Review: Let a Sleeping Witch Lie; Welsh Gothic Stories by Elizabeth Walter

Julie Brominicks

‘In the hall ahead the stranger could be heard stamping. His feet had a solid, earthy, reassuring sound. Bits of snow broke loose from his boots and scattered on the front-door mat. He called to Brian: ‘Aren’t you coming in?’’

No! whispers the reader. This stranger who led you here in the snow left no footprints alongside your own, the realisation of which mere moments ago, made you gasp as if you’d been struck by a physical blow.

Don’t do it. But Brian’s car is snow-bound in The Beacons (Y Bannau) in a blizzard. He is compelled to enter the house.

In the same way dear reader, that you simply must turn the page to witness his fate…

Perhaps because my life is already quite exciting, I have never sought to frighten myself into sensation through books and films. This collection of enchanting supernatural stories therefore propels me into unfamiliar territory but not too far out of my comfort zone.

Of course I find them disturbing, but in a delicate rather than violent or gory way, prompting me to ask the question; what is Gothic fiction exactly?

‘Haunting’

Wiki’s description of a primarily twentieth-century ‘loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting’ is apt for these tales by the late Elizabeth Walter who throughout the sixties and seventies, served up her own particular dish of the paranormal and paranoid, ever so sweetly and coldly.

‘Her extraordinary sensitivity amounted at times to ESP. At other times it amounted to nothing and I called it fanciful,’ says one character about another, getting to the heart of Walter’s guile.

For how can the reader possibly know? How can we discern, for instance, whether Diana, having already overheard the gardener fore-telling her death, is deluded or correct in concluding that her deteriorating health is due to her loving husband lacing her chocolates with arsenic?

This is a strange mean world – ‘the world next door’ as Walter describes the supernatural – where dark destiny rides random and roughshod over reason and justice, resulting in untimely deaths you might describe as tragic; if tragic was not too strong a word.

Tragic assumes passion and emotion which are masterfully, chillingly absent. Walter’s cool narrative is a foil to harrowing happenings; such as the drum that starts beating a death rhythm, the night in an inn that hasn’t existed for a century, or the long dead soldier calling ‘Come and Get Me’ from the window of an empty house.

‘Genteel’

If Nick Freeman is right and Walter at least partly turned to writing Gothic tales as a result of her earlier novels being considered ‘somewhat genteel,’ I say she went onto to use that criticism to her absolute advantage; in the contemporary tradition of ‘owning it.’

Her protagonists often seem to float through mundane middleclass existences and joyless relationships.

The polite and aloof tone with which Walter delivers them to their destiny is potent. From a chilly dispassionate distance the reader witnesses their demise with helpless fascination. Walter bosses ‘somewhat genteel’.

Elizabeth Walter was born in 1927 and died in 2006. She grew up in Hereford, studied English language and literature in London where she continued to work in publishing, particularly at Collins where she edited crime fiction till 1993.

From her five collections of supernatural stories, the editor Nick Freeman has selected for this Seren publication, those set in Wales and the borders. We are taken for example, to a ghost ship in Tenby, a haunted plas overlooking Elan Valley, and a village where a ‘witch’ met her doom ‘between Usk and Ludlow’ somewhere on the border.

There is a great deal pertaining to border in these pages. Of course there is the border between the normal and paranormal. Between madness and reason. And the physical space between Wales and England.

‘Imaginative possibilities’

In his helpful introduction, Freeman writes ‘Walter seems to have regarded Wales as a place where the supernatural was far more perceptible than in the big cities of Britain and the continent.’

He maintains Walter saw ‘imaginative possibilities’ in rural locations and ‘sensed the border country was a place where the veil between worlds was thinner, more permeable.’ (‘Telling the Bees’ held a particular frisson for me, having only recently been informed by a border-dwelling friend how important it is to communicate with bees and look them in the eye while so doing.)

Freeman explains that Walter and her contemporaries such as Du Maurier represented a genre of female-authored Gothic literature just before it was eclipsed by a trend for more sexually explicit and violent horror à la Blatty’s The Exorcist.

This is a period that also borders post-war Britain and a modern era referenced only from a distance:

‘To exchange our world of wind and sky and water for the hemmed-in noisiness of city streets; to breathe the stench of humanity and exhaust gases rather than the gorse and seaweed on our salt-laden, gull-loud air’ as Davy Jones of Tenby laments in the tale that bears his name.

These stories hang in the liminal space between so many things. Nations, periods, genres. Ideas, worlds; and words too. It is the vintage English language of the day that charms me most. Walter introduces ‘an amorphous armchair, springs sagging’, ‘children, muffled to the eyebrows in coats and scarves and berets running about like so many gnomes’ and wonderfully, when describing a rapt audience; ‘mention of treasure caused them to stir like trees when the wind blows through them; the mention of murder held them still, in the grip of frost.’

Another google definition of Gothic fiction is that it pairs ‘terror with pleasure.’ This book is indeed an awful indulgence not to be partaken of too quickly.

One tale at a time, each enjoyed with a single chocolate. A book to be ritually read by a fire into which the reader can gaze, perhaps while sipping something mildly intoxicating from a glass which reflects the flames.

Let a Sleeping Witch Lie is published by Seren and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops.