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I'd be more bothered if a ghost had seen me
The Keeper (1983) is pocket hauntology, a one-room two-hander that packs its half-hour with explicitly immensurable time. Its plot is that paranormal evergreen, the ghost-hunters who find their quarry and so much the worse for them, but as it plays out in the stone-time cosmology of Alan Garner, they should have been so lucky as to wake the dead.
From its start, the teleplay does not align us with the human disturbance of the tranquil decay of Beacon Lodge, the colorless slanting of a winter afternoon through ivy-scrawled panes across a floor of sticks and rubbish, every sign of dereliction from bare shelves to jutting beams except for the fire that danced in unswept ashes as if newly laid, the one unbroken chair drawn up to the hearth as if vacated just a moment before. It doesn't look like a place where anyone has been living, yet it does not look unoccupied. Rattling the door to come in, Peter (Tim Woodward) and Sally (Janet Maw) register as gate-crashers rather than guests, bundled like hikers with the paraphernalia of their psychical overnight which they unshoulder to take in the chill, littered, open-roofed emptiness: "What a shame, letting it get like this!" From restless coverts of the house, we regard them as doubtfully, a couple so obviously mismatched, they make a natural pair, him gangling and fairish, still cheerful to believe after six fruitless investigations, her dark and compact, skeptically prepared to enjoy a self-spooked night. They unfold their camp beds, share a thermos of coffee, make their first, mundane observations. By the time night has fallen without a glimpse of spirits beyond the contents of their glasses, Sally is teasing her earnest, embarrassed partner, "When I said I'd come with you on this jaunt, I expected a little more of a run for my money," as they sit up by the artificial campfire of a storm lantern. "You might find it here," he returns with a hint of storyteller's malice, before relating the ill-starred essentials of this nineteenth-century gamekeeper's lodge that make it sound like a miniature Hill House, a locus of inexplicable misfortunes long predating the suicide that emptied it of active tenancy in 1912, its peculiarly formal abandonment following the 1960 sale of the estate. "There's always something been here . . . That's what's creepy. There's no ghost. But my grandmother was never in doubt," Peter concludes, a mischievous, telltale admission, the origin story perhaps of his paranormal interest: "If ever any house was haunted, this one was. Or is." The riddle hangs on the air like the curious whiff of smoke, reminiscent of herbs, even incense, Sally caught for an instant as she moved around the cold-hearthed half-ruin, how can there be a haunting without a ghost? The audience with the advantage of a share in the darting, creeping camera that peers through the caged ribs of wainscoting and across both sides of a Scrabble board as if everywhere and nowhere at once may have their suspicions, but as Peter warns with apt and unconscious irony, "It's best to keep an open mind."
Considered as the mystery of a classic ghost story in which the cause of the haunting contains the conditions for its expiation, the short slow burn of The Keeper plays by Golden Age rules in providing its characters with the necessary clues, though their susceptible rationalism makes it anyone's guess whether they'll interpret them correctly in time. Certainly it feels unwise of Sally to chafe her arms and mutter, "Oh, come on, house, if you're going to," especially without checking whether it already has, but the night is wearing on in the click of tiles and the scratching of pencils and Peter's good-natured grousing about her triple scores and the most notable anomaly recorded so far at Beacon Lodge has been an incongruous rise in the ambient temperature, not so much that its mortal lodgers aren't still huddling into their coats and scarves over the last of the coffee, but definitely not the eerie heat-theft that presages the spark-gap transmission of the dead. Even as they compare their personal theories of haunting, neither of them gives much thought to the competitive acrostic of their game—cuckoo, love, west, window, nest, lodging, go—until it leaps out in exquisite corpse relief as the skeleton of the folk verse apparently written by Sally in lieu of her intended correspondence, an act of mutual, unwitting psychography that makes irreversibly clear how literally the strangeness of Beacon Lodge has gotten under their skins:
Go from my window, my love, my love,
Go from my window, my dear;
For the wind's in the west and the cuckoo's in his nest
And you can't have a lodging here.
