Yesterday’s entry in The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale was all about voices from the past coming back to haunt those in the present. Which begs the question: has the reverse ever been the case? Can the future ever travel back in time to affect the present? And if the future from which these ghosts originated was far flung enough, would we even understand what we were seeing?
These are the questions that 18th century philosopher Gideon Cobb and scientist Sir Timothy Hassall must contend with on Day Four of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. Hope you are wearing comfortable shoes, because we have some miles yet ahead of us. Don’t worry, I’ll share my trail mix as we walk down...“The Road”...
At the invitation of Sir Timothy Hassall’s wife Lavinia, Gideon Cobb has travelled far from the busy streets of London into the lonely English countryside to lend his rationalism to a most irrational problem. A series of strange, inexplicable events has occurred in a clearing of the forest. Tetsy, the young daughter of a the local landlord, is this manifestation’s only witness. The year previous — exactly one year ago, Sir Timothy points out, the 27th of October, 1768 — Tetsy says that she was in the woods walking alone when she heard the noises:
“Weren’t much at first. Like some sort of whistles or squeaks. I thought birds, but t’weren’t birds...then they started to burst out more. Very loud. And between whiles there was quiet. And then I was laid on the ground and I could feel it starting to shake and the noises came nearer. A roaring and a rattling like nor I ever did hear...There seemed to be voices, too...yelling and screeching, yelling for their lives by the sound of them. And footsteps running under the ground I was lying on...right under me where I lay...But the queer thing was they sounded like feet on cobbles...”
Sir Timothy believes that what Tetsy witnessed in the forest are the revenants of the army of Queen Boadicea, the queen of an ancient British tribe, who failed in ousting the Roman Empire from Britain in 60 or 61 BCE:
“Imagine that hereabouts in the far past there was some great catastrophic event...a massacre...Now is it not possible that an event of such spiritual force somehow imprinted itself on the very landscape?”
Cobb, ever the rationalist, will have none of it. He claims that what Tetsy heard in the forest were her own heartbeats beating upon the ground. He believes that the girl’s imagination was influenced by the ancient tales told to her by her mother of Boadicea marching her army through the woods:
“All those sad barbarians, sweating the blue woad off their bodies as they fled, tossing their spears away, yelling and screaming in their terror, and behind them the trumpets and the drums — the rolling drums — of the Roman army.”
And so, to either prove or disprove Tetsy’s tale, the party moves from the local hostelry to the woods. There, in the clearing that Sir Timothy has had roped off, Gideon Cobb comes face-to-face with his worst nightmare: the bright and shining future to be built by overly rational men such as himself is not at all what he imagines it to be.
“The Road” was originally written by Nigel Kneale for the 1963 BBC television series First Night. A year later, the script was enacted again for Australian television. Neither broadcast survives.
In 2018, BBC Radio 4 transmitted an audio drama based on Kneale’s original script. Adapted for radio by Toby Hadoke, the drama stars Mark Gatiss (of League of Gentlemen fame!) as “Gideon Cobb,” Adrian Sarborough as “Sir Timothy Hassall,” and as “Lavinia Hassall” Hattie Morahan, the daughter of the man who directed “The Road” in 1963. It is a wonderfully creepy adaptation. The sound design alone makes it perfect for the spooky season:
That’s it for day four of The Nine Days of Nigel Kneale. I hope all this walking hasn’t tuckered you out too much. Since we are already in the country, I thought we would head on over to Beeley’s farm tomorrow for Day Five. Mr. Beeley is having some trouble with his pigs. The local vet doesn’t seem to know what to make of it all, but Mr. Beeley and his men think they have it all sorted out. It has something to do with the old woman living next door...it has something to do with a...“Murrain.”
Gideon Cobb in today’s story was an insufferable horse's arse, was he not, Blog-o-weeners? But I would hope that even he in all his rationalist wisdom would take the following to heart as the absolute truth:
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