Dead Letters Anthology (17 page)

I was about to open it when my fingers brushed against something on the front. I turned the letter over again and looked at the address more closely, realising that the last three letters of ‘Abbas’ were obscured by some kind of sticky substance and a few fragments of adhering dirt. My brain had just filled in the missing bit without me realising. Automatically I brushed the dirt off with my thumb. Removing the residue made the address clearer. The ink was still blurred by the stains, but it was obvious now that the letter had actually been sent to Winterbourne Abase, rather than Winterbourne Abbas, which is where I happen to live.

As I stared at the words I wondered whether that was a mistake. I’d never heard of the place. ‘Abase’ also seemed a strange partial name for a town. Perhaps, I thought, as I stood there, it had some devout religious connotation – a bit like those American fundamentalists who used to choose their kids’ names by opening the Bible at a random page and letting God guide their finger to an appropriate word, like ‘Charity’ or ‘Perseverance’. There is a town near Winterbourne Abbas named Whitchurch Canonicorum, so I was prepared to believe that ‘Abase’ was correct. Of course, now that I knew the letter was intended for the occupant of another 7 Vicarage Close in another village, I couldn’t really open it, not if I wanted to preserve my moral integrity, but I did wonder how I could get it to its intended recipient. Writing ‘Return to Sender’ on the front probably wouldn’t work – the Post Office was unlikely to send it all the way back to America. I suppose I could have underlined the Abase to make it clearer and just put it back into the nearest postbox, but I was intrigued now. I wanted to find out where Winterbourne Abase actually was.

One of the things I love about England is that you can find so many towns and villages with the same name. Take ‘Whitchurch’, for instance. There are at least thirteen of them around, just based on a quick look at Google Maps. Most authorities think that the preponderance is due to there having been a clutch of churches built of white stone around the countryside, and the phrase ‘the town with the white church’ having mutated over the centuries to ‘the town of Whitchurch’. An alternative explanation that I have seen suggests that the churches were actually built in honour of St Wite – although nobody seems sure who St Wite actually was. Whatever the explanation, the sheer number of Whitchurches can lead to some confusion. For instance, I was once invited to a wedding in Whitchurch, Shropshire, but accidentally ended up going to Whitchurch, Hampshire instead and wondering where everyone was. The answer was that they were cheerfully quaffing champagne a hundred and sixty miles away, but by the time I discovered that it was too late.

Winterbourne is another good example. A ‘winterbourne’ is the old name for a stream that’s dry in the summer, but comes to life in the winter. That’s why there are places called Winterbourne everywhere you look in England, from Winterbourne Abbas to Winterborne Zelston.

My fascination with lost, ignored or otherwise ambiguous places probably started with my parents’ place. They owned a terraced house in a town in Cornwall whose garden backed onto the garden of the house in the next road, but there was a little patch of ground separating the two fences, barely six feet across. Most of that space was taken up with the trunks of two large trees whose foliage cast shadows over the ends of both gardens, but nobody had ever cut them down or trimmed them because nobody knew who owned that little strip of land. The local council denied all knowledge, and the title plans were no help at all, so the trees just got larger and larger, the gardens got darker and darker and the lawns became paler and paler thanks to the tree roots that extended beneath them, sucking up moisture from the ground. From that unpromising start I became interested in those little unowned alleys and paths that you can see separating houses in roads everywhere, and from there to the various places that have dropped off the maps over the course of the years, from those villages on Salisbury Plain whose inhabitants had been moved out because the houses had been taken over by the British Army for training purposes to the hamlets on the coast that had been lost to the encroaching waves and whose church bells could, allegedly, still be heard sometimes, pealing beneath the surface of the sea at low tide.

