Spectral spaces

The First Voice by Emma McGordon

I’ve just finished watching Emma McGordon’s unsettling video of ‘The First Voice’ (see above). Beyond some obviously exceptional individual lines such as ‘I was Billy Goat’s Gruff rough’ and ‘bone lonely’, it’s a great piece of writing and videomaking. It reminds me a bit of a short vid I made to accompany my pamphlet of ‘imagined emails’, The Terrors.

I think this notion of ‘voices’ is central to what you might term ‘place-making’ – that expression of space as social, true human geography or pyschogeography. The voices Emma conjures in her poem seem ghostly to me. The poet inhabits the place like a spectre, moving through the shadows (as she does, literally, towards the end of the video). It is a dissenter’s poem, a marginal force. The poem should tell an alternative narrative.

I’m sure we’ve all had those experiences of walking through a city at night and imagining voices whispering behind us, in dark corners, alleyways, the vacant spaces developers forgot. Are these voices pure fantasy or are they in any way real? Do we create reality when we create a poem. Or is this all just sub-Sinclairian bluff and waffle?

Well, I think there’s a fine line between poetry as archaeology and ghost-hunting. Geoffrey Hill or Yvette Fielding?

I was recently told a very spooky story by my uncle and aunt of something they’d experienced over thirty years ago. Spooky because they’re both straight-talking people who wouldn’t make stuff up (unlike me). It goes roughly like this…

One evening in 1975 or ‘76 the young couple, newly-wed, decided to take a drive into the Sussex countryside to find a good local pub. They reached a small village called Jevington and, spotting what looked like an excellent place for dinner and some drinks, parked up. It was a very old-fashioned pub with sawdust on the floor and cheap Sussex ale – the locals were very friendly if a bit strange and the couple ended up spending the whole night there, drinking and chatting. They drove back home really happy they’d found such a great pub (this is, I hasten to add, before drink driving became taboo!).

The following week they decided to return for another evening at the pub. They drove exactly the same way, passing exactly the same fields, roads, houses and farms, until they reached the village. Everything looked exactly the same, but when they got to the pub – it wasn’t there. Nothing. For a moment they thought they must be confused so drove around the village for half an hour to look for the pub. But they were not confused. The pub just wasn’t there.

They parked up, and walked to a small terrace of old, grey houses opposite where the pub should have been. They knocked on the first door they came to and after a long wait a small elderly woman appeared. Apologising for disturbing her, they explained their situation; how they had enjoyed a marvellous evening of drinking at the local pub, but that it had now disappeared…

Pausing for a long time and looking them up and down, the old woman finally revealed: yes, there had been a pub there, a great old pub she remembers from when she was a girl. But it had burned down forty years ago, killing the landlord and his family in their sleep.

Perplexed and unsettled, my aunt and uncle returned home to Eastbourne. Ever since, they have always looked for that vanished pub, but never found it again – left wondering about the fire, the dead family, the sawdust, and that mysterious evening of laughter and local beer in 1976.

How can you explain something like this? Could it be that a place can absorb the people, memories and happenings that it has experienced? Can space somehow remember time? I can’t think of any other explanation (assuming, as I do, absolutely, that my uncle and aunt are telling the truth). Or is this remembering merely a human act, a trick of the mind, like a poem?

Scratch the surface; every forest is a sea. Every street is a palimpsest. You just have to listen for the ‘bone longing’.