Episode 25: 'Brickett Bottom' by Amyas Northcote
Doing the podcast has so far led me down many unexpected pathways. Just when I have my next episode planned, my reading for the show throws up a story or author I have either never heard of or forgotten, and thus I am diverted! And so, for several successive episodes I have read stories from some of the more neglected and overlooked writers in the supernatural tradition.
Amyas Northcote, I would say, falls into that category, although Brickett Bottom is almost certainly his most well-known tale, having been widely collected in ghost story anthologies in almost every successive decade since its first publication as part of Northcote's sole volume of supernatural fiction In Ghostly Company.
Once again, we have a writer inspired by M.R. James and writing in the Jamesian tradition, and once again, the telling of ghost stories appears to have been little more than a diversion, for Northcote was an aristocrat (seventh son of the First Earl of Iddesleigh, in case you were wondering) and a wealthy investment banker to boot. Although he seems to have lived at various times in England's leafiest counties, he also lived and worked in America, in Chicago, and met there the woman who would become his wife.
One American-based tale aside, the stories in In Ghostly Company are mostly set in the UK and, for the most part, rural England. Such is the case with Brickett Bottom which sees a city vicar transplanted to a rustic village in the countryside for an extended holiday along with his two daughters. For a time all is well, until one day, one of the daughters (Alice who, either by design or by accident, is as curious as her namesake) stumbles across an old-fashioned red-brick house in a part of the local woods (the "Bottom" of the title) and develops a fascination for both the house and its occupants.
I have realised that, while I sometimes impart some biographical information about the author in these blog posts, usually with a brief summary of the plot, and some argument as to the pedigree of the story in question, I don't necessarily indicate why I like the story and chose to make it an episode. Brickett Bottom is, after all, at first glance a fairly generic ghost story. But it appealed to me because of some ambiguities and a sense of lingering mystery which put me in mind of Picnic At Hanging Rock (not the Joan Lindsay novel, which I have never read, but the 1975 Peter Weir film, which I have seen many times). A lot of ghost and horror stories end on a note of ambiguity, for obvious reasons, and sometimes frustratingly or disappointingly. I quite like it in Brickett Bottom, however. Northcote is (deliberately or otherwise) vague on Alice's fate, opaque on the history of the house at Brickett Bottom, and the reader/listener will ruminate on what it all means after the tale is over.
The ghosts are either relatively benign or possibly terrible. I have tried, through slight nuances in the reading, to suggest the latter.
Northcote never had the opportunity to follow-up his 1922 collection, by the way. He died the following year.
See you on the other side,
Jasper
*******
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4997-past-the-edge
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Water Prelude by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4610-water-prelude
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4578-vanishing
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
All other sound effects sourced at Freesound.org
The recording was created using Audacity and BandLab. Podcast hosted by Anchor.
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