That’s why, instead of putting the envelope back into the nearest postbox with some clarifying amendment scrawled on it, I went to my computer and looked up ‘Winterbourne Abase’ on Google Maps. It wasn’t there, of course, which didn’t really surprise me. I tried Wikipedia next, but there was no listing for the village there either. After half an hour of browsing I gave up and went back to where I should have started – the library of old books that I had scavenged from second-hand bookshops, car boot sales and jumble sales across the length and breadth of England. I eventually found a mention in one of the forty-six volumes of Pevsner’s Buildings of England. Apparently it is, or was, a small hamlet in Devon, right on the coast, that had become absorbed into another nearby village for administrative purposes at some stage in the 1960s, around the same time as the Beeching Report led to the closure of several thousand small stations and the rail lines running through them. Its sole item of appeal seems to have been a rather fine church with an apse which has features – including wooden pegs rather than nails used in the construction – dating back to Saxon times.

I was intrigued, of course. It wasn’t so much the church that had caught my attention as the idea of a place that existed once, within living memory, but which appeared to have vanished from modern consideration and modern maps.

Perhaps it should have occurred to me to wonder why a writer in America should expect a postman in England to know the old name for an English village. Perhaps things might have been different if I had.

Devon wasn’t that far away from where I lived. I could probably drive there within an hour. I wasn’t doing anything that day, so I decided to get my scooter out and head off down the A35 to deliver the letter in person.

I don’t drive a car. I don’t like the enclosed, bubble-like feel of them. Then again, I don’t like motorcycles either – too fast, too brutal. I own an Italjet Velocifero scooter, which is like a Vespa, only bigger and faster. It looks like it was built in the 1950s for Audrey Hepburn’s older brother, but it’s actually of 1990s construction and just looks classic. It certainly makes heads turn as it buzzes down the road. I like it because I can feel the wind in my hair, and I can smell the fields and the riverbanks and even people’s gardens as I pass by. Also silage pits and fertiliser being spread across fields, but you have to take the rough with the smooth.

There was a low cloud base across the south-west as I set out, casting an oddly sombre pall across the landscape. The road rose and fell as it crossed the ridges that extended like fingers towards the coast, and I found myself either driving through the mist where it touched the high ground, with visibility reduced to a few tens of feet, or driving so close underneath it that I felt I could reach up and make a trail in it with my hand.

There were no road signs pointing to the village formerly known as Winterbourne Abase, of course, so I was navigating purely based on what I could remember of the map in Pevsner. Several times I took wrong turnings off the A35 and ended up in places like Seaton and Colyton, or travelling along the banks of rivers with strange names, like the Yarty and the Char, but eventually – and more by luck than judgement – I decided to try a narrow, unmarked track that led off a minor B-road. After twenty minutes of winding around the edges of fields and copses of trees, I discovered an old grey metal sign on a post. It was half-covered in moss, and tilted crazily over, but I could see the words ‘Winterbourne Ab---’ engraved into it. The last three letters were covered with the moss, and I had to brush it off before I could see the ‘ase’ at the end.

I set off again, down the winding track. It was barely wide enough to get a car down, and if I came across a car coming towards me then I wasn’t sure we could get past each other without scraping our respective paint jobs. The foliage closed in overhead so that the track was mostly in shadow. I had to put my headlamp on so that I could see where I was going. As I slowly navigated the ruts and holes in the road, anticipating the way it twisted without warning, I found myself glancing sideways, trying to identify the large leaves, mottled in red and dark green, which covered the bushes. They were the size of my head, but they looked more like grasping hands: five separate lobes curling together into sharp points that were tipped with crimson, like claws. Beneath them, close to the track, were clusters of gnarled white vegetables, like cauliflowers, that looked like misshapen babies’ heads nestled in leaves so dark green they were almost black.

Something ran across the track, startling me. I twisted my head to follow it, but all I could see was something thin and blue-grey, like a shaved greyhound. It turned its head to look at me as it vanished into the bushes, and I caught a brief glimpse of a thin face lined with sharp teeth, and little red eyes that seemed to glow in the light from my headlamp. I felt a shudder run through me, but it was gone before I could do anything.