Prior to this point, the house has been no more unwelcoming to its visitors than any historic structure half pulled down and left to rot the rest of the way, its bare walls offering the shelter its stripped roof denies, but now as if in vehement underscore of the song's instruction they are assailed by all the sense-wrenching phenomena a parapsychologist could dream of, a windless storm that beats them to the ground in one another's arms, an audible smash of glass intact in the bobble of a torch-flash, a terrible deep-sounding tread that clangs at the door and drags itself across the vanished floor of the upper storey and down the inaccessible gap of the stairs and in the finest tradition of stone tapes, on the cassette that Peter frantically plays back it's nowhere to be heard, only their own captured human confusion and fright. His pedantically point-missing deflection that "Cuckoos don't have nests, anyway" has as little effect as breaking the connectors of the tiles. Sally has already intuited that the plug can't be pulled on this haunting so easily. "We're being used. I'm being used," she breathes in dismay, the letter-writer dwarfed by the looming slats of the chair still turned toward the silent hearth, its perspective dissolving over her shoulder as her pen began to scrawl across the page. Her round face in its cup of bark-brown hair floats like a mask in the paraffin light, a pressure of darkness behind it: "I can feel it. Absorbing. What are we doing here?"
In fairness to Peter and Sally, their misinterpretation of the available data has some generically established, misleadingly literary precedents on its side. As they slap down the letter tiles that will become their inadvertent planchettes, we learn that Sally favors the poltergeist-like explanation that "it was people that made a haunting, not ghosts . . . that it's something people generate in themselves," while Peter takes a more latent, residual, mediated view: "You don't think it's the place that does the generating? Or perhaps the place acting through the people . . . It's like we're the connection: we convert the energy. Aye, it's like transistors." His simile of choice is only a little more electronically advanced from the mythical plug wiring of The Owl Service (1967), essentially the same idea of a force in the land instantiated through its inhabitants. With the same author behind both texts, the reader-viewer may be forgiven for sharing the assumption that the recurring ill-luck of Beacon Lodge is a similar product of the human ability to tap into the ancient, imprinted earth, receiving its pattern to play it out again. The earth in question would prefer not to:
"To think that we could have been so arrogant . . . All it wants is to be left alone. The earth not broken. They were wrong to build a house here. That woman. She knew the land should not be broken. That's why she left it. There is a keeper for the land. A keeper against trespass."
In this one respect, Beacon Lodge is more Hell House than it is Hill House or Taskerlands—its haunting is neither an insensate mechanism nor an accumulated stain but a guarded intelligence in control of its manifestations, merely one that was never human and wants none of them. The folk song it excavated from the Scrabble tiles looks like a sincere effort to communicate both its nature and its intentions. Older than humanity it may be, geologically autochthonous, its own habitat encroached on by estates and enclosures and the insect presumptions of the Anthropocene, it is also the cuckoo in Beacon Lodge, the claimant of a nest that was not built for it and from which it will evict all cohabitants, even from their own selves. It does seem to differ from other traditionally haunted houses in that it offers its invaders the chance of escape, cryptically by quotation, more forcefully with its territorial display, none of which is sufficient to detach Peter from the empirical impedimenta of his ghost-hunt or Sally from her partner's side, even as her interpenetration with the land becomes ever more complete. "We should not have meddled. We should not . . . We were told. Now the keeper will not let us go." If he would just turn around from his anxious scribbling, he would see the thickening stillness with which she assumed her place in the chair that earlier warned her off like a siege perilous, the pad of notes he thrust on her with irrelevant reassurance lying blankly across her lap and her eyes a thousand yards of centuries, but it is not until she comes to find him that he can be distracted from his feverish recording and by then she is no longer, her vision swallowed by that disembodied subjective camera closing in on a terrified tangle of a man who can barely articulate the question of what was once his lover, echoing back at him in her calm, unrecognizable voice: "Who are you?" Slack-jawed, in the grip of an awful immanence, Peter whispers, "You." In the ring of his stone-green eye, a flame kindles, the tongues of the fire that danced by day on the unperturbed hearth. It burns just as steadily now in the faintly moonlit room that seems empty once again of all human traces, sleeping bags and rucksacks and folding chairs as lost in time as the people they once gave the false hope of a home. The chair stands as it always did, spindle-legged, expectant, comfortable before the fire.
