Today’s story is one of my favourite examples of ‘women’s weird’ writing. You can read ‘Outside the House’ here (you’ll also find other Bessie Kyffin-Taylor stories if you like this one!)
I have often heard that ghost stories went out of fashion with the horrors of the First World War. This was, of course, the heyday of the weird and there were plenty of writers dabbling in the ghostly and horrific but still that idea makes its ways to my ears every now and again. This is a story which delves deep into the supernatural but in which the First World War is constantly present. Our protagonist is a returning soldier, injured beyond the possibility of redeployment. He falls in love with his nurse (who he will insist on referring to as a ‘little girl’ and ‘sweet child’ for maximum ick factor) and that’s how he ends up at the ‘house’ of the title. From this point on, it seems that the story leaves the war-setting behind.
Our protagonist enjoys his tea on the sunken lawn only to be surprised by the family’s insistence on moving inside at 5. There is something about the house after 5 which he experiences that first night as a resistance, a field of briars pushing him back from the house. I have to admit to finding the doings of the family fairly irritating in relation to this mysterious something. Why regularly schedule tea on the lawn at 4pm and cut it so fine? The fact that they don’t even tell him he has to come in and just sort of leave this injured man outside to find out its terrors for himself also smacks of something akin to indifference. There seems to be no reason to leave the man in the dark about what the problem is – especially as they increasingly have proof that being left in ignorance is only likely to push him to further investigation. They just give orders, instructions or ‘suggestions’ (which are to be taken as rules) without explanation to which he is always resistant. He is, he tells us, ‘reluctant to obey’ these mysterious commands and expectations. Here, as in numerous other places, we can see the shadow of the war and a critiques of it. This resistance to unexplained orders is a resistance to the unmeaning orders, the pointless slaughters under poor leadership of the First World War. There are other more direct call-backs to the war which make it a constant presence, a parallel text if you will, of the main story. On his second adventure ‘Outside the House’, he describes the increasing feeling of being unable to breath: ‘not out of breathe but nothing to breath’. The next paragraph starts with ‘I had been in a gas-cloud in France, but this wasn’t like that.’ Except, of course, why mention it at all if he bears no relevance or relation to the current experience. The difference between the experiences only underlines their parity, if not in the physical experience then perhaps in its causes. The sensation mimics, as I read it, that of the miners starved for breathe below earth, condemned to a torturous death through the greed of a mine-owner who wouldn’t stop their work despite knowing the danger and would rescue them for the cost. This experience of the cost of greed, of ruling class indifference, of tortured choking death is brought into conversation with the gas attacks of the first world war, its chemical warfare, in the service of a dispute many had come to see as a gratuitous waste of human life. The scene on the lawn, the faces rearing from the fog, the grasping hands and unearthly hatred seem also to be an echoed scene of war, it confusion and its horror as experienced by the Major during his wartime service.
Our protagonist believes in the supernatural because of the war (citing the Angel of Mons) but the supernatural here has not come to save him. It has come for him as a perpetrator, confusing him with its righteous target of wrath or, perhaps, identifying him as one of its tools or sympathisers. Here as well, I think, we see the text’s attempts to grapple with the legacies of the first world war and the Major’s inevitable role in the deaths of men who, like those miners, lost their lives at his command. The fact that he dies in the hospital, his beloved soldier friend by his side, unwilling and unable to recognise anyone else almost seems to erase the reality of the story ‘outside the house’, reduce it to metaphor, the fevered imaginings of an injured man. The framing narrative allows for no such conclusion but it is notable that his life ends with a command:
Hark! there are the guns, at it again, are they—give me my rifle, I’ll show them. Now boys, come on—over the top, and at ’em.
Wherever else he has been, the war has never left him. The only one he trusts, knows or can be helped by at his end is one who had been there too. The war, more than his experience with the hellish ‘outside the house’, separates him from the world he wished to rejoin.
The war is an uneasy presence within the text and I don’t want to suggest a singular reading. Rather it strikes me that in publishing this tale in 1920, Bessie Kyffin-Taylor is exploring the loss, tragedy, and horror implicit in the war and partaking in the re-evaluation which the First World War’s innovations and shattering loss of life brought with it.
Romancing the Gothic 