Recently published by Rough Trade Books, Sam Reid’s ‘The Pin Jar’ is full of the kind of ghost stories told by mad bastards in the rural Sussex pubs of Mathew Clayton’s youth.
Just up the hill from the Sussex village of Alfriston is a remarkable little church called the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. And when I say little, I mean little. It can’t seat more than ten people. For a few years, my son worked at Alfriston’s wonderful bookshop Much Ado, and after dropping him each Saturday morning I would run up to the chalk figure, the Long Man of Wilmington, stopping at the Good Shepherd on the way. Sometimes, if leaves had blown in, I would sweep them up using a broom left by the door — as I did this I would think about the weddings, christenings, and funerals that had taken place on this one small patch of earth. I am a sucker for a country church, the more remote the better.
On the opening page of Sam Reid’s short novel The Pin Jar, just published by Rough Trade Books, we learn that the fictional narrator was married at the Chapel of the Good Shepherd. Reid mentions its name, but he doesn’t mention its most distinguishing characteristic — its size, or lack thereof. He also doesn’t mention its location, which geographically is at the start of the journey taken in the book across three pubs in three villages. I loved that. It shows such confidence on the writer’s behalf that he leaves these two details untold, waiting to be unearthed.
The narrator of The Pin Jar is Francis J. Cardwell, a 20th-century modernist composer who returns to Sussex after the Second World War with a promise that he will never leave again. Having been given a dictaphone by his friend J. G. Ballard, Cardwell records three ghost stories told to him in three pubs, all within a day’s walk of his home in Friston Forest. He writes these phonetically in Sussex dialect — think Trainspotting but Downland gravediggers, not Scottish smackheads. The Sussex accent, if not completely extinct, is definitely on the red list. The last speaker I knew was the village lollipop man, David Combe, who famously undertook his duties with a half-lit roll-up hanging off his bottom lip and a disdain for children and traffic alike. Sadly, he died a couple of months ago. His accent was a softer version of the West Country accent — I am guessing it was not really specific to Sussex but a far broader swathe of rural southern England.
For help with the phraseology, I presume Reid consulted the Rev. William Parish’s 1875 book, the snappily titled A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Collection of Provincialisms in Use in the County of Sussex. Parish was the youngest of thirteen children and deserves a book to himself. He was a good friend of Lewis Carroll, and it is believed a papier-mâché model in the vicarage was the inspiration for Jabberwocky. Parish’s own parish, Selmeston (which has its own peculiar Sussex pronunciation: Simson), lies within the tight geographical confines of The Pin Jar.
The three stories in the book, written in dialect, are also typeset like experimental poems or lyrics, with large amounts of space dividing lines and words. Each comes with an intro from Cardwell. The first story is told to him in Alfriston’s George Inn (a pub which gained its licence in 1397!) and concerns itself with a ‘blind, rampaging, lonely golem’ with an ‘unending appetite for human life.’
The second story, The Pin Jar, is told to him at The Ram Inn at Firle. Cardwell explains in the introduction that kiln jars full of metal nails were kept on mantelpieces to ward off evil. I have no idea if this is invented or not. The village pub where I live has witch marks above the fireplace that are supposed to do the same job. But frankly they could gave been carved by one of the publicans to charm visitors. The joy of folklore is that, by its very nature, it is all just made up stuff.
The final story is told to Cardwell in Glynde’s The Trevor Arms, renamed here as Burning Sky (itself a brewery based in Firle —beers within beers, so to speak), by a folk singer, Dolly Bowland (Dolly was also the name of local folk legend Shirley Collins’ older sister). They are all, in essence, ghost stories told by the type of mad bastard who was likely to buttonhole you in the rural pubs of my youth.
I think Reid is making a point about how the essence of a place is held in the stories told about it and the people that live there as much as in its hills and hedgerows. He does all this expertly, balancing invention, strangeness, actual history, and well-drawn characters with just the right amount of experimentation. This is a unique combination, and I look forward to reading what he writes next.
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‘The Pin Jar’ by Sam Reid is out now and available physically here, or here as an Ebook, published by Rough Trade Books.
Sam Reid appears in conversation with Lara Haworth at Waterstones Islington on 5th February. More information here.