Even more than the ending of Red Shift (1973) which pulls its people apart as inexorably as the heat death of the universe, The Keeper may be the most pessimistic version I have encountered of Garner's vision of relationship with the land. The Owl Service offers no way out of its endlessly iterating circuit of myth, but each generation does have the chance to channel the power once perverted in their valley into a less destructive expression, flowers instead of owls. There is nothing that can be done to be safe in Beacon Lodge except leave it. There is no expiation except the process begun by the daughter of self-destroyed Charlie Giddens, guessing that what the land wanted most was to be free of its human chains. It doesn't want architecture, it doesn't want agriculture, it doesn't want settlement. No wonder an odd avidity steals into Sally's voice as she strokes the undamaged glass of the windows and muses otherwise: "When we were little, we used to go looking for empty houses. There's no sound like it when a brick lands smack in the middle. You feel it in your stomach." Her face mingled with the night-clustered ivy reflects like a wildwood stranger's, a Pepper's ghost of a green woman. Perhaps it's a glimpse of the truth: if this inviolable earth was ever anything a human name could be put to, it might have been a sacred grove, a nemeton or something even more primeval; its associations with fire further suggest a ritual site, god-ground forgotten except in the hand-me-down of the house's name and jealously defended by its numen nonetheless. It is notable that in a near-contravention of the laws of folk horror, Peter's local origins avail him nothing when it comes to understanding or withstanding the keeper. It doesn't care who's homegrown or outlandish, what adult foolhardiness or childhood nightmares explain the breaching of its threshold. All habitation is inimical to it and when this latest incursion shows no signs of sensibly decamping, the keeper takes care of its pests. They are not even left as a palimpsest in the land but subsumed into it totally, as if wiped from history, a brutal end for a couple of characters who don't even rate on the obnoxiously debunking, rigidly credulous scale of paranormal researchers. Especially from a writer so concerned with the ineradicable hereness of past ages, what an actual hell of a fate.
The Keeper was the third and last of Garner's original one-shots for television anthologies, in this case ITV's Spooky (1983), the precursor to Dramarama (1983–89) under whose banner it was released on now inevitably out-of-print DVD; I watched it despite an aggravating, glitchy muddiness on YouTube and the tight direction by John Woods, the restive cinematography by Albert Almond, and especially the skittery, antique score by Gordon Crosse, rattling the nerve harp of its hammered dulcimer, suggest that even younger viewers who had made it through Children of the Stones (1977) or the catalogue of Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) could have hit this programme and bailed on the entire concept of TV. I thought I had discovered it last month after To Kill a King (1980), but it turns out I was rediscovering an almost decade-old recommendation from Catherine Butler, which feels correct. It may be a minor item in Garner's catalogue, but minor Garner is still weirder than most alternatives. "Welcome to Beacon Lodge." This trespass brought to you by my absorbing backers at Patreon.
From its start, the teleplay does not align us with the human disturbance of the tranquil decay of Beacon Lodge, the colorless slanting of a winter afternoon through ivy-scrawled panes across a floor of sticks and rubbish, every sign of dereliction from bare shelves to jutting beams except for the fire that danced in unswept ashes as if newly laid, the one unbroken chair drawn up to the hearth as if vacated just a moment before. It doesn't look like a place where anyone has been living, yet it does not look unoccupied. Rattling the door to come in, Peter (Tim Woodward) and Sally (Janet Maw) register as gate-crashers rather than guests, bundled like hikers with the paraphernalia of their psychical overnight which they unshoulder to take in the chill, littered, open-roofed emptiness: "What a shame, letting it get like this!" From restless coverts of the house, we regard them as doubtfully, a couple so obviously mismatched, they make a natural pair, him gangling and fairish, still cheerful to believe after six fruitless investigations, her dark and compact, skeptically prepared to enjoy a self-spooked night. They unfold their camp beds, share a thermos of coffee, make their first, mundane observations. By the time night has fallen without a glimpse of spirits beyond the contents of their glasses, Sally is teasing her earnest, embarrassed partner, "When I said I'd come with you on this jaunt, I expected a little more of a run for my money," as they sit up by the artificial campfire of a storm lantern. "You might find it here," he returns with a hint of storyteller's malice, before relating the ill-starred essentials of this nineteenth-century gamekeeper's lodge that make it sound like a miniature Hill House, a locus of inexplicable misfortunes long predating the suicide that emptied it of active tenancy in 1912, its peculiarly formal abandonment following the 1960 sale of the estate. "There's always something been here . . . That's what's creepy. There's no ghost. But my grandmother was never in doubt," Peter concludes, a mischievous, telltale admission, the origin story perhaps of his paranormal interest: "If ever any house was haunted, this one was. Or is." The riddle hangs on the air like the curious whiff of smoke, reminiscent of herbs, even incense, Sally caught for an instant as she moved around the cold-hearthed half-ruin, how can there be a haunting without a ghost? The audience with the advantage of a share in the darting, creeping camera that peers through the caged ribs of wainscoting and across both sides of a Scrabble board as if everywhere and nowhere at once may have their suspicions, but as Peter warns with apt and unconscious irony, "It's best to keep an open mind."
