The genesis of 'The Skeleton Man'
Jim Kelly's latest novel, The Skeleton Man, is set in the lost village of Jude's Ferry. Here he considers the genesis of that idea.
I saw my first lost village from the top of a Sheffield Corporation bus one dawn morning in the drought summer of 1976. The top floor of the double-decker was crowded with fishermen that Saturday, who'd filed aboard in the terraced streets down by the steel works. As we climbed up the valley past the Ladybower Dam, and then the lake trapped beyond it came into view, a blue creased tablecloth laid between the brown moorland hills of The High Peak. And out in the middle something else - the mud-cloaked remains of the village of Derwent, flooded when the great dam was completed in 1943. In a normal summer the only thing left of the village was the old stone packhorse bridge - moved to a new site at the wonderfully named Slippery Stones. But that summer, as the sun burned down, each dry day brought a little bit of the past to light.
It wasn't the first time that Derwent had risen. Back in 1959 the waters had dropped to reveal the spire of the church, an attraction to children from the hot streets of the city who began to swim out to take a closer look. Eventually the Army blew the spire up to discourage them, and then the winter rains covered the village again. Most people must have thought that was the last time the sun would shine on Derwent. But the Great Drought re-wrote the record books. I'd gone up on the fisherman's bus to catch a glimpse of the village, lugging my revision notes for that year's exams, but taking care to pack a telescope. I sat on the burnt grass looking at the buildings and streets revealed in the mud, and wondering what secrets still lay hidden in the ruins.
Lost villages was a subject I'd come across before. My elder brother John, going North before me from London to university in Leeds, had found himself being taught by a remarkable man - Prof Maurice Beresford. Beresford, and his great collaborator W G Hoskins - invented what has become known as Landscape History - using your eyes to find out about the past. He wrote a great book - The Lost Villages of England - which would be my desert island choice. A book packed with lost stories. Hoskins went on to write another classic - The Making of The English Landscape. Both books are in fact works in detection, the uncovering of the past using clues in the landscape - field patterns, old place names, lost streets, crops and gardens gone to seed, rivers and streams diverted for mills and drinking water. Beresford actually went out and found lost villages - most famously stumbling up on the site of Wharram Percy, near York, and spending the best part of 40 years uncovering it with a whole army of volunteers. I managed to steal my brother's copy of Beresford's great work, and thought even then that landscape could play a major role in crime fiction, providing a mystery in itself rather than just a lifeless backdrop.
Which brings me to The Skeleton Man - the latest Philip Dryden mystery. I'd wanted to write a book involving a lost village since I'd begun the Dryden series back in 2000. The problem was that the reason most villages are lost is deeply historical - the ravages of plague, for example, or a wealthy landowner moving villagers out of his line of sight, or the slow death by coastal erosion. None of these seemed to offer the basis for an exciting, contemporary crime novel. (The example of Derwent was different, of course, but that had already been beautifully utilised by Peter Robinson in his excellent novel - In A Dry Season - which begins with the discovery of a body in an inundated village during a drought.) Had I missed the boat ? I thought I had, until I stumbled upon the story of Imber - a large medieval village with a 1000 year history, on the middle of Salisbury Plain.
The villagers of Imber were given a few weeks to quit their homes in 1943 because the Army wanted to use the surrounding firing ranges for exercises ahead of the D-Day Landings. There is little doubt they were all given the impression that once the hostilities were over they would be allowed to go home. They never were. Imber is still used for military training, and the fine church remains, although most of the other buildings are now reconstructed block-houses, vital props in training troops for the kind of house-to-house fighting now common in theatres of war such as Iran and Afghanistan. I read a wonderful account of the death of the village - by Rex Sawyer - and was overwhelmed by the potential it offered for a crime novel setting.
Imber boasted that in its long history there had never been a recorded crime. This seemed to me a deeply suspicious claim. I wondered what it had been like that last night in the village, the men crowded in to The Bell Inn, many of the women and children at a dance in the Methodist Hall. What hatreds and jealousies were played out in those last hours? It was difficult to think of a more likely situation to end in violence and revenge. So I had my plot, at least the platform for one. The problem was finding a lost village within the East Anglian Fens for a Dryden mystery. There were examples out on the Breckland - the sandy woodlands which stretch from the Fens towards Norwich. A whole cluster of villages had been evacuated in the closing years of the war - including Tottington, again home to a fine church. Local men, fighting overseas, told stories of arriving back in England and catching train and bus to their homes only to find the villages wired off, the houses just shells.
But to give Philip Dryden such a mystery in the Black Fens I had to make up my lost village. West of Ely is the vast drained fen which was once Whittlesea Mere - until the 19th century the largest freshwater lake in the country. In the 18th century a band of wealthy aristocrats had actually set out in boats on a voyage around the mere, their servants and a large supply of good food and wine, following on in separate ships. But now the mere is a vast swathe of reclaimed farming land, although parts are being returned to their original state of fen marsh. On its edge stands the Holme Post - a Victorian iron pole sunk down to its crown and left to show the extent to which the peat soil has shrunk back around it. It now stands 17 feet tall - and marks the lowest point in mainland Britain.
I decided to put my village in the middle of the mere - creating a medieval island in a sea of fen wasteland, with a fine church on the hill. The name Jude's Ferry I stole from a real place - on the River Lark, a one-time Roman port now marked only by a pub of the same name. The associations of Jude and Judas with betrayal were satisfyingly mysterious. The Army, and particularly the RAF and its US counterpart, are active in the Fens and it needed very little by way of imagination to clear Jude's Ferry for a military firing range in the summer of 1990, as the UK government began to deal with the possibility of war in the Gulf. Like the villagers of Imber the villagers of Jude's Ferry were never allowed back. But the Army continued its exercises, and then in 2007 the High Court finally ruled that the long-running campaign by villagers to win a right of return was over: Jude's Ferry was lost forever. To mark the day local reporter Philip Dryden joins the TA on an exercise - a house to house search preceded by a bombardment with live artillery shells. One wayward shell hits the old pub, revealing the cellar below, where a skeleton hangs, a noose still round the neck, gossamer-thin clothes floating like an ancient shroud.
Which is where we'll have to leave the story of The Skeleton Man.
Most lost villages, at least those taken over by the military, have inspired campaigns to reclaim them. But writing The Skeleton Man has made me realise that in an odd way the lost village is a treasure in itself - a piece of the past caught in time, like some long extinct insect trapped in amber. It seems to me that while the villagers in many cases were duped out of their homes, this was a time when millions were being bombed out of their's. Thousands - even in England - were on the move, their lives disrupted and changed forever. Perhaps lost villages are best left. The story of Tottington, the evacuated village near Norwich, appears on an excellent website (norfolkchurches.co.uk). Locals and visitors can look around the area - but only in very strictly controlled conditions due to the obvious dangers. The churches are well kept - more by the military than - it appears - the diocese. I found this brief mesasage on the site, from an enthusiast for the place as it is now. I can think of no better epitaph to the imaginary Jude's Ferry...
"The wind ripples the ....grasses; the deer, the sheep and the rabbits lead their uncomplicated lives. The incursions of armour are slight and temporary in this great vastness. The pattern of the past survives in a way that is lost elsewhere, in an England which has been redeveloped and rebuilt by generation after generation. Here, emptied of people now, untouched by the complications of civilisation, the past lingers on; and there is also the memory of the past, the ghosts and dreams of the old times, the lives once led now but names on the stones in the graveyards. Let this stand."