in a family ruled over by a heavy-drinking, gambling, womanising bully whose time in the Royal Navy did nothing to sweeten his manners or temper.

It’s perhaps no wonder that Alan was an unruly child and teenager who drank his first pint of beer in a pub at the age of 12. Though ashamed of it for much of his life he spoke more openly in recent years about his adventures in joyriding and his juvenile criminal record for breaking into the village shop to steal cigarettes. In fact, one of his favourite stories was about returning from a screening of the 1962 film Some People at the Palace Cinema in Bridgwater to find his father furious after a visit from the police.

“Where have you been, boy?”

“In town to see Some People.”

“Oh, yeah? Some People? Well while you’ve been out, some bloody people have been here to see you.”

Though a scholar in his own way – more on that later – Alan didn’t enjoy school and was happier playing sports or, more often, mucking around with a gang of friends. He left Sydenham, the brand new comprehensive in Bridgwater at 15, with no qualifications and went straight into the world of work, where he would remain for 50 years.

He trained as an apprentice coachbuilder for a while, then became part of a demolition crew for Pollard’s of Bridgwater. “If you wanted something smashing with sledgehammers,” he later recalled, “you called the Newman boys.” There was also a stint in the Army which, to his great disappointment, was cut short because he failed a medical examination. (Or perhaps, as he once suggested, because he joined the Young Communist League hoping to meet liberated women, which wasn’t the done thing for people serving in the armed forces during the Cold War.)

Alan (front, centre) with his brothers in one of the various incarnations of their band Ginger Ellis & the Dracos.

Like many teenagers in the 1960s he also developed an interest in rock’n’roll music and formed a succession of bands. Under a pseudonym he was lead singer and leader of Ginger Ellis & the Dracos. Later, in red velvet flares during the psychedelic era, he fulfilled the same role in The Keystone Kops, who even cut a single with ‘Can’t Stand No More’ on the A-side and ‘The Rise and Fall of a Persian Pig in E-Minor’ on the flip. Alan’s favourite band was The Rolling Stones whose first two albums, filled with R&B, rock’n’roll and blues covers, would form the template for his musical taste for decades to come.

Alan and Eileen met in 1970 in a Bridgwater pub on a busy Saturday night. He was 21, she was 17, and they were engaged by the following Thursday. They married in 1971. Drifting away from his own family he found a warm welcome from Eileen’s parents and the four of them became drinking buddies, chain smoking cigarettes, and playing the four-player card game euchre as they crawled the pubs of St John Street, Eastover, and into town.

Though he continued to buy and play records, loudly, he had less time to make music as he settled into a steady job at British Cellophane. Wading in troughs of solvent without adequate protection no doubt did some lasting damage but, at the time, he was simply happy to be bringing home the kind of money that paid for a house, a car, and a decent quality of life.

It was difficult to have children and took longer than expected. A secret Alan and Eileen kept for decades was that they ended up using the then pioneering technique of donor insemination (DI) via Dr Margaret Jackson’s clinic in Devon. Perhaps he felt embarrassed about this, or felt it to be a failing on his part, but as far as my brother and I are concerned, it shows the sheer generosity of his spirit. He suggested this because Eileen needed it, and committed fully to the experiment. And he was never less than doting as a father, and never gave us the slightest reason to doubt he loved us – which is not always the experience of people conceived through DI. When we learned the truth many years later, Alan’s first concern was whether it changed anything in his relationship with his sons. We were able to tell him that not only had nothing changed but, if anything, we respected and loved him all the more.

Alan loved to play darts and got pretty good at it as a pub landlord.

In the 1980s, Alan and Eileen took on a decrepit Whitbread pub in Exeter which they ran for several years. Alan had a real talent for engaging with customers and creating a sense of community. His turn as Widow Twankee in the pub pantomime was a surprising success, again revealing an instinct for creativity and performance at odds with his macho persona. Unfortunately, it is and always has been tough to make a living in a tied public house, and the experience bankrupted them.

Alan hated to be unemployed and resented living in a council house, which became necessary in the aftermath. It was in this low period that his dormant interest in blues music resurfaced – perhaps because he was now feeling it in his heart. He acquired a cheap electric guitar, a Gibson Les Paul copy, and tried to learn to play. When that didn’t work, he switched to the bass guitar and realised he had found his instrument. Our house began to throb to the sound of walking 12-bar patterns, or the sparse moodiness of the bass part for ‘Stormy Monday’.

Working long night shifts plus overtime operating a lathe at Wellworthy’s in Bridgwater he had little time and even less energy. Blues bands would form around him, rehearse for a while, then break apart. All the time he kept listening to blues music, reading about blues music, and lecturing anyone who would listen about the career of Muddy Waters, or chord progressions, or the meaning of the obtuse lyrics of 1930s acoustic blues songs. What is a peach-tree man? Alan could tell you. The house was filled with books such as Paul Oliver’s The Devil’s Music. He was often to be seen in the crowd at gigs in Bridgwater, Taunton and further afield, at a time when blues music was a staple part of the offer at pubs and social clubs across Somerset.

As a performer, things finally came together at around the turn of the millennium when Alan met his great friend Les Leiper and they formed the band Witch Doctor. At last, he was part of an efficient gigging band that played most weekends in pubs across the region, with the thump-thump-thump of Alan’s bass providing a steady clock. His proudest achievement was playing multiple gigs at The Old Duke in Bristol, a legendary jazz and blues venue where he’d previously seen some of his own favourite bands perform. When Alan eventually left Witch Doctor it was partly because, being a man of his time, he was unable to express his frustrations in words. Quitting was the easier option.

In the years that followed, he joined or formed many more blues bands, each one with its own unique style and set list. The Blue Healers, for example, gigged in Bristol and elsewhere. Alan’s problem was that he wanted to play blues music, and nothing but blues music, and, inevitably, most bands would start to talk about adding soul or classic rock tunes to the set. ‘Mustang Sally’, though a fine song, did not belong in the repertoire of a blues band. Nor did ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. Again, although he got better at having these conversations, he would often simply leave rather than deal with conflict or awkwardness.

Alan retired from his final job as a warehouseman at 67. He’d been doing heavy, physical work for most of his life, and his body had begun to creak. His lungs, never quite 100% functional, began to fail him and he was diagnosed with both asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). You can’t help but wonder about all those jobs – demolition in the era of asbestos, factory work with baths of solvents – and the cold dampness of his childhood home. Still, in retirement, with two beloved dogs, he started to get fit, rambling with Eileen over the Mendips and across the Levels.

Both being village kids, at heart, they moved to the country, settling in Rooks Bridge. He would stand and stare at the landscape, listen to the birds, and relish the fresh air. His bands sometimes rehearsed in a nearby stable, or in the kitchen at the house, and the neighbours would turn off their TVs to listen.

During the pandemic his lung conditions put him in a high risk category and was effectively trapped in the house for several months. This did him no good and he emerged from successive lockdowns seeming suddenly much older and far less robust. A chest infection in 2023 never quite cleared and dragged him down for over a year. Finally, in August 2024, it got him. He died while receiving care at Weston General Hospital, not long before dawn.