Considered as the mystery of a classic ghost story in which the cause of the haunting contains the conditions for its expiation, the short slow burn of The Keeper plays by Golden Age rules in providing its characters with the necessary clues, though their susceptible rationalism makes it anyone's guess whether they'll interpret them correctly in time. Certainly it feels unwise of Sally to chafe her arms and mutter, "Oh, come on, house, if you're going to," especially without checking whether it already has, but the night is wearing on in the click of tiles and the scratching of pencils and Peter's good-natured grousing about her triple scores and the most notable anomaly recorded so far at Beacon Lodge has been an incongruous rise in the ambient temperature, not so much that its mortal lodgers aren't still huddling into their coats and scarves over the last of the coffee, but definitely not the eerie heat-theft that presages the spark-gap transmission of the dead. Even as they compare their personal theories of haunting, neither of them gives much thought to the competitive acrostic of their game—cuckoo, love, west, window, nest, lodging, go—until it leaps out in exquisite corpse relief as the skeleton of the folk verse apparently written by Sally in lieu of her intended correspondence, an act of mutual, unwitting psychography that makes irreversibly clear how literally the strangeness of Beacon Lodge has gotten under their skins:
Go from my window, my love, my love,
Go from my window, my dear;
For the wind's in the west and the cuckoo's in his nest
And you can't have a lodging here.
Prior to this point, the house has been no more unwelcoming to its visitors than any historic structure half pulled down and left to rot the rest of the way, its bare walls offering the shelter its stripped roof denies, but now as if in vehement underscore of the song's instruction they are assailed by all the sense-wrenching phenomena a parapsychologist could dream of, a windless storm that beats them to the ground in one another's arms, an audible smash of glass intact in the bobble of a torch-flash, a terrible deep-sounding tread that clangs at the door and drags itself across the vanished floor of the upper storey and down the inaccessible gap of the stairs and in the finest tradition of stone tapes, on the cassette that Peter frantically plays back it's nowhere to be heard, only their own captured human confusion and fright. His pedantically point-missing deflection that "Cuckoos don't have nests, anyway" has as little effect as breaking the connectors of the tiles. Sally has already intuited that the plug can't be pulled on this haunting so easily. "We're being used. I'm being used," she breathes in dismay, the letter-writer dwarfed by the looming slats of the chair still turned toward the silent hearth, its perspective dissolving over her shoulder as her pen began to scrawl across the page. Her round face in its cup of bark-brown hair floats like a mask in the paraffin light, a pressure of darkness behind it: "I can feel it. Absorbing. What are we doing here?"
In fairness to Peter and Sally, their misinterpretation of the available data has some generically established, misleadingly literary precedents on its side. As they slap down the letter tiles that will become their inadvertent planchettes, we learn that Sally favors the poltergeist-like explanation that "it was people that made a haunting, not ghosts . . . that it's something people generate in themselves," while Peter takes a more latent, residual, mediated view: "You don't think it's the place that does the generating? Or perhaps the place acting through the people . . . It's like we're the connection: we convert the energy. Aye, it's like transistors." His simile of choice is only a little more electronically advanced from the mythical plug wiring of The Owl Service (1967), essentially the same idea of a force in the land instantiated through its inhabitants. With the same author behind both texts, the reader-viewer may be forgiven for sharing the assumption that the recurring ill-luck of Beacon Lodge is a similar product of the human ability to tap into the ancient, imprinted earth, receiving its pattern to play it out again. The earth in question would prefer not to:
"To think that we could have been so arrogant . . . All it wants is to be left alone. The earth not broken. They were wrong to build a house here. That woman. She knew the land should not be broken. That's why she left it. There is a keeper for the land. A keeper against trespass."
