“…and we were driving to Manchester for a Harty Sibelius concert.”
…when this story discovery (a true classic!) — read today I think for the first time — was told to ‘me’ in the car by Old Porteous about his younger days in the notoriously drought-ridden countryside area in Essex around where I myself still live today (the clue about ‘Colchester police’ is telling). Not sure about the ‘inter-breeding’, though! Nor about ‘intuition’ (tellingly discussed here about its intrinsic meaning as a word) being singularly lacking in women! This story itself, meanwhile, is a thunderous, drought-breaking, crop-triggering, climactically arm-diselbowed apotheosis of ‘folk horror’ as well as of any intuitive powers of the reader, whoever he or she happens to be. Just a few necessary words by me about the above mention of Jean Sibelius: I imagine the concert, it being in Manchester during HR Wakefield’s day, would have featured the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty who also famously conducted Elgar’s ‘Dream Children’. HR Wakefield’s words about “a horrid, thin cry of agony that seemed to have been carried from afar” are maybe his nod to the latter music as its children attenuated to nothing… Did the child here (“The result was an oddly lovely child, as fair and rosy as her father. She shone out in the village like a Golden Oriole in a crew of crows”) also attenuate to a single tooth as a sacrifice to the rain gods within the Round Field’s stone pillar? Anyway, Sibelius famously ‘suffered’ a complete creative composing ‘drought’ in the whole of the last 33 years of his life! — known as the the “silence of Järvenpää” — and who knows what rituals could have evoked such a climactic thunderous symphony now added to his canon by this story!?
“This emptied my little bag of courage and, with ‘zero at the bone’, I got up and ran for it.”
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My other reviews of disconnected horrors: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
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