That urge to make music, and to create, was with him until the end. Shortly before he went to hospital for this final stay, he started talking about recording a podcast, and also snuck an advert onto Facebook when Eileen wasn’t looking: did anyone want to form a blues band for some low key rehearsals?

Alan Newman, born November 1948, died August 2024.

Tags obituary

crime Film & TV

The Todd Killings, Smooth Talk, and the allure of the creep

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date May 16, 2024
No Comments on The Todd Killings, Smooth Talk, and the allure of the creep

Everything about the American serial killer Charles Schmid sounds pathetic – so how was he able to command the loyalty of his teenage followers?

That’s a question grappled with by two films based on Schmid’s story, 1971’s The Todd Killings, directed by Barry Shear, and 1985’s Smooth Talk, directed by Joyce Chopra.

Both films ultimately share the same original source: a 1966 Life magazine article by Don Moser called ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson’.

That article is a masterpiece of true crime writing, available online, and also collected in a 2008 Library of America anthology. Moser painted a picture of a loser and weirdo who, in his early 20s, was still hanging around with school kids in Tucson, Arizona:

At the time of his arrest last November, Charles Schmid was 23 years old. He wore face make-up and dyed his hair. He habitually stuffed three or four inches of old rags and tin cans into the bottoms of his high-topped boots to make himself taller than his five-foot-three and stumbled about so awkwardly while walking that some people thought he had wooden feet. He pursed his lips and let his eyelids droop in order to emulate his idol, Elvis Presley. He bragged to girls that he knew 100 ways to make love, that he ran dope, that he was a Hell’s Angel.

But Schmid was somehow appealing to teenagers who saw not a creep but a local own-brand version of Elvis Presley:

He had a nice car. He had plenty of money from his parents, who ran a nursing home, and he was always glad to spend it on anyone who’d listen to him. He had a pad of his own where he threw parties and he had impeccable manners… He knew where the action was, and if he wore make-up—well, at least he was different… [To] the youngsters – to the bored and the lonely, to the dropout and the delinquent, to the young girls with beehive hairdos and tight pants they didn’t quite fill out, and to the boys with acne and no jobs – to these people, Smitty was a kind of folk hero. Nutty maybe, but at least more dramatic, more theatrical, more interesting than anyone else in their lives: a semi-ludicrous, sexy-eyed pied piper who, stumbling along in his rag-stuffed boots, led them up and down Speedway.

Schmid was more than “nutty”. He tortured at least one cat, for starters. Then, in May 1964 he convinced two young friends to accompany him as he kidnapped, raped and murdered 16-year-old Aileen Rowe. They helped him bury the body in the desert – and kept his secret.

A little later, in the summer of 1964, he met 16-year-old Gretchen Fritz at a swimming pool. He seduced her and they had a rocky year-long relationship. It culminated in the death of both Gretchen and her younger sister, Wendy, in August 1965. When he showed a friend called Richard Bruns where the bodies were buried in the desert, Bruns turned Schmid into the law.

Schmid was convicted of murder in August 1966 and sentenced to death. By June 1967 a film based on the story was in production.

Robert F. Lyons as Skipper Todd in The Todd Killings.

The Todd Killings: torn from today’s headlines!

The Todd Killings had a range of working titles like ‘Pied Piper of Tucson’, ‘The Pied Piper’ and ‘What Are We Going to Do Without Skipper?’

It was eventually released in 1971 with the action relocated from Tucson to the fictional town of Darlington, California.

Schmid became ‘Skipper Todd’ played by Robert F. Lyons, with his look and lingo brought up to date. Skipper has shaggy Mick Jagger hair, tight bell bottoms, and a green dune buggy. He also plays folk rock songs on an acoustic guitar, almost like a spare member of The Monkees, or Charles Manson.

Lyons really is good looking, though, and brings to the part a commanding arrogance. The children follow him because he has the qualities of a leader. In odd, intercut scenes he is shown lying to a US Army recruiter to wriggle out of fighting in Vietnam where, actually, he might have thrived as another William Calley.

Updates and poetic licence aside, the film is an otherwise relatively faithful recounting of the facts of the case.

It has a particularly strong opening: Skipper is burying a body in the desert, helped by a devoted young girlfriend and a panicky boy.

This is not a whodunnit, or a did-he-do-it, like Psycho. That this young man is bad is established from shot number one.

From the off, we also empathise with the bored kids who are groomed by Skipper Todd, even as we want to shake them by the shoulders and urge them to break free.

We even begin to understand why they would reward his madness and violence with devotion. They are weak, and their parents are weak, too. He is good at spotting weakness and filling the gaps in people’s live. He has everyone, both boys and girls, under an erotic spell.

Did Charles Schmid ever see The Todd Killings? He died in prison in 1975 so it’s just about possible. If so, he would probably have found it flattering.

Treat Williams as Arnold Friend in Smooth Talk.

Smooth Talk: back to the future

More than a decade later a second film tackled the story more obliquely, and more artfully. Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk from 1985 was not based on Moser’s article but on a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ first published in 1966.

In Oates’s version of the Schmid affair, which was distilled from Moser, the monstrous fake teenager is called Arnold Friend. He stalks, seduces and seizes a teenager called Connie while her well-to-do parents are out at a barbecue. It crams a lot into a few thousand words and presents small town America as a menacing, sickly place.

Smooth Talk expands on the short story significantly, using Oates’s original material to form only the final act of the film.

It also does something really clever with the period. Connie (Laura Dern) is a quintessential 1980s teenager straight out of a John Hughes movie, while Arnold Friend (Treat Williams) is a relic of the 1950s. He is a cheap knockoff of James Dean (Connie has posters of Dean on her bedroom wall) and therefore closer to the real Charles Schmid than Skipper Todd.

In this, there’s an echo of another film: Terence Malick’s Badlands from 1973, in which Martin Sheen based his performance as spree-killer Kit Carruthers on James Dean. Kit wasn’t based on Charles Schmid, however, but his near namesake, Charles Starkweather – another rural weirdo with a taste for teenage girls.

In some ways, Arnold Friend is a less complex character than Skipper Todd, or the real Charles Schmid. He’s a sinister stranger, not a ‘pied piper’ who everyone knows and admires. He’s clearly a much older man (Williams was 34 when he played the part), dressed anachronistically, and almost supernaturally sinister in his manner, like an avatar of the Devil after Connie’s living soul.

In this version of the story Arnold Friend doesn’t kill anybody – as far as we know. He stalks Connie and, eventually, convinces her to go for a ride. This is roughly where Oates’s story ends and in that version we’re left to speculate on her fate. But if you know it’s inspired by Schmid your speculation is likely to favour murder.

In the film, Connie returns. She is changed – an adult, now, and no longer innocent. But she is, at least, not dead and buried in the desert.

In almost every way Smooth Talk is the better film. Not least because it makes Friend/Schmid an exterior menace and puts in the turbulent mind of one of his victims.

