I think Robert Aickman would have enjoyed a visit to my home town, Leamington Spa, in the heart of the English midlands. With its air of foregone luxury and faded Georgian grandeur, it is the sort of place he would have approved of. There is a decent museum, and several art galleries to muse in, as well as two excellent second-hand bookshops. This time of year, mid-Autumn, would have been an especially suitable time to come, when the few tourists have moved on and a melancholy calm pervades the damp streets. Autumn is a good time, too, to take account of the town's ghosts, timid and scattered as they may be.If he travelled by train, our learned friend would have found the railway station rather scruffy and drab, with only worn traces of its thirties art deco remaining. Despite belated improvements, pigeons still haunt the rafters overhead, its blocked-off terrace is thick with weeds, and an air of dampness lingers on the stairway. The grim waiting room on platform 3, where Aickman would have alighted, is made more, not less, melancholy by the oil paintings that hang above its disused fireplace. Outside, the railwaymen plod by in faded uniforms, reciting their mantra of secret timetables and altered destinations. It is this somnolent scene that always I picture in my mind when I re-read The Waiting Room.
Aickman would almost certainly have stayed in Leamington’s best hotel, the Clarendon, on the Parade, the town’s high street. After his evening meal, he might have taken a stroll among the town’s broad, tree-lined avenues, where the sodium lamps throw a sallow light on drifting leaves. He would have heard coarse laughter emanate from the many pubs, and seen curtains twitching in the imposing Edwardian villas that line the more salubrious streets. My favourite of these, a white-stuccoed pile opposite the damp enclosure of Welch’s Meadow, could easily have been the setting for Ravissante. As he passed by, Aickman might have noticed its black-painted front door opening just wide enough to admit an enervated artist or two.
In Clarendon Avenue, at the north end of the town, Aickman would have found a wide thoroughfare lined by yet more pallid mansions. Forty years ago they were private homes, with crisp lace in the windows and grand pianos gleaming in their spotless parlours. The aged lady owner of one of them, a Mrs Marriner, died after a long, reclusive existence. Every room in the upstairs of the house was empty except one, where the skeleton of an adult male, dressed in a clean suit, shirt and tie, was found hanging neatly in a locked cupboard. The police made some tentative enquiries, but then my grandfather (who knew just about everyone in the town in those days) had a word with them, to what end I’ll never know, and shortly afterwards the matter was dropped.
Nowadays many of these mansions are retirement homes, where legions of pensioners live out their twilight years. It's not hard to picture them in their communal dining rooms, busily eating vast and tasteless meals, like the old people in The Hospice. Quite suitably, the town's main firm of undertakers is only a couple of streets away, its fleet of gleaming hearses silently waiting.
Later, Aickman might have wandered eastwards to a quadrangle of working-class streets separated from the main town by Campion Terrace. This area was once the home of the legendary Bumbalows, a semi-secret society that served mainly as an excuse for boozy carnivals and practical jokes. The self-contained locality it flourished in was the perfect urban village, where everyone knew each other and many were inter-related. Every November, the King of the Bumbalows - a noble figure of straw quite distinct from Guy Fawkes - would be ceremoniously crowned and paraded through the narrow streets before being burnt on a huge bonfire, the flames shooting upwards into the raw night air.
Not far away in Holly Street Aickman would have found an empty spiritualist church, a tenebrous old Victorian building sealed with boards and dust. Its malevolent façade never failed to frighten me when I hurried past on dark evenings. While other disused buildings were demolished, it lingered on for years after it was sealed up and abandoned to chance and the elements. Only once did I see any sign of human life near the place, when a group of spiritualists (easily identified) stood on its crumbling steps in earnest discussion. They had the well-groomed confidence of those who feel sure they have scanned the topography of the after-life, rather like the Pharisee-types in Larger Than Oneself. But the commonplace new building they raised in place of the old will hold no fears for anyone.
On the other side of the stone bridge that crosses the River Leam (pronounced Leem) and links the prosperous north side of the town to the less favoured south, is the ninth-century Anglican Church of St. Paul’s. No doubt Aickman would have been interested in this building. With its concealed chapels and distracted guides, there are strong similarities to the cathedral John Trant enters at the opening of The Cicerones. On one side of St Paul’s there is the grand sandstone post office; on the other is a little park where daytime drinkers gather with their dogs. A bloody murder took place there in the late sixties.
Another imposing Leamington building Aickman would have appreciated is the town hall, standing like a redbrick colossus in the middle of the Parade. Only once did I penetrate its grand foyer, when my father went there to register his name in some bureaucratic charade. I remember a broad, curling staircase and crowds of puzzled people drifting to and fro. A prominent memory is that of a harassed-looking, middle-aged man in a dark suit who strode impatiently out of the place. He could have been the model for the doomed Enright, from My Poor Friend, hurrying home to his strange and deadly family.
Aickman would surely have taken a look at the Jephson Gardens in the centre of the town, their green sward bisected in part by the River Leam. I secretly called these Gardens ‘heaven’ when I was a child. My grandfather used to take me there in fine weather, permitting me to chase the squirrels while he strolled along behind, smiling at old friends and tipping his hat to the ladies. Today, the same flowerbeds bloom in summer and the fountains still play over the artificial lake. From his coldly elegant mausoleum, a statue of Dr Jephson, the town’s founding father, still gazes out from his stone temple, his all-seeing eyes as deceptively blank as white marbles.
If Aickman had desired more lively entertainment, he might have considered going to see a show at the Royal Spa Centre, just opposite the northern entrance to the Gardens. I rather doubt, though, that the faded pop singers and smutty comedians who are its usual stalwarts would have tempted him. A truly vaunted performer like Miss Rokeby, from The Visiting Star, would never have set foot in such a place. I think our esteemed author would have preferred the previous occupant of the site, a phantasmagoric late-Victorian mansion glowering in sub-gothic splendour and only half-jokingly referred to as Dracula’s Castle.
After these modest enjoyments, Aickman would have concluded what I like to think would have been an enjoyable stay in Leamington, where Very Little happens and people are glad of it. I understand they served excellent food at the Clarendon in its day. After he’d dined on a full English breakfast and read the morning papers, I think we can safely picture him taking a taxi to that pigeon-infested railway station, suitcase in hand, ready once more for mighty London and his Gower Street abode. Leamington’s ghosts, such as they were (and are), will have wished him “God Speed”.
Peter Coady
(October 21, 2002)