Today, in Caithness, the sun is shining and the air is clear. I'm sure it will come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that, certain weathers and certain times of the year ignite certain music in me. And, on late winter days which are filled with sunshine, I am usually to be found singing the songs of The Spinners . Inevitably, I start humming different ones of their songs (and of course adapting them to be about Orlando and Jess) as I go around doing different things. But I remember almost all the words to them. I haven't heard a lot of them in years, but they are all there, rooted in my memory. It is truly fascinating to think about how these songs have passed through history. They are part of my own nostalgia, which is why crisp sunny mornings make me incapable of ignoring the temptation to sing them, but they are part of something much bigger. There are songs amongst them which are a newer step in the folk music movement. Songs like Silver in the Stubble are amongs...
Well, we're so close to release day for Beneath A Darkening Sky, and I've celebrated this by becoming a member of the Horror Writers' Association! I also had a set of author photos taken in a local graveyard, complete with an entire flock of sheep watching me as some previous visitor had left the gate open for them.
So now, I'm faced with the decision of which story to share with you. We've been through a few for this blog series, and I'm left with three: Guidman Trowie (a tale set in Orkney and inspired by the unique folklore of the islands); Moonsong (a love song from a werewolf to the moon); and Eaves-Drip, which is the story I'm going to talk about in this blog.
It's no coincidence that these three stories have been left. Along with Ay Atomics, they're the short and (not-always-very-)sweet ones.
Eaves-Drip was written while we were on holiday in Perthshire one autumn, but it goes back to Lincolnshire, where I grew up.
Lincolnshire is full of fascinating ghost and horror stories: everyone knew them growing up as well. I hope it's still the same now. I'd love to think that children and young people continue to talk about the haunted houses in the village in the same way we did. When we moved to Chippy Cottage in Crowle, Mum (who named it) told us that it used to be Mrs Fishwick's Pot Shop. She told us to listen for the ghostly sound of Mrs Fishwick's pots and pans, and it captured our imaginations, even if we never really got much suggestion that the house was in any way haunted. Not so for the next house, which was quite actively inhabited by those who had gone before.
That is why I put Broughley in Lincolnshire. It snuggles into the map around where Stickney is in reality. Eaves-Drip is set in Fen-Broughley, which is just a few miles away from Broughley. The church in Fen-Broughley, I decided, had served its final congregation and was being repurposed into a house. Then, what would the new occupants find as they started digging in their garden???
I discovered the story of eaves-drip burials whilst doing my Masters in Archaeology. My poor tutors put up with my very different interests admirably: I believe I was the only person who could be studying archaeology in Orkney and yet have precious little interest in the prehistoric. Instead, I gobbled up any information I could about graveyards, and eaves-drip burials were part of that.
Babies who were unchristened could not be buried in a churchyard, so there was a common practice of parents sneaking over in the dead of night and burying them just next to the church, where water would run down from the holy place and drop onto the grave, providing a form of baptism.
Between this idea and the Lincolnshire setting, the story came together rapidly, and eventually explored the lengths which people would go to in order to achieve their aims. And what might happen when those aims begin to conflict with one another.
[You can read Judith's earlier Gothic Horror blog posts here]
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