The Schmids, they’re multiplying

There is something particularly dark and rich about this story which must be why filmmakers keep coming back to it.

There’s Dead Beat from 1994, which seems almost impossible to see; Lost from 2005, adapted from a novel by horror writer Jack Ketchum; and Dawn from 2014, which focuses on the sister of one of Schmid’s victims.

Schmid is not the only killer to have inspired multiple movies, though. In fact, it’s unusual for a notable serial killer not to have inspired multiple movies.

Leopold and Loeb are practically a sub-genre (Rope, Compulsion, Swoon). So is Ed Gein – the original model for six decades of psycho-slashers, from Norman Bates to Leatherface. And Badlands is by no means the only take on the Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate story.

As a writer of fiction I find it almost maddening that real life generates stories that are so much more out there than anything I could invent. If I’d created Charles Schmid as a character it wouldn’t have occurred to me to give him white foundation make-up, a fake mole, and shoes full of crushed tin cans. Real criminals are often both dumber and more interesting than their fictional counterparts.

More importantly, I don’t know if I’d have been able to look at Schmid through the eyes of a teenager and have them think, “That guy is cool, I love him, I’ll do whatever he says.”

Main image: A digital sketch based on several different photos of Charles Schmid composited, traced, and treated with textures and filters.

Tags crime, film, true crime

fonts

That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date April 22, 2024
4 Comments on That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie

What is that font? You know, THAT font? The chunky italic lettering you see on launderettes and council blocks, on post-war churches and new town butcher’s shops, across the UK.

The font you’re thinking of might well be ‘Festive’, a lettering style designed by Maurice Ward of Ward & Co, a sign-making company in Bristol, founded in 1952.

Launched in the early 1960s, Ward’s ‘Inter-signs’ product, manufactured under the Lettercast brand, used injection moulding.

Lettersigns was available in two styles, Festive and Block, and made it possible for anyone to mount their own custom signs with professional-looking 3D lettering.

Or, of course, the specific sign you’re thinking of might be in one of any number of similar lettering styles in the broader category of ‘Egyptian italic’.

Samples of lettering styles similar to Festive cobbled together by me from various sources including The Studio Book of Alphabets, 1963.

Those include:

Egyptian Italic (an earlier Ward & Co style)
Festival Egyptian (an official style of the Festival of Britain)
Stymie Bold Italic
Clarendon Bold Italic
Profil
Amigo No. 1

First, then, let’s pin down how to spot Festive in particular.

How to spot Festive

Trade catalogues from Wards of Bristol include samples of Festive in print.

From this, we can see the most distinctive features of Festive, which can help us distinguish it from similar lettering styles in the wild.

A sample of Festive from a Ward’s catalogue from, I think, 1971.

A shop sign in Bristol in Festive, author’s own photo.

First, there’s the unexpected serif at the apex of the capital A.

Then there’s the relative flatness of the round letters, like C and G.

And, of course, there’s the built-in beading – that outer line that traces the edge of each letter.

The origins of Festive

There’s a clue right there in the name: like almost every bit of flair in Britain’s mid-20th century public spaces, it came indirectly from the 1951 Festival of Britain.

One of its official lettering styles was ‘Festival Egyptian’, as depicted in the typographic handbook for designers.

A page from A Specimen of Display Letters Designed for the Festival of Britain 1951 via Chris Mullen at The Visual Telling of Stories.

But why Egyptian? In around 1817, London type founder Vincent Figgins created a typeface he referred to as ‘Antique’.

An 1834 sample of an italic variation of Antique. SOURCE: archive.org

It was fat, bold and easy to read from a distance.

Earlier examples of this style have been found but Figgins commercialised it and prompted imitations from other foundries worldwide.

These days, they’re known as slab serif fonts but in the 19th century, they were usually referred to as antique, after Figgins; or as either Ionic or Egyptian, in variations on the theme.

You can certainly see in Antique, especially when italicised, the seeds of the 20th century launderette signs and tower block titling.

But these in-your-face, ungainly display typefaces went out of fashion, like everything associated with the Victorians. They spoke of slums, music halls and Gothic mausoleums. They weren’t fit for the world of motor cars, aeroplanes and Streamline Moderne.

Then, in the 1930s, a revival began, achieving its full flowering with the 1951 Festival of Britain. This is documented in detail by Paul Rennie in this 2001 essay (PDF) but here are the key points.

First, the cover of John Betjeman’s first book Ghastly Good Taste, published in 1933 when he was still in his twenties, showcased a jumble of Victorian typefaces.

Then, in 1938, came Nicolette Gray’s book Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces, celebrating Victorian lettering styles.

And in the same year, the architect and townscape designer Gordon Cullen personally produced (non-italic) slab serif lettering for the starkly modern Finsbury Health Centre. It is clearly ahead of its time and wouldn’t look out of place on a municipal building erected 20 years later.

The Finsbury Health Centre in 1979. SOURCE: Gillfoto, via Wikimedia Commons, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence.

Though the British Government generally clung to clean, uncluttered sans serif typefaces such as Gill Sans for official posters (Keep Calm and Carry On, chaps) advertising designers and publishers dabbled in Victorian styles throughout the 1940s.

After World War II, In the run up to the Festival, committees and working groups were put together to consider every small detail, including typography. Gordon Cullen and Nicolette Gray were both on the Festival of Britain Typographic Panel.

Once the Festival was over, Festival style lingered. Lettering catalogues from the 1950s and 60s include, for example, Egyptian Italic, Rockwell Italic and Ultra Bodoni Italic.

A sample of Egyptian Italic from a Ward’s catalogue of 1971.

Maurice Ward wrote this of his Egyptian Italic, the immediate precursor to Festive, in a catalogue from 1962:

[This] face, together with its vertical counterpart is a harmonious combination of the best features of the Egyptian family of characters and is perfectly suited as an architectural letter on buildings. The popularity of these Egyptians is unquestionably due to the Festival of Britain in 1951 and no face characterises more aptly the word ‘Festive’.

And when Ward & Co (Lettercast) launched Festive in around 1963 it was labelled as “based on Egyptian Italic”, which was in turn a take on Festival Egyptian.

The A from Egyptian Italic (left) and from Festive (right).

Feelings about fonts

What’s fascinating about Festive is how it moves people emotionally, and obsesses them.

The writer Jason Hazeley has been trying to identify it for years, for example, referring to it as “That Font” or “Everywhere Bold Italic”.

And he is not alone. For a generation of British people, it represents the vanishing landscape of their childhoods, tied into ideas of nostalgia and even hauntology.

Graphic designers have often resorted to Profil as a close match – and, of course, Festive was never really intended to be used in print.

On social media, including a popular Flickr group, Stymie Bold Italic has incorrectly been used to describe this entire category of lettering styles.

It’s only recently, however, that illustrator and designer Richard Littler of Scarfolk fame managed to unlock the mystery – or, at least, bring together all the threads.

