Advent is a time of horror

At the age when most children are being read The Tailor of Gloucester or ’Twas the Night before Christmas, my father took a very different approach to bedtime stories during Advent, and read me my first M.R. James story. I can’t have been much more than five years old, and he was probably a few sherries to the wind, but I can recall with the utmost clarity the sheer, tingling chill of being exposed to Number 13 at such a formative stage.

Number 13 tells the story of the nightly appearance and dawn disappearance of the eponymous room at an inn in Viborg, Denmark, and its unnatural guest, of whom all that’s ever seen is an emaciated arm, covered in long grey hairs, which claws its way out of the room when the protagonist and his companions investigate.

My mother was naturally apoplectic because of course once one has had a literary taste of the supernatural, it’s hard to go back to bunnies and Blyton. And thus a slight obsession was born. I’ve explored the genre fairly broadly and come to the conclusion that my father was absolutely right: there simply isn’t a writer of ghost stories out there to touch M.R. James, who veered away from the heavy-handedness of much gothic fiction to carve out a niche which at its best is erudite, elegant and above all subtle – suitable for the friends who would gather in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve to hear them. Number 13 aside, his finest tales include A Warning to the Curious, A School Story, The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook, and Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, while my favourite remains the utterly terrifying Count Magnus. There are of course some clunky howlers (The Wailing Well) and some macabre nasties (Lost Hearts). But the great ones work so well because they’re devoid of the elements of horror which came to dominate later ghost stories.

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Julie Burchill

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Indeed, so deeply ingrained is my love of M.R. James that I’ve indoctrinated my own daughters in a similar way – though, in soft 21st-century fashion, I held off until they were a little older. My father’s own adoration of M.R. James wasn’t confined to his books but extended to certain dramatisations. The Jonathan Miller-directed Whistle and I’ll Come to You of 1968, and the BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series in the early 1970s garnered particular praise from my father. They’re so good that while other families are watching classic Christmas TV re-runs, we nestle down and watch them each year, with my younger girl displaying an extraordinarily high threshold for clutching at cushions and closing eyes.

My father was a man whose emotions were entirely dictated by his politics, which were staunchly to the right. So the semi-dramatised M.R. James’ stories narrated by SDP founder member Robert Powell in the mid-1980s were bound to raise his blood pressure to imminent stroke levels. I remember watching The Mezzotint (1986) with him and being almost impressed at the sustained rage – though as middle age takes its inexorable hold, I fear I’m beginning to understand. (Tony Robinson had the same effect on my father which meant Blackadder was problematic. Speed bumps similarly upset his libertarian instincts and his enlarged prostate.)

It wasn’t a massive surprise that he had a heart attack before he was 60 but he did recover enough to be able to draw on his reserves of anger to be incensed by Mark Gatiss’s adaptations, on the grounds of both authenticity and political persuasion.

I thought of my father when I dragged my family to The Globe last week to see Ghost Stories by Candlelight in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. If ever there were a venue which lent itself to ghost stories, this was surely it. And I felt very sad that he is no longer around to accompany me to such an event. We’d had several wonderful evenings watching M.R. James performances at Robert Lloyd Parry’s marvellous Nunkie Theatre and I hoped that this might be similarly atmospheric. But thank Christ my father’s shuffled off. With my predilection for the writings of an Edwardian academic, the supernatural tales of contemporary nights out in East Anglia delivered in scraping Estuary tones with laboured feminist and environmental messages didn’t so much disappoint as enrage.

I was sufficiently livid as to be unable to applaud and realised this is exactly the sort of reaction my own dear father would have had when festive chills fall short of M.R. James. The apple doesn’t fall far from The Ash Tree.