10. I bought that first copy of Swann’s Way...
The tenth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero recalls his freshman days and a curious woodland haunting.
I bought that first copy of Swann’s Way – a 1966 paperback edition published by Chatto & Windus – many years before I eventually picked it up to read…
I found it while browsing through the student union bookshop at the University of East Anglia, which was where I’d gone to study literature. Its front cover was illustrated by the French artist and aesthete Philippe Jullian. It was 95p.
If I’m honest, I have to admit that I found the whole university experience oddly disconcerting. Where I was from, it was still something of a rarity to enter the world of higher education, and the news of my acceptance was greeted with a mixture of indifference and bewilderment. The grizzled regulars at The Dog and Duck, where I worked the bar during my last summer at home, and who still called me ‘nipper’, eyed me curiously when I explained to them that I’d be leaving soon to start college. They couldn’t understand why I’d leave a perfectly good job to go and read stories. The couple who ran the shop near my grandmother’s house, who’d doted on me for years, and would often give me free ice cream on hot summer days, seemed upset, almost betrayed, when I told them the news. ‘You’ll be back soon enough, though?’ The inhabitants of our little town possessed such a keen affinity for the place they called home, and such a mistrust of anywhere else, that they couldn’t help but treat anyone who consciously decided to leave with suspicion and contempt.
The truth was, that as my father’s son, I was always somewhat of a pariah, no matter what I did. The very idea of ‘fitting in’ was anathema to him. He liked it that way; and the people of the town obliged. Not being born there was enough of course, but his love of the written word was almost certainly another reason why he stood out. He always had his nose in a book, and reading was viewed warily because it necessarily involved isolation, which didn’t square with a culture in which everyone’s business was everyone’s business.
Even after I arrived at UEA, I was never entirely sure what I was doing there. Stranded in this clockwork-orange campus on the edge of a city which was itself miles from anywhere, nothing made any sense. For the first few months I felt like an imposter. My fellow first years – self-assured, yet simultaneously awkward – seemed to talk a common language in which I lacked any fluency. It was as if they already knew one another. Suddenly, I had to deal with these people every day, to live in their pocket, to make pretend I was one of them, even though I had no idea what that meant. The sense of difference which had been growing within me over the preceding few years back at home accompanied me to Norwich. And I can distinctly remember being bothered by the thought that I didn’t quite fit in, and that they didn’t like me very much.
Despite my reservations, I was also profoundly conscious of how fortunate I was, and equally aware of what a rich and significant experience I’d stumbled into. Something had pulled me there, or perhaps pushed me away from where I’d been. I guess all universities make an emotional claim on their students, such is the susceptibility of the mind at that age. It’s difficult not to look back and see one’s own experience as something special or unique; and it was much the same for me.
East Anglia was many things all at once, signalling newfound freedoms, fears and responsibilities, offering up new sensations, new confusions, twisting the world into different shapes that required rethinking on an almost daily basis. I soon began to relish the Brutalist architecture; to find delight in traversing the walkways, staircases and structural conceits of the campus. I developed a deep love of the library, where I’d sequester myself for hours, hidden between bookshelves, reading happily until the alarm that signalled closing time sounded, and I could amble over to the bar. I held fast to the strange, new knowledge I found in those books. I began to see value in what I was doing; to think this might change the course of my life.
But the one slightly incongruous thing that strikes me, when I think back to those days, was simply the strange and haunting quality of the light, especially at dusk, which always seemed to last longer than I remembered back at home, elongated under the spell of those lingering Norfolk sunsets that, evening after evening, cast their lambent glare over the eastern flatlands and filled the sky with colour: rose pink, marigold orange, midnight purple. Of everything I recall from my time there, it’s this that I remember most fondly.
One of the reasons I’d been drawn to that part of the country was my love for the writing of M.R. James, who’d set many of his stories in the region. He’d lived as a young boy in Suffolk and gone on to a stellar academic career at Cambridge, where he famously composed some of the greatest ghost stories ever written; strange tales of fusty antiquarians whose curiosity unleashes dark forces that their rational, Enlightenment minds can barely comprehend. It was in his work that I found something recognisable from my own early life: the strange and troubling dreams with which I’d been afflicted during infancy, the intimations of mortality, the feeling of never being quite alone.
It is believed by certain devotees that in his youth James may have once seen an apparition himself, in the gardens of the rectory in Great Livermere, near Bury St Edmunds. If true, this experience was surely one of the catalysts for his later fiction. My father introduced me to his stories when I was nine or ten, and I’ve been reading them ever since, so when it came to pick a place to study, I soon settled on East Anglia.
Like James, I must have carried some of my juvenile phantoms with me in my journey to the east. In that first year, I lived in one of the ziggurats that overlooked the university broad and woodland beyond. Constructed as a series of pyramids, they stacked student on top of student, with each roof of the floor below creating a balcony for the one above. This created the perfect environment for parties (not that we needed much encouragement), as intrepid undergraduates clambered from one level to the next, ducked in and out of rooms, and caused their own kind of mayhem on what was essentially a giant concrete climbing frame. Music, drinking, sex, drugs – nothing out of the ordinary, except perhaps our prodigious consumption of the latter, which in the Nineties seemed to be the prevailing indulgence of all those bored and distracted middle-class kids I found myself surrounded by. For a while, this seemed like a kind of heaven on earth, but it didn’t take long for the drugs to start fucking us up, and to realise that everyone, me included, was becoming a little deranged. To get away from the madness, I started going for long perambulations through the woods by myself, perhaps in an effort to recapture those family walks I loved so much, to connect with the spirit of my father.
It was while on one of these – on a Friday, around six in the evening – that I found myself playing the role of a James protagonist, suddenly convinced that I was being followed by someone or something, and perhaps even some ungodly phantom intent on doing me harm. I remember it so distinctly, even all these years later; the feeling of some presence close behind me, an awareness of its proximity, its malevolent energy, even though, whenever I turned to look back, there was nothing there. For some reason, instead of returning to halls, I pushed on and tried to dismiss my fears. But the feeling persisted. Every noise became an affirmation of this evil force; every tree or bush was complicit in giving cover; and every time I glanced behind, still nothing.
Eventually, tired and anxious, I sat down next to an old ash tree, where, after a few moments, I suddenly became aware of an oppressive force pushing against my chest, which I felt sure was in some way related to the strange and insular world in which I was living, and a feeling of being overwhelmed by my friends, my studies, my responsibilities, and to myself as a creature that was struggling to keep it together. It was then that I became conscious of what felt like a hand pressing down on my shoulder, a momentary sensation, but one that seemed to last for the longest time, which sent a shiver through my entire body and had me jolting around in terror to see who was there. As my eyes frantically searched the near-dark, I was convinced this was the end. That the sinister shadow from my youth had finally caught up with me. But still, there was no one.
On reflection, I’m not sure if it wasn’t all a dream. Or given my habits at the time, a hallucination of some kind. Whatever happened that night, it had James written all over it, and there was something about the whole experience, terrifying as it was, that made perfect sense, and that I took as cosmic approbation of my decision to move to that part of the country; an affirmation of something beyond material reality making its presence felt, like the soldier in the bedroom, or my great-grandfather murmuring beneath the earth.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.