When he put out a call on social media his significant reach across multiple platforms, with exactly the right kind of people, brought to light:

previously overlooked material at archive.org
detailed research into the British soap opera Crossroads (Wayback Machine)

The latter, a spectacular piece of work, has been sitting there for anyone to find since 2020, in a different domain of geekiness – if only type nerds had known to search ‘Inter-signs’ and ‘Lettercast’.

Personally, I’m a bit embarrassed not to have got there sooner. Back in 2020 I spent some time researching this seriously. I got in touch with Andy Ward, Maurice Ward’s son, who tipped me off to Egyptian Italic, and sent me photocopies of material he had at hand, at home, during lockdown.

And then Christine Daniel sent me photos of the back of some sign letters in her collection with ‘Inter-signs’ clearly marked on the back. But I couldn’t quite make those final links.

SOURCE: Twitter/X.

Together, though, we got there. The mystery has been solved. What a relief.

With thanks to Christine Daniel, Jason Hazeley, Richard Littler, Paul Rhodes and Andy Ward.

Tags fonts, lettering, typography

Fiction

FICTION: The Fugitive

In the late afternoon, slow-moving cloud came in off the mountains and burst over Maxton City. Main Street had just been macadamed the year before and the rain turned it into a stream.

Dan Todd used the storm as an excuse to drop into the Turkey Inn on his way home from the newspaper office. He had already dawdled and detoured. He was avoiding the road home, and the one-pot dinner he knew was being kept warm on the stove.

That damn black pot. The thought of it made his gut hurt. Hazel always did use too much salt, and never trimmed the fat off the meat. Which would be fine, which he could live with, if she cooked it long enough for the damn fat to render out, but damn her, she never did. It just stewed like white rubber, and then he wouldn’t sleep with it sitting on his gut.

The Turkey was an old wooden building, one of the oldest in Maxton. In recent years, however, the old half-height saloon doors had been replaced with shining new ones in chrome and glass. They looked out of place but a travelling salesman from the city had dazzled old Jim with talk of modernisation, hygiene and glamour. It was true that they kept the dust out in summer. Dan pushed his way in and let the door swing behind him.

The bar was gloomy, and downright dark towards the back. Jim ought to have switched on the lamps, what with the storm having made it so dark outside, but he always waited until six o’clock. It was a point of principle.

The barroom was long and thin. The counter was of polished wood with big cut glass mirrors on the wall behind. A row of stools lined the bar and there were wooden booths with benches along the opposite wall. There was a cigarette machine, a gum machine, and a cardboard sign that said ‘Please pay when served’.

Music was coming from a radio on the counter, a big city dance band strangled through a small speaker. Dan didn’t recognise the song but could hear somebody crooning about the moon and loneliness.

Dan took off his hat, revealing fine, fair hair, and slapped the felt brim firmly against his hand. Rainwater scattered on the floor. He hung the hat on the stand by the door. Then he shook off his coat and hung that up, too. He used his handkerchief to wipe raindrops from his spectacles as he approached the bar.

‘Beer, if you please.’

Jim was a round, blank-faced man bald except for tussocks of hair above his ears. He poured a mug of Old Joe’s Lager Beer and placed it on a napkin on the bar.

Dan glanced along the counter to the only other customer.

He was a hunched, miserable looking man in a heavy plaid jacket with a sheepskin lining. His head hung over an almost-empty beer mug that was clutched in his thick, dark hands.

Dan had few friends. He didn’t need them. But that night, he wanted to talk, and he heard himself saying: ‘Buy you a beer, friend?’

The man looked up.

Dan had never seen such eyes. They were like those of a whipped dog, or a seasick stowaway. The whites were the colour of slow-baked cream.

‘Had a couple already,’ he growled.

Dan began to turn away.

‘Could handle another.’

Jim looked at Dan, who nodded. As Dan lifted himself onto a stool, Jim placed the beer in front of the stranger.

‘Obliged to ya,’ said the stranger. He pushed his spent glass away and lifted the fresh one, glittering with dew, in Dan’s direction.

‘Name’s Dan Todd,’ said Dan. ‘What do I call you?’

The man on the other stool turned slowly to look over his shoulder, the movement creaky and apparently painful. He turned back and glanced at Dan from under black, unruly brows.

‘Call me Grant.’

‘That your first name or your last?’

Grant took a long gulp of beer and rubbed foam from his stubble-covered upper lip.

Now he was settled next to Grant, Dan could detect a musk about the man that he didn’t like. Men often had a smell after a day’s work. Heck, even he needed to shower after a day baking in that miserable office which the old man insisted on keeping sealed like a diving bell. Grant’s smell, though, was rotten, as if he was sick and didn’t yet know it. It came out of his pores and in his breath whenever he turned a little towards Dan.

‘Hope you don’t mind a little company,’ said Dan, hoping that Grant would send him away.

‘I ain’t a big talker but I don’t mind listening,’ said Grant.

‘You might regret saying that, friend,’ said Dan with a dry laugh. He took his beer mug in his strong right hand and sipped a little. ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

Grant rolled his yellow eyes towards Dan and waited.

‘Well, it’s just that, oh, well, a fellow gets so damn bored.’

‘Bored how?’

‘See, the thing is, I’ve never lived anywhere but Maxton,’ said Dan. ‘I didn’t even go to college, and I missed the war. Started writing for the paper when I was fourteen and I’ve been there ever since. I suppose it’s been quite different for you?’

‘I know the road, that’s true,’ said Grant. ‘Six states and five countries.’

With a sigh, Dan said, ‘Gosh. Doing what?’

‘Picking fruit. Crewing boats. Driving trucks. Peeling taters.’

‘I should have done all of that before I married,’ said Dan. ‘I should have done everything. Are you married?’

‘Was.’

‘Then you know how it is. The same conversations, the same dinners on the table, the same old flower arrangement on the stand in the hall.’

Grant grunted.

‘Sounds tough.’

Before Dan could reply Grant shivered as if an earthquake had shaken his body.

‘Got a fever?’ asked Dan, leaning back in his stool. ‘Get caught in the storm?’

‘Hungry, mostly,’ said Grant. ‘Ain’t eaten today.’

Dan waved a hand at Jim. The barkeep had slunk away to the far end of the bar to watch the rain on the glass but saw the movement from the corner of his eye.

‘Couple of sandwiches,’ he said.

Jim nodded and disappeared through a door into the kitchen.

‘You was saying about your wife,’ said Grant. ‘Them flowers in the hall.’

Dan knew he wasn’t really interested. It was just that he’d rather hear Dan talk than talk himself. Dan rubbed a hand through his damp hair and pushed his glasses tight to the bridge of his nose.

‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ said Dan. ‘It’s not gentlemanly.’

‘You was saying about the dinners and the conversations.’

There was a suggestion of bitterness in Grant’s voice now. Jealousy, perhaps, Dan thought.

‘I don’t mean to complain,’ said Dan. ‘I don’t mean to boast either. We’re just like any other couple that’s been married five years. Not sick of each other, exactly, but—’ Well, he thought, maybe sick of each other is exactly right. ‘I like apple pie but I don’t want to eat it every damn day.’

