By Keri O’Shea
As I alluded to in the introduction to our Childhood Terrors series, the bookshelf has long been (and hopefully still is) a formidable presence in children’s lives – a rich seam of ideas at the threshold of a room, teeming with characters and forces which command real power. A book is, all at the same time, wonderfully simple and wonderfully complex – a glimpse into imagined worlds, worlds which have a particular resonance when they have the ability to scare. One book which had such a hold on me is Vivien Alcock’s The Stonewalkers, a chance find in a provincial library in the depths of the Welsh valleys…
The first thing to say, although in a feature such as this it may well go without saying, is that The Stonewalkers is a wonderfully frightening story. It was read to me by my mother when I was seven or eight years old and, thinking about it with the full power of hindsight, it wasn’t the best choice for a bedtime story. It stopped me sleeping well for weeks – a fact I hid, because I wanted to find out what happened. I found out in later years that while I was hiding how scared I was, so was my mother! That’s one of the great strengths of this novella: it gets straight down to that archetypal horror of portraits or statues, these great immovables, coming to life. Children recognise and adults remember that awful ‘what if?’ at the heart of this tale. This is a fast-paced book which delights in delicious understatement: Alcock’s economical and thereby incisive style allows a lot of scope for a child’s (and an adult’s) imagination to play with the macabre goings-on, with lots of potential to create some tangible and terrifying mental images of the events as they unfold. I’m very surprised that The Stonewalkers has never been brought to the screen; some of its scenes are as clear to me as if they had been, and it would surely make for an engaging horror movie.
Poppy Brown is a lonely twelve year old, and not automatically a sympathetic character. Renowned as a fibber and wary of other kids, she keeps herself to herself – often spending her time pouring out her woes, punctuated by the proverbs she has so hopefully learned by heart, to ‘Belladonna’, a statue of a girl in the grounds of her mother’s employer’s house. Using a length of a chain she finds in the cellar of the house one day, she attaches it to Belladonna’s ankle like a piece of jewellery. Then, the hot July day gives way to a thunderstorm: Belladonna is hit by lightning, the metal chain drawing the strike. She’s knocked from her plinth but, somehow, the stone girl comes alive.
At first, Belladonna is benign, and Poppy is keen to prove that