In this one respect, Beacon Lodge is more Hell House than it is Hill House or Taskerlands—its haunting is neither an insensate mechanism nor an accumulated stain but a guarded intelligence in control of its manifestations, merely one that was never human and wants none of them. The folk song it excavated from the Scrabble tiles looks like a sincere effort to communicate both its nature and its intentions. Older than humanity it may be, geologically autochthonous, its own habitat encroached on by estates and enclosures and the insect presumptions of the Anthropocene, it is also the cuckoo in Beacon Lodge, the claimant of a nest that was not built for it and from which it will evict all cohabitants, even from their own selves. It does seem to differ from other traditionally haunted houses in that it offers its invaders the chance of escape, cryptically by quotation, more forcefully with its territorial display, none of which is sufficient to detach Peter from the empirical impedimenta of his ghost-hunt or Sally from her partner's side, even as her interpenetration with the land becomes ever more complete. "We should not have meddled. We should not . . . We were told. Now the keeper will not let us go." If he would just turn around from his anxious scribbling, he would see the thickening stillness with which she assumed her place in the chair that earlier warned her off like a siege perilous, the pad of notes he thrust on her with irrelevant reassurance lying blankly across her lap and her eyes a thousand yards of centuries, but it is not until she comes to find him that he can be distracted from his feverish recording and by then she is no longer, her vision swallowed by that disembodied subjective camera closing in on a terrified tangle of a man who can barely articulate the question of what was once his lover, echoing back at him in her calm, unrecognizable voice: "Who are you?" Slack-jawed, in the grip of an awful immanence, Peter whispers, "You." In the ring of his stone-green eye, a flame kindles, the tongues of the fire that danced by day on the unperturbed hearth. It burns just as steadily now in the faintly moonlit room that seems empty once again of all human traces, sleeping bags and rucksacks and folding chairs as lost in time as the people they once gave the false hope of a home. The chair stands as it always did, spindle-legged, expectant, comfortable before the fire.
Even more than the ending of Red Shift (1973) which pulls its people apart as inexorably as the heat death of the universe, The Keeper may be the most pessimistic version I have encountered of Garner's vision of relationship with the land. The Owl Service offers no way out of its endlessly iterating circuit of myth, but each generation does have the chance to channel the power once perverted in their valley into a less destructive expression, flowers instead of owls. There is nothing that can be done to be safe in Beacon Lodge except leave it. There is no expiation except the process begun by the daughter of self-destroyed Charlie Giddens, guessing that what the land wanted most was to be free of its human chains. It doesn't want architecture, it doesn't want agriculture, it doesn't want settlement. No wonder an odd avidity steals into Sally's voice as she strokes the undamaged glass of the windows and muses otherwise: "When we were little, we used to go looking for empty houses. There's no sound like it when a brick lands smack in the middle. You feel it in your stomach." Her face mingled with the night-clustered ivy reflects like a wildwood stranger's, a Pepper's ghost of a green woman. Perhaps it's a glimpse of the truth: if this inviolable earth was ever anything a human name could be put to, it might have been a sacred grove, a nemeton or something even more primeval; its associations with fire further suggest a ritual site, god-ground forgotten except in the hand-me-down of the house's name and jealously defended by its numen nonetheless. It is notable that in a near-contravention of the laws of folk horror, Peter's local origins avail him nothing when it comes to understanding or withstanding the keeper. It doesn't care who's homegrown or outlandish, what adult foolhardiness or childhood nightmares explain the breaching of its threshold. All habitation is inimical to it and when this latest incursion shows no signs of sensibly decamping, the keeper takes care of its pests. They are not even left as a palimpsest in the land but subsumed into it totally, as if wiped from history, a brutal end for a couple of characters who don't even rate on the obnoxiously debunking, rigidly credulous scale of paranormal researchers. Especially from a writer so concerned with the ineradicable hereness of past ages, what an actual hell of a fate.
The Keeper was the third and last of Garner's original one-shots for television anthologies, in this case ITV's Spooky (1983), the precursor to Dramarama (1983–89) under whose banner it was released on now inevitably out-of-print DVD; I watched it despite an aggravating, glitchy muddiness on YouTube and the tight direction by John Woods, the restive cinematography by Albert Almond, and especially the skittery, antique score by Gordon Crosse, rattling the nerve harp of its hammered dulcimer, suggest that even younger viewers who had made it through Children of the Stones (1977) or the catalogue of Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) could have hit this programme and bailed on the entire concept of TV. I thought I had discovered it last month after To Kill a King (1980), but it turns out I was rediscovering an almost decade-old recommendation from Catherine Butler, which feels correct. It may be a minor item in Garner's catalogue, but minor Garner is still weirder than most alternatives. "Welcome to Beacon Lodge." This trespass brought to you by my absorbing backers at Patreon.
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