Grant finished his beer in a single long pull as Jim returned with two thin, greasy sandwiches. Nobody came to the Turkey to eat. Grant flicked at one sandwich with a dirty nail, peeled back the bread, let it drop.

‘Another beer,’ Grant said.

‘Put it on my tab,’ said Dan. ‘I’ll take another, too.’

There was a sudden change in the air in the bar and the door made a booming sound as it was thrown open. Two men entered, followed by a gust of wind carrying about equal amounts of dust and rain.

Both were dressed in hunting clothes, plaid shirts and woolen caps, but Dan noticed immediately that they were wearing polished black city shoes.

‘Howdy,’ said one of the men with a broad, childlike smile. He was grey-haired, lean and tall. He looked everywhere but at Grant.

His companion was younger with rough red hair and a sharp jaw. His big teeth didn’t quite fit in his mouth. He looked directly at Grant and thereafter his eyes didn’t move from the shaggy figure at the bar.

‘What’ll it be?’ asked Jim.

‘Two beers,’ said the older man.

‘Not for me,’ said the other, still staring at Grant. ‘Coke, if you have it, or root beer.’

They took seats at the end of the bar, one looking at Grant, the other pointedly not.

‘My wife was a wonder,’ growled Grant, almost under his breath.

Dan turned so that his back blocked Grant from view. He did not know why he did this, only that he did not like the young red-haired man, not at all.

‘Not too good with the flowers or conversations but–’ He gave a low, howling whistle. ‘She was sure nice to be around. Sure knew how to make a feller feel like a million dollars.’

‘Then why did you leave her? Or let her go?’

Their conversation was now being held at a whisper and sounded more conspiratorial than perhaps they knew.

‘Somebody killed her,’ said Grant. He took hold of the beer glass in front of him and gave it four quarter turns with his dirty fingertips until it was back where it started.

Dan swallowed.

‘Somebody?’

‘Not me,’ said Grant, wearily. ‘Somebody. Something. They never did find out.’

‘Something? Who do you mean, “they”?’

Dan glanced towards the two men at the end of the bar and then back at Grant.

‘Who are those men?’

‘I ain’t never seen ‘em before today.’

‘Well, I just don’t know what to think,’ said Dan. He took a mouthful of beer, struggled to swallow, as if he’d forgotten how.

‘Don’t think nothing. We’ll finish our beers and then I’ll walk out of here. They’ll follow me and something will happen, who knows what. But it won’t matter none to you because you’ll be home with that wife of yours soon enough, feeling glad you ain’t me.’

For the first time, Grant laughed. It was a rough, raw bark.

‘The grass is always greener, they say,’ said Grant, ‘except there ain’t nobody looking at my lawn and wishing it was theirs.’

Grant drank some beer. He and Dan sat in silence for a minute before he drank the rest.

As he pushed back the stool it scraped on the boards and the two detectives, or special agents, or whatever they were, looked sharply in Grant’s direction. There was no jollity in the older man’s face now, and the younger man looked ready to wrestle a mountain bobcat.

Grant didn’t offer to shake Dan’s hand, which Dan was glad about, having seen his filthy nails and the blisters on his palms.

‘See you around,’ Grant said as he pushed past and headed for the bar’s front door. On the mat, he pulled up the collar of his plaid jacket and retrieved a woollen hat from his jacket pocket. He pulled the hat on tight, and low over his eyes. Then he stepped out into the blue evening light.

The moment the door was closed, the older of the two detectives threw a bill on the bar.

‘Keep the change.’

They rushed out into the street after Grant.

At last, when it was just Dan in front of the counter and Jim behind it, the two men spoke.

‘Policeman, I reckon. They believe he killed his wife,’ said Dan.

‘No smoke without fire,’ said Jim. ‘That feller stank of Folsom.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Dan.

‘Some reporter,’ said Jim with a smile.

Jim checked his watch and switched on the lights. They filled the empty bar with queasy yellow light. The dance band on the radio finished with a flourish and a soap company spokesman began talking about how to avoid ‘scummy dishpan film’.

‘I’d better be going,’ said Dan. He looked at his glass of beer but didn’t finish it.

When he stepped outside he found the sky clear, the storm having blown on clean through the valley, and dusk coming on. There was a full, round moon rising faintly above the spikes of the ponderosa pine trees on the foothills.

Main Street was quiet, in that just-scrubbed silence that comes after a storm, and Dan could hear his own footsteps on the sidewalk as he tramped towards home. He was crying, just a little, because of the cold air in his eyes, he told himself, though he was thinking of Hazel and how sweet it would be to sit with her in front of the radio, even if there was nothing to talk about.

He could tell her about Grant, he supposed, but he wouldn’t. It would scare her, in lots of different ways.

The next morning Dan left his house under a cold, clear sky, feeling rested and fortunate. He passed the fine old houses on the street, each spaced apart with room for a paddock or orchard, and smiled. Some had cars or pickup trucks parked outside, none of them new, but all well cared for and clean.

As he neared the end of the road, he saw that there were big black cars parked along the edge of the forest that led into the foothills. There were men in uniform, too. As he came closer, Dan saw Pete Nachel, the Sheriff, and two of his deputies. Pete was a tall man with a moustache whose points reached his jaw, like Wyatt Earp. His hat was trimmed with a gold cord. There were men from out of town, too, in black suits and black hats.

‘Morning, Dan,’ said Pete as Dan approached. ‘Hear any trouble here last night?’

Dan stopped and peered into the trees.

‘Walked this way at about six thirty yesterday evening and all was well. What’s the problem?’

Pete looked towards the out-of-towners who were busy supervising a photographer.

‘Couple of G-Men dead in the gully. Followed one of them public enemies up this way. Been tracking him for months. Man named Grant.’

Dan swallowed hard and licked his dry lips.

‘Golly. And he shot ‘em?’

Pete pursed his lips and shook his head slowly.

‘Well, no. They’re cut up pretty bad. They say he done it with a knife. In a frenzy, they say. That’s how his wife got it.’

‘Did they find a knife?’

Pete squinted and tipped his head to one side.

‘Well, maybe it was a knife, maybe it wasn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

Pete took off his hat and drew his long fingers through his thin hair.

‘This is still wild country round here, Dan, and I say an animal done it.’ He nodded firmly. ‘Biting and tearing, damn near minced… Yes, an animal. Can’t be nothing else. A man couldn’t have done it, not like that.’

Dan stood silently, staring down into the darkest part of the forest, and thought to himself: Old Grant never did eat that sandwich, hungry as he was.

Main image: Yreeka, California, by Lee Russell, 1942, in the public domain via the Library of Congress.

Fiction Film & TV

FICTION: Scholomance, dir. Ewart Stangebye, 1927

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date January 14, 2024
1 Comment on FICTION: Scholomance, dir. Ewart Stangebye, 1927

Fiction municipal gothic

FICTION: Winter Wonderland

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date December 1, 2023
No Comments on FICTION: Winter Wonderland

When Dad turned up with tickets for Winter Wonderland, Tyler and I were truly astonished, for several reasons.

First, we hadn’t seen Dad since October, when he and Mum had one of their dramas. He stayed out all night and she waited for him. When we went to school, he still hadn’t turned up. He wasn’t there when we got home and she only laid three places for dinner. We knew better than to ask.

Secondly, it had already been agreed this was going to be a Little Christmas. In our family, this was an important concept. When Mum and Dad were flush, or had managed to patch things up with one or both sets of grandparents, we might get a Big Christmas. That meant proper presents, a proper Christmas dinner, and maybe even a proper tree. But most years were Little Christmases, where we each got a few things in a stocking and Christmas dinner was whatever Mum could conjure up from the freezer and the cupboards. One year, we had instant mash with Bisto and burgers.

Thirdly, even when there was a little bit of money around, Dad never bought us anything. It never occurred to him to treat or spoil us, or even to pretend to find fifty pence behind our ears. If he had coins in his pocket, he spent them on himself. Or very occasionally on Mum, if he was trying to heal a wound. Clothes, usually – skimpier and more gaudy than anything she would ever buy herself.

So, when he arrived on the doorstep, pink faced and cider breathed, chuckling and prancing like a clown, we simply didn’t believe him. He waved the envelope at us and pinched our cheeks.

‘Who’s the best Dad in the world, eh? My lovely girl and my lovely boy.’

You can now read the rest of this story in my collection Intervals of Darkness available as an eBook and paperback from 7 September 2024.

The cover of Intervals of Darkness by Ray Newman. It is mostly black with an illustration showing two doorways bathed in red light. Someone is striding out of one doorway casting a long shadow. In the other doorway is just a shadow, implying an unseen figure.

Declaration on the use of generative AI

I didn’t use any AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to write the story. I drew the illustration myself with pen, on paper, and then edited it in Photoshop, which did include a small clean-up on the signpost using Adobe’s Generative Fill (Adobe Firefly).

Tags christmas

Film & TV

Lure of the wasteland: love and death in the rubblescape

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date July 16, 2023
1 Comment on Lure of the wasteland: love and death in the rubblescape

When they’ve built flats or superstores on the last of our wastelands, where will stories happen? Where will we go to play dangerous games?

Think of a 1970s British crime drama and you might well picture Jags and Ford Granadas chasing each other round nowhere spaces strewn with rubbish and ruins.

And any number of films stage their denouements on wasteland – because that’s where you end up when you’ve nowhere else to run.

It is a blank space, an urban version of the wild west, where confrontations between goodies and baddies can play out without civilians getting in the way.

Where did the wasteland come from?

It’s perhaps no surprise that the popularity of the word began to soar from the 1920s onward.

Until then, the life of cities took place in their centres – factories, offices, housing, ports and public transport.

But in the 20th century, that began to change.

Wasteland is primarily a product of the decline of industry. In his 1969 book Derelict Britain John Barr explained the extent of the problem of wasteland in post-war Britain:

First of all, industrial wastelands are a visual affront. They offend the eye, they offend what is one of the world’s most civilised landscapes… To tolerate dereliction spattering that landscape, to expect people to live amidst dereliction, is not civilised… Derelict land, and the industrial junk left behind when industry has made its profit and fled, is dangerous to life.

There was also the clearance of ‘slums’ and the movement of the population out to suburbs and new towns.

And, of course, there was World War II. The Blitz created spectacular wastelands in the hearts of cities such as London and Bristol.

What wastelands mean

T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land (significant ‘the’, wasteland as two words) addresses the collapse of western civilization brought about by the industrial revolution and the technological age.

For the 1979 album Setting Sons Paul Weller of The Jam wrote a song called ‘Wasteland’ which equates industrial dereliction with childhood freedom. It is only there “amongst the smouldering embers of yesterday” that the song’s working class narrator feels free to express feelings of love.

In the atomic age, wasteland also offered a taste of what might be – a vision of what our homes and streets could become with one well-placed missile.

On film, as well as being logistically convenient for location shooting, wasteland represented similar ideas.

Richard Attenborough in Seance on a Wet Afternoon.

Wastelands on screen

In Seance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964) wasteland is vital to the unhinged kidnap plot enacted by Billy and Myra (Richard Attenborough and Kim Stanley) as a promotional stunt for her work as a psychic.

Among tall grass, rusting Nissen huts and the remains of a half-demolished greyhound racing track, Billy prepares for the kidnap by dying his hair and hiding his motorbike.

Then, when he has the child in his custody, he returns to the same place to dump the stolen car and ditch his disguise.

The wasteland is a place between worlds, and between lives.

By passing through this wild space, he is able to leave civilization behind and transform himself from a timid suburban husband into a criminal capable of anything.

In The Small World of Sammy Lee (Ken Hughes, 1963) Anthony Newley plays a Soho nightclub compere who gets in debt with the wrong people.

His desperate attempts to raise money, against the clock, take him from one part of London to another.

Eventually, though, he runs out of road and winds up on a stretch of Thameside wasteland after dark.

There is nobody there to see or care as he is beaten half to death by his bookie’s enforcer.

In Bronco Bullfrog (Barney Platts-Mills, 1969) a young working class man called Del (Del Walker) tries to find somewhere to be alone with his girlfriend Irene (Anne Gooding).

They are frustrated at every turn, with interfering parents denying them privacy in both modernist flats and Victorian terraced houses.

Though it is far from ideal, like the protagonists of Paul Weller’s song, they resort to an inbetween space: a ruined building on wasteland in Stratford, East London. It is dirty, damp, overgrown and covered with graffiti, and this doesn’t work out either.

The Bashers is a remarkable documentary from 1963. Filmed by the BBC in Bristol it depicts the lives of youths in Barton Hill whose neighbourhood has great stretches of wasteland, awaiting the construction of new blocks of flats.

They don’t have much but they do have this remarkable resource and so entertain themselves by building giant bonfires, and battling gangs from rival neighbourhoods.

The authorities didn’t like this kind of thing, of course, and another place we see wasteland is in one of the most famous public information films. Lonely Water from 1973 shows children playing on the edge of a flooded quarry, among rusting cars and other fly-tipped rubbish.

Villains and tough cops

It’s in the gritty crime film that wasteland really comes into its own. Police corruption scandals and tabloid coverage of the Kray twins triggered a cycle of these in Britain from the late 1960s and through the 1970s.

The final act of Villain (Michael Tuchner, 1971) sees Ronnie Kray-alike Vic Dakin (Richard Burton) on the run in the aftermath of a robbery.

He ends up on a vast area of wasteland at Nine Elms in Battersea, being chased through the ruins of a gas works and a British Rail goods depot.

Villain.

In Sitting Target (Douglas Hickox, 1972) the final scenes take place in a distinct type of wasteland location: a dusty, cluttered transport depot full of workmen’s sheds, parked buses and freight cars.

Here, Harry Lomart (Oliver Reed) is able to pursue his nemesis, using a red jeep to crash into their car time and again, spinning them around a space that already feels half like a graveyard.

