Joan Aiken ~ Return to a Haunted Childhood

     Joan Aiken was born, as I have just discovered, under an extraordinary series of planetary influences  –  with Mercury  Jupiter and Neptune rising, under a midnight Scorpio Moon, all marking her out to be an extraordinary teller of tales, someone able to communicate other worldly ideas, if not actually a psychic, and of course, making her first appearance at night in a haunted house full of history that her impoverished American/Canadian parents had just bought in the ancient sea port of Rye, in Sussex.

     Joan Aiken and her father, poet Conrad Aiken, were equally haunted by Jeake’s House, as it was called, after the astronomer philosopher whose family built it. She described it as ‘Full of a strange melancholy, with a haunted beauty not unlike the atmosphere of an Edgar Allan Poe story.’

Just before her birth Conrad wrote:

     Both of them were to leave and return to this house many times; Conrad abandoned the family when Joan was two, going back to America; she and her mother left when Joan was four, but Conrad kept the house and returned with a second wife, and then finally a third. Joan didn’t come back to Rye or see Conrad again until she was nine, as in Harken House to meet a stepmother, but memories of the house with or without her father were a potent background to her childhood.

    As an adult writer she revisits the house through her earlier memories in this ghostly re-telling of the traumas of a poignant period of her own childhood in the late 1930’s, but in her own strongly matter of fact manner, manages to make a sympathetic tale out of the trials of her young heroine, who suffers as much from her own rampant imagination, her loneliness and her hair raising diet of Gothic novels, as she does from the mysteries of adult relationships, and the rumblings of global upheaval as World War Two gathers pace.

     The book was originally called Voices, as young Julia not only hears ghostly voices, but apparently becomes possessed by earlier inhabitants of the house; she is equally haunted by the voice of Hitler bursting out of her Austrian stepmother’s radio, the voices of characters in her absent father’s plays, the voices of Faustus or The Duchess of Malfi in her grimly Gothic reading, and even ghostly commands from her brisk, no nonsense mother who she is desperately missing on this Summer away from home, and whose solid sensible advice bears no relation to the strange world of  historical ghosts and diffident grown ups, or incurious local characters among whom she now finds herself.

    Written as a Young Adult Ghost tale, this short novel is now just as gripping for the autobiographical light it shines on Joan Aiken’s childhood. The absent father is as potent a figure as the usually ever present mother, who has educated Joan at home for the previous half a dozen years; and Julia, the heroine, or Joan herself, is forced to come to terms with the extraordinary mix of cultures, personalities and the all pervading voices of literature, all of which go to make up the character, and the imagination of the writer she goes on to become.

Joan and her older sister at Jeake’s House. Conrad Aiken.

Return to Harken House is now out as an EBook from SFGateway

together with other Joan Aiken Y.A.Ghost and Fantasy titles

“The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters” – Joan Aiken’s timely warning.

This haunting picture by Goya and its resonant title quoted above, was often taken as the Spanish painter’s manifesto, and was the inspiration for Joan Aiken’s science fiction fantasy novel The Cockatrice Boys.   Her magpie mind was ever alert to the news of the day, about scientific discoveries or impending disasters, and she followed the work of other artists and writers, past and present, who shared her concern about our ever changing world, and our inability to keep up with it.

Goya’s picture shows the sleeping artist,  surrounded by creatures of the dark, as a commentary on the corrupt state of his country before the Enlightenment of the Eighteenth century.  Joan Aiken took the idea, and the imagery of the picture, and used the theme to write about one of the disasters of her day – the sensational discovery of the hole in the ozone layer above earth,  twenty-five years ago. 

In her fantasy novel, it is the dereliction of human awareness that creates this threat to life on our planet and leads to an invasion of monsters – the Cockatrices of her story – who are descending on the earth through the ozone hole as the embodiment of evil, the personification of all our weakest impulses.

These days the popularity of the Dystopian novel shows that there is an ongoing will to imagine, and thereby possibly prevent the destructive forces of dissonant societies who are carelessly, or even consciously depleting the riches of the earth and destroying the future for our children.   Joan Aiken, like Goya, and a current trend of fantasy writers, believed that the power of the imagination, used alongside reason and enlightenment, could save us from our own folly, or even the power of evil.

But she also believed that the opposite was true – that our failure to remain alert to dark forces,  in reality, as much as in our imagination – falling into Goya’s ‘Sleep of Reason’ could be equally harmful.

Sauna, the young heroine of the novel, is sent on the train with The Cockatrice Boys a raggle taggle army of survivors, to fight the invaders because of her mind-reading abilities. Here, she asks her fellow traveller, the archbishop, Dr Wren, whether there has always been evil:

It is up to all of us to maintain that delicate balance –

not lend our power to forces created by greed and wickedness

  all we have to do is stay awake….

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Joan Aiken’s own manifesto, The Way to Write for Children is a guide to the importance of children’s writing, in which she emphasises the need for every child to have access to books, stories and myths to stimulate their imagination. She writes:

“A myth or fairy tale interprets and resolves the contradictions which the child sees all around him, and gives him confidence in his power to deal with reality. We don’t have angels and devils any more, but we are still stuck with good and evil.”

Now out as an EBook, click to find this gripping Y.A.Fantasy novel

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Joan Aiken’s Desert Island Stories

Joan Aiken was often asked where she got her ideas. She was once so moved by a news story and a powerfully melancholy piece of music, written to save a Scottish island, that this story, and the story told by the music itself, inspired her to write her own mythical supernatural tale, The Scream about an endangered and lost island. It was linked in her mind, to the famous Munch painting of this name, and an an extraordinary present she had been given –  a screaming pillow, which also comes into the story…

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies wrote Farewell to Stromness when the  future of the Orkney Islands where he lived, was threatened by a proposal to mine there for uranium, known locally as Yellow Cake. His music formed part of a protest performance on Orkney called The Yellow Cake Revue, which helped put paid to the horrific project. His hypnotic piano piece, only five minutes long has become a poignant part of many people’s lives,  bringing peace, comfort and hope.

But it is not an entirely soothing composition, more of a dangerous journey;  the way has to be followed round crags, up mountains, over high bridges, through mists and fog – we are in danger – until at last the light appears through the mist, first dimly then welcoming and then blazing, and finally home is seen again. The opening rhythm returns, this time more like the rocking of a boat, and quietens, takes us in its arms into the rocking of a lullabye. Finally it softens, and fades, gently into history.  The danger has been surmounted, but the experience remains.

Inspired by this powerful musical expression of struggle and resolution,  Joan Aiken wrote her haunting story called The Scream,  which also references the famous Munch painting of that name, of a terrified figure seeing an appalling vision on a bridge. In Joan Aiken’s story the inhabitants are forced from their homes on a Scottish island because it is due to be poisoned for a scientific experiment. Brought up on their own myths, these people had always believed local dangers would be wrought by Kelpies – water demons, very hostile to humans – not by alarming technological developments…

“Before the time of electricity, radio, motors, long-range missiles, aircraft,

 people thought seriously about such things.”

But while the exiled islanders have to adapt their way of life to the ugly new towns and tower blocks where they now live, they have brought with them a powerful magic which is stirring, endangering their new lives and calling them to return, and which finally it breaks out in a great Scream, with the force of a tidal wave, and with the unleashing of this ancient power the island is reclaimed.

As the daughter of Joan Aiken, I was brought up on stories which although haunting, also saw me through dangers and rocked me to sleep. We shared music too, and this piece which recalled the Scottish folk tunes her mother used to sing, spoke to us both of our roots, and a love of islands, many of which we had visited together. The last one we visited before she died was the Channel Island of Herm, her house was called The Hermitage, and we joked about the journey being our Herm from Herm. Sitting on a shore of sea shells, she told me how she had always longed to be on Desert Island Discs, and had often thought about her music choices while waiting to fall asleep at night. One of her choices would have been Farewell to Stromness, and so we had it played at her funeral, to see her safely home.

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Hear Farewell to Stromness played by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies

The haunting Y.A. novel The Scream has just come out as an EBook 

Find it here

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The illustration at the top is by Arvis Stuart from the cover of a children’s play by Joan Aiken called Winterthing – another mythical island which disappears each winter

http://www.joanaiken.com/pages/plays_01.html

Joan Aiken’s Haunted Houses

So wrote Joan Aiken about her early fascination with ghosts and ghost stories, and the inevitability of returning to these in her own writing career. In a piece about why we read ghost stories she continues:

“In the course of my writing career I have put together five or six collections of ghost/horror stories, and among my novels, three in particular had definitely supernatural themes  –The Shadow Guests,  Return to Harken House – and The Haunting of Lamb House; significantly, all of those have sold rather better, and continued to stay in print longer, than my non-supernatural works, which proves, to me at least, that readers like ghosts and need them. Perhaps ghost stories are a kind of homeopathic remedy against real terrors: Take one a day to guard against anything of this kind happening to you. Most modern readers lead lives which are, to a great extent, insulated from primitive fears. But this, I believe, leads to a build-up of unacknowledged anxiety that may be liberated and drawn to the surface by the artificial alarms of ghost stories.”

Lamb House was a perfect subject for her to tackle, a house she had known since childhood, and which had been inhabited by writers who had all written ghost stories of their own.

     “A few years ago, I was approached by the National Trust, the body that cares for ancient houses in England, and asked if I would like to write a story about one of their properties. Enchanted, I at once said, Yes, I would like to write a story about Lamb House. This ancient house stands at the top of the hill where I was born, in Rye, Sussex, England. Up to 1918, it belonged to Henry James, who wrote many novels there, including The Turn of the Screw; after his death, it passed into the hands of E. F. Benson, who wrote his Lucia books and many ghost stories there. Then later, it was occupied by Rumer Godden, who had several strange psychic experiences (described in her autobiography A House with Four Rooms). Both James and Benson had fallen in love with the house, and both said they had practically been summoned to live in it by what seemed a meaningful chain of events. Comparing their lives, I found many interesting parallels: They both came from large, talented families; their sisters had breakdowns; they had supernatural experiences… I began planning a series of three tales, one to be wholly invented, preceding the lives of James and Benson, but linking them. I thought I would write the stories about James and Benson each in a pastiche of their own style, and the climax of each would be the type they themselves used in ghost stories: In the case of James, a kind of nebulous, sinister fade-out; in Benson’s case, a more robust and dramatic confrontation with the Powers of Evil, ending in an exorcism.”

Both Henry James and E.F. Benson had written ghost stories using Lamb House as a setting, and Joan Aiken had no difficulty imagining the haunting boyhood there of Toby Lamb, whose wealthy wine merchant father had built the handsome Georgian house in the 1720’s, and whose lost manuscript account of his life re-appears to haunt the later writer inhabitants. Rumer Godden, who describes a few ghostly occurrences during her time in the house, including her pen splitting from end to end when she laid it down at the completion of one of her own books, gives Joan’s novel a fantastic review in The Washington Post calling it ‘A little masterpiece.’

Both The Haunting of Lamb House and Return to Harken House – a semi autobiographical thriller for younger readers set in Joan’s own birthplace, Jeake’s House, just around the corner in Mermaid Street Rye, are being re-published by Orion this year on their SFGateway site, the modern incarnation of Gollancz who originally published Joan Aiken’s thrillers, and which is now bringing back ‘the greatest examples of Science fiction and Fantasy in the English Language’ – a category which in the case of this novel brings back a veritable clutch of classic authors.

The photograph above, taken by Joan Aiken shows the garden and back view of Lamb House when she visited with her painter husband, Julius Goldstein, a fellow American in the footsteps of Henry James.

Visit the SFGateway site to read about all the Joan Aiken reissues this autumn