THE SPOOKS IN THE BOOKS
Sunday afternoon, Cambridge. The brolly lolled skeleton-like and withered in my bag. The weather hadn’t turned after all: there was some Easter sun, shining down on the Backs, illuminating paleskinned students punting and gadding about. (A stern college official poured scorn on one group: “There are just two rules for the garden. No picnics, and don’t sit on the grass. You’re breaking both!” The kids, naturally, scarpered.)
I was on a bridge over the River Cam, near Trinity, in thrall to a tousle-haired
“performance storyteller” who was leading a literary walking tour of the city.
Cambridge is, as you’d expect, littered with literary history, never mind eccentric academics delving into arcane knowledge and antiquities.
The remarkable Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes here. Wordsworth attended St John’s College in the 1780s (he graduated without distinction) and a bunch of centuries later, Douglas Adams studied Eng Lit before writing The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy. AS Byatt was at Newnham; Zadie Smith at King’s. At the Cambridge
Literary Festival earlier in the month, I’d watched the wicked pixie mind of alumnus Ali Smith flash and fire.
So yes, a literary walking tour. Yet as one participant later put it, it was all “goosebumps in the sun”. The familiar names above – bar Ted – didn’t pop up. No, we were on the trail of Ghost Writers on the Cam: adherents of supernatural tales, often involving perplexing visitations and ancient objects imbued with menace. And most, I suspect, entirely obscure to the average South African.
A key figure was medievalist scholar and King’s College provost MR James, well known in scary-story circles. The tour started at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Near MRJ’s former office, our guide read sonorously from a story called Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook.
The unfortunate scholarly protagonist, reading alone late one night, becomes aware of a hairy hand by his side, and looks up to find a creature with yellow eyes, “against which the pupils showed black and intense”. These were “the most horrifying feature in the whole vision. There was intelligence of a kind in them — intelligence beyond that of a beast, below that of a man”. Brr.
And so we trotted about Cambridge’s streets, stopping near familiar sights only to hear creepy fragments from long-gone imaginations. Ice cream-absorbing tourists looked curiously on as we paused outside colleges and churches to speak of tokoloshe like visitations and annoying wraiths, smelly chimneys and a peculiar incident in which the figures depicted in King’s College Chapel’s stained-glass windows came to life…
On a sunny bridge, with a swan paddling about below, we heard of occultist Aleister Crowley, who wrote: “At Cambridge I was surrounded by a more or less happy, healthy, prosperous set of parasites.” At Trinity, he claimed to have read repeatedly through the night, feasting on books and their contents. Our guide treated us to a sliver of his poem about the Cam at night, all “corpse-lit river where dark vapours teem heavy and horrible”.
On the way home later, it seemed a chilly fog wrapped around my ankles and faces loomed from the twilight. I jumped at what looked like a hairy head at cobblestone level (a Maltese?) and a strange fit was upon me. But a cure was at hand. I took a sho’t left into one of Cambridge’s venerable bookstores, and bought a good novel to read deep into the night.
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