Again, the idea seems to be that this is the end of the line. It’s where you end up when there’s nowhere else to go and where, if you’re lucky, you might just about be able to lose yourself.

This isn’t uniquely British. We see similar settings in American crime films from the same period, and in Italy especially. Italian films about tough cops, known as poliziotteschi, invariably include a car chase or shootout on wasteland on the outskirts of Rome, Milan, Turin, or some other città violenta.

When the villain and the tough cop made it to British TV, the wasteland went with them.

The very first shot of the very first regular episode of The Sweeney, broadcast in January 1975, is of a stretch of cracked concrete, where a van races towards a bright yellow Ford Capri. They’re tooling up for a blag, you see, and where else can you do that except on wasteland?

The same episode concludes with a brutal brawl on what looks like a bombsite. It’s like watching boys play cops and robbers and probably not the first time this particular bit of wasteland was used for that purpose.

Turning waste into money

In 1980, crime drama The Long Good Friday arguably signalled the end of the wasteland era. Harry Shand (Bob Hoskins) is an East End gangster looking to go straight by getting in early on the London docklands property development boom.

In the decades that followed, London would lose much of its wasteland as Canary Wharf rose from the rubble, and other cities have followed the same pattern.

That barren landscape beyond Tower Bridge would have one last starring role, though, with the remains of Beckton gas works doubling for Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

Now they’re almost gone, some of us have started to feel nostalgic for those wastelands. They were dangerous, mysterious and wide open.

Those that remain, pending development, are invariably locked down tight, with heavy security and surveillance.

For our own protection, of course, so we don’t end up like the victim of a 1970s public information film, drowned or crushed.

And to make sure squatters can’t get in and make use of these otherwise barren spaces to park vans or caravans.

But where are we supposed to have our showdowns now?

Or hold hands amongst the punctured footballs and rusting bicycles?

Tags films, london

buildings Fiction

FICTION: The Architects

‘I think I’d like to see Mountvale again,’ said Julian German from the tangle of his duvet.

Esther German, on her way to the airing cupboard with unnecessary haste, paused in the doorway of his room and peered at him. She smoothed a towel over her arm.

‘Did you say something, Jules?’

‘I said, woman, that I would like to see Mountvale one last time.’

Esther removed her glasses and let them hang around her neck on their beaded strap. She blinked and twitched.

‘Mountvale?’

‘Christ give me strength… Mountvale school. Bloody Mountvale. Again, meaning another time; once more.’

Esther came into the room with its smell of antiseptic cream and sweat. She lowered herself into the dusty steel-framed chair against the wall. Its feet scraped on the dull parquet. Julian winced.

‘The weather’s awful. Wouldn’t you rather spend the day in? I can find a film for you to watch.’

Julian put his hands behind his head.

‘No, I bloody wouldn’t. I want to see that school. One last time.’

‘I don’t see why. It’s a very ordinary building and–’

‘Russell Cavendish brought it up the other day. Said somebody from Historic England was talking about getting it listed. Unique example of post-war construction.’

‘But Russell–’

‘The first use of curtain walling in the whole county,’ Julian went on.

Esther looked towards the large window, speckled with rain and streaked with green moss at its corners.

Julian shook his head and growled.

‘Are you going to drive me or shall I drive myself?’

Julian had always been too tall to sit comfortably in cars. Even now, with a hump in his back and a couple of inches lost to the erosion of his spinal cartilage, he looked uncomfortable in the passenger seat of the Citroen.

Esther leaned forward against the steering wheel, thin wrists at ten to two. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth as she squinted past the windscreen wipers.

A passing van threw a fine mist from the road.

‘Left,’ snapped Julian, pointing with bunched arthritic fingers.

Esther ignored him.

He grabbed at the steering wheel.

‘Bloody left, woman! Left.’

She slapped his hand away and he winced.

‘Don’t panic, darling. I’m driving, not you, and I know the way.’

He stroked the translucent skin where she’d made contact, inspecting for a bruise, and pouted.

‘Do you? Know the way, I mean? I didn’t see you look at a map before we left.’

‘I don’t need a map.’

‘Typical woman. Why bloody plan anything?’

At a roundabout, she took the right exit. Julian leaned towards the window, scanning the road signs. He looked over his shoulder.

‘Where the bloody hell are we going now?’

‘It’s funny,’ said Esther, her voice unsteady. ‘The listing thing. Nothing we worked on was built to last, was it?’

‘Speak for your bloody self,’ said Julian, forgetting for a moment his anxiety over the route. ‘I always saw my work in context as part of the broader sweep of history.’

‘Our work,’ said Esther.

‘Oh, for God’s sake… Yes, yes, technically, yes.’

‘And do try not to lecture. I’m not one of your students.’

He shrugged and folded his arms.

‘You were never a preservationist, anyway,’ she went on. ‘Knock it all down, you used to say.’

Julian didn’t reply.

Esther took her eyes off the road for a moment and saw that he’d fallen asleep, quite suddenly, as he often did in the car.

‘This isn’t the way to Mountvale,’ Julian bellowed.

‘I do wish you’d wear your hearing aid, darling. Then you’d know how loud you’re being.’

‘I don’t need it. My hearing is fine. And this is completely the wrong direction.’

They were on a country lane, now, passing through a village with a Norman church.

‘I thought we might go somewhere else instead of Mountvale,’ said Esther.

‘Where the hell are we?’

He saw and recognised the pub and so knew the village.

‘There’s a layby up ahead. You can turn there.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to stop for lunch? You could have a pint of beer.’

‘Don’t mother, me woman. For one thing, you’ve had no bloody practice. Just turn the car around and take me to Mountvale.’

Esther did as she was told, struggling with the gear stick as she conducted a five-point turn in ever-heavier rain.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Julian after a few moments, once he’d got his way. ‘About the mothering business. I forget sometimes.’

‘It’s alright, darling,’ said Esther. She sounded weary.

‘I’d have been a dreadful father, anyway.’

‘You certainly aren’t a terribly good husband.’

Julian laughed.

‘That’s my girl,’ he said, reaching across to pat her thigh. ‘As good as you get, eh?’

She brushed him away.

‘I’m driving.’

As they got nearer to Mountvale, in the early winter twilight, Julian became agitated again.

‘This is the estate, isn’t it? It’s changed a lot.’

‘Well, a lot of lives have been lived here,’ said Esther. ‘These buildings were always meant to be used.’

‘Plastic windows. Pebbledash. Pastel paint. Dreadful. Why did they cover the concrete?’ He raised his chin in lecturing mode. ‘It had such purity.’

‘But we didn’t have to look at it every day, did we? Or live in it, or work in it.’

‘Not that old argument!’ said Julian raising his voice and twisting in his seat.

She took advantage of his distraction to make a deliberate wrong turn.

‘Goldfinger lived in his tower, didn’t he?’

‘For a short while. But Le Corbusier lived in a fishing cottage. And Lubetkin lived in a Georgian townhouse.’

