The Royal Oak (with apologies to George Orwell)

Shortly after the Second World War, George Orwell wrote a paean to his ideal London pub, in an essay called The Moon Under Water. The titular tavern did not exist - it was a composite, a fantasy, a dream. But Orwell described it beautifully and memorably all the same. 

I rather fancied trying my own hand at a similar exercise, focusing on a rural inn, especially in these strange days of shuttered pubs and social distancing. So here it is - The Royal Oak...

The Royal Oak is a little outside the centre of the village, within walking distance of any house in the parish. It sits just beyond a small but picturesque area of woodland that screens out most of the traffic noise from the annoyingly busy main street. It is set back from a quiet and little-frequented road, a few steps up, with a tidily-kept lawn at the front. In spring and summer this lawn is set with wooden picnic benches.

Christmas, ghosts and MR James

Quis est iste, qui venit? 

Who is this, that is coming?

An unsettling question from ‘Oh Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, by MR James. It is one of the inscriptions on the side of an old whistle found by a certain Mr Parkins, in a ruined Knights Templar chapel on the remote east coast. The story does not really provide us with an answer. Parkins is pursued and menaced by a silent and malevolent presence, but we are never told what precisely he has encountered. James rarely felt the need to over-explain his apparitions.

Parkins is a typical James protagonist; a bachelor academic, sceptical and firmly materialist, visiting an out-of-the-way spot who, through a combination of ignorance and foolhardiness, summons a terrifying and unholy visitor from – well, from Elsewhere. He escapes from the spirit relatively unharmed; this is the norm for well-meaning people in the Jamesian canon, though there are exceptions, like the unwise Mr Wraxall from Count Magnus or the doomed Paxton from A Warning To The Curious. Grisly ends tend to be reserved for genuinely villainous characters. One thinks of the magnificently sinister Karswell from Casting The Runes, or John Eldred, the antagonist of The Tractate Middoth.