To celebrate the release of our Self Made Hero book of M. R. James adaptations – Ghost Stories of an Antiquary Vol 1 – we’re going to be counting down to Christmas in true Jamesian style, with a new ghostly image and nugget of info every day.
Day 8: “GREEN NOAH, DEMON TREE”
Lucy M. Boston is best remembered today as the Carnegie Medal-winning author of a series of children’s novels set in Green Knowe, an ancient, haunted house based on Hemingford Grey Manor near Huntingdon, Cambridge.
Boston began writing the Green Knowe books when she was already in her sixties, but they were not her first attempts at fiction. A handful of supernatural tales dating from the early 1930s exist among her papers, and these were published together for the first time by Dublin’s Swan River Press in 2011. In his introduction to the volume Robert Lloyd Parry (well known for his one man performance/recitations of M. R. James’ works as Nunkie Theatre) considers the literary influences on these works.
Boston’s debt to James, in fact, runs deep. The stories collected here offer the same unmistakeable, inexplicable malice that we find in James, and the same lurking feeling of terror: what Boston calls in “Curfew” the “thrill, or chill, of expectation”. And like James’s most celebrated stories, most of those collected here centre around antiquarian objects — an old bell, a rug bought at auction, an intricately carved desk left in a house by a previous occupant — curious trouvés, artefacts of the past that carry more than memories with them.
A TV show adapted from Boston’s The Children of Greene Knowe aired on the BBC in 1986. The possessed tree, Green Noah, waiting malevolently in the garden of Green Knowe providing nightmare fuel for many children who watched the series.
Green Noah, demon tree,
Evil fingers can’t catch me.
Moore & Reppion will be introducing a rare screening of two classic films from the BBC’s Ghost Story For Christmas series – The Signalman & Whistle And I’ll Come To You – at FACT Liverpool on Wednesday the 21st of December at 7pm.
The screening is part of Picturehouse’s nationwide A Warning to the Curious: Ghost Stories at Christmas season.