‘I’d have gladly lived on any of the estates where we worked. Our house, the house I designed for us–’

‘That we designed.’

‘Yes, yes, our house is true to the principles, isn’t it?’

Esther didn’t reply to that, not even to mention the draughts that blew through the open plan living area, or the water that gathered on the fatally flat roof all year round.

They were on a crescent, now, with a rippling concrete road and prefabricated homes. The house lights and streetlights had begun to come on.

‘This isn’t the way,’ said Julian. ‘I’m sure I remember…’ His mouth opened and closed as he tried to grip onto something. Spit gathered in the corners of his lips. He slammed a hand onto the dashboard.

‘Central square, community centre, health centre, shopping parade, schools complex opposite – primary, junior, secondary. These crescents are at the other end of the estate.’

‘You’re quite right, so they are,’ said Esther quietly.

‘What?’

She didn’t repeat herself, just flipped on the indicator and entered the final phase of the journey.

It couldn’t be avoided, now.

She parked the car half on the kerb and turned off the engine. The lights died with it.

They sat together in silence as rain sounded on the roof and windscreen.

Julian sighed.

‘Where’s my umbrella?’

Esther reached into the back seat and found it for him.

He undid his seatbelt and got out. After a struggle he got the umbrella up and lifted it. In his swollen hand, over his big head, it looked absurd, like something from Jacques Tati.

As he shuffled to the black cast-iron gate, Esther remembered when his stride was long and confident. She pulled the hood of her well-worn anorak over her head and joined him.

She looped her arm through his and they shivered together.

The gate and fence were still there but beyond was wasteland: concrete, wild grass, scattered bricks and litter.

‘The school’s gone,’ he said quietly.

‘Yes.’

A large sheet of clear plastic trapped in brambles snapped and boomed.

‘But Russell said…’

‘Russell’s been gone a long time, too, darling.’

‘Gone?’

‘Three years.’

‘A highly significant building, he said, and now…’

‘Not significant enough. And with too much asbestos.’

Julian snatched his arm away.

‘A sound material, in its day. Hindsight is a bloody fine thing.’

‘Come on, Jules, let’s go home. Aren’t you hungry?’

Julian didn’t move except to raise a hand to the railings. He wrapped his fingers around the rusting metal and the wind filled his eyes with water.

The next morning, the sun made golden stripes on the far wall of the bedroom as it passed through the blinds.

‘Esther! Where the hell are you?

Esther’s footsteps sounded along the parquet in the hall. She appeared in the doorway, small and exhausted.

‘I’ve had a thought.’

‘Yes?’

‘I’d like to see Mountvale one last time.’

Esther blinked and sighed.

‘Mountvale?’

Tags Fiction

books

Spooky stories to read in 2023

Post author By Ray Newman
Post date January 1, 2023
3 Comments on Spooky stories to read in 2023

One of my resolutions for 2023 is to read at least one short story every day. Totally achievable, right?

Yes, definitely, especially if this replaces endlessly scrolling social media, hoping something might happen.

But I do like social media, especially when it’s helping me find good stuff to watch or read.

I asked for recommendations for spooky stories on Mastodon and Twitter – not just the names of authors, but which specific piece or pieces I should read first.

I’ve got piles of anthologies and volumes of collected stories. The challenge is knowing where to start.

This is the list I’ve ended up with.

The Same Dog	Robert Aickman
The Trains	Robert Aickman
The Fully Conducted Tour	Robert Aickman
The Coffin House	Robert Aickman
The Swords	Robert Aickman
Ringing the Changes	Robert Aickman
The School Friend	Robert Aickman
The Diver	A.J. Alan
The Room in the Tower	E.F. Benson
The Outcast	E.F. Benson
The Moonlit Road	Ambrose Bierce
The Willows	Algernon Blackwood
The Wendigo	Algernon Blackwood
The Gospel According to Mark	Jorge Luis Borges
Curfew	Lucy M. Boston
The Bishop of Hell	Marjorie Bowen
The Crown Derby Plate	Marjorie Bowen
The Scythe	Ray Bradbury
Smee	A.M. Burrage
The Day Father Brought Something Home	R. Chetwynd Hayes
Hell is the Absence of God	Ted Chiang
Snare	Bora Chung
The Upper Berth	F. Marion Crawford
The Smile	F. Marion Crawford
A Slap in the Face	Chris Culshaw
The Dark Divide	Chris Culshaw
The Landlady	Roald Dahl
Out of the Deep	Walter de la Mare
The Horla	Guy de Maupassant
The Signal-Man	Charles Dickens
The Return of the Native	William Croft Dickinson
The Breakthrough	Daphne du Maurier
The Apple Tree	Daphne du Maurier
The Blue Lenses	Daphne du Maurier
The Entrance	Gerald Durrell
A Rose for Emily	William Faulkner
Kwaidan	Lafcadio Hearn
Pop Art	Joe Hill
Black Phone	Joe Hill
The Brownie of the Black Haggs	James Hogg
Three Miles Up	Elizabeth Jane Howard
While the Nightjar Sleeps	Andrew Michael Hurley
The Tooth	Shirley Jackson
The Monkey’s Paw	W.W. Jacobs
Under the Crust	Terry Lamsley
The Tower	Marghanita Laski
The Haunted Saucepan	Margery Lawrence
Whoever Heard of A Haunted Lift	Alan W. Lear
Cargo	E. Michael Lewis
In a Foreign Town in a Foreign Land	Thomas Ligotti
The White People	Arthur Machen
The Sundial	R.H. Malden
The House	Katherine Mansfield
An Encounter in the Mist	A.N.L Munby
Gabriel Ernest	H.H. ‘Saki’ Munro
Man Size in Marble	Edith Nesbit
The Shadow	Edith Nesbit
Secret Observations On the Goat Girl	Joyce Carol Oates
Dolling Halt	Pamela Oldfield
The Beckoning Fair One	Oliver Onions
Rooum	Oliver Onions
The Running Companion	Phillipa Pearce
The Yellow Wallpaper	Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Tourist Trap	Barbara Roden
Bosworth Summit Pound	L.T.C. Rolt
This Creeping Thing	Robert Shearman
If The Dead Knew	May Sinclair
The Portobello Road	Muriel Spark
On Mirrors	Ben Tufnell
The Pennine Tower Restaurant	Simon K. Unsworth
The Island of Regrets	Elizabeth Walter
The Boys’ Toilets	Robert Westall
Afterward	Edith Wharton
The Eyes	Edith Wharton
Miss Mary Pask	Edith Wharton
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell	Edith Wharton
Pomegranate Seed	Edith Wharton
Diary of a Madman	Lu Xun

Last updated 11/01/2023.

I’ve already read some of these, as you might expect, but will probably reread them this year.

You’ll also notice that there’s no M.R. James because I’ve read his ghost stories multiple times. He’s a given. The same goes for H.P. Lovecraft who, anyway, is generally more hysterical than spooky.

With that in mind, what’s missing? Comment below, or let me know via Mastodon or Twitter.

Tags ghost stories