I was relieved when I finally got to the village of Winterbourne Abase. It was a motley collection of perhaps ten or twelve old houses spread out on either side of the dirt road. The paint on them was peeling, hanging off in dry scabs and scales. I could smell that particular odour that people always say is the smell of ozone, but which is actually rotting seaweed. Past the last houses, I could see that the road finished at a stone jetty which extended out into the grey sea at a shallow angle, so that its far end was hidden by the greasily lapping and scum-covered waves. Its sides were covered in bladderwrack seaweed and barnacles. There was nobody around, but the place didn’t feel deserted. I had the strangest feeling that I was being observed from behind the grey lace curtains that hung like cobwebs in every window.

The path of the Winterbourne from which the village took its name was obvious. The houses on the left-hand side were separated from the road by a narrow ditch – dry at the moment, and filled with grass and weeds. A small bridge of stone led across the ditch to the front door of each house. The last building before the jetty was actually a village hall – a single-storey structure that covered about as much ground as six or seven of the houses. In front of it was a gravelled car park with several cars in it – quite expensive ones as well: I saw a Range Rover and a Lexus as well as something that was either a Jaguar or a Rover 75. They seemed a trifle out of character for the area. The sign in front of the hall was covered with old ribbons of paper that had peeled off the board and now hung down like creepers – the sole remnants of generations of parish notices, I presumed.

I wondered if the track I was on was actually Vicarage Close – I couldn’t see a vicarage, let alone a church – but I suddenly realised that what I had taken to be a gap between two of the houses was in fact a narrow road heading off at right angles. I hauled my scooter around to navigate down it.

The houses were smaller and darker along this narrow road, and I couldn’t see any numbers. At the far end was a church set in a small graveyard of crooked gravestones. More of the knobbly cauliflower-things sprouted in the angle between the graveyard wall and the ground, and even on the graves themselves. The church was constructed from a dark stone which was darkened even more by age and speckled with orange mould. It was set with several dark stained-glass windows, and the walls between the windows were covered with a regular array of metal spikes that had been hammered into the stone until only their ends were visible. The lead tiles on the roof were half-hidden by the low-hanging mist, as was the church’s bell tower. I could immediately see that Pevsner was right – this was an interesting church.

I parked my scooter just outside the drystone wall surrounding the cemetery. As the engine died a thick silence rolled in – no birds, no sounds of movement, just the distant sound of the unenthusiastic waves. I could see that the church door – a massive wooden affair, painted green and also covered with those metal bosses – was partially open. I wanted an excuse to look inside anyway, and the idea that someone in there might direct me to number seven was as good an excuse as I was going to get.

It took my eyes a few moments to adjust to the low light inside. The stained-glass windows were dirty, and the glass seemed to be mainly green and blue, which meant that the old wooden pews and the uneven stone floor were cast in a strange watery light. Just past the transept, in front of the choir stalls, was a stone pulpit. It was several steps up from the church floor so that its occupant could look down on the parishioners as they preached their sermons. Standing in the pulpit was the church’s vicar.

Her head was bowed over a thick book on the lectern in front of her, and it took a few moments for her to register my presence. She looked up slowly. She was probably middle-aged, with red hair that had dulled and was streaked with grey. Her blue eyes glistened in the meagre illumination.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

She hesitated for a few moments. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. ‘It’s wrong.’

I assumed that she meant either that I was interrupting her prayers or that this was an isolated church run by religious zealots who didn’t want unbelievers contaminating their ceremonies. That meant I wavered between wanting to feel apologetic and wanting to be irritated. I pulled the envelope out from my jacket pocket. ‘I was sent this by mistake,’ I said. ‘It should have come here, to number seven Vicarage Close. I don’t live too far away, so I thought I’d just drop it off and take a look around the village.’

She frowned. ‘Number seven? That’s… Ben and Maureen Cheadler. They won’t be in at the moment. Nobody’s in, I’m afraid. They’ll all be at the village hall for the bring-and-buy.’

‘Bring-and-buy’ is one of those phrases, along with ‘jumble sale’, ‘flea market’, ‘garage sale’, and ‘boot sale’, which gets me excited. I’ve found so many old books in those settings that I knew I had to take a look. Just the smell of old paper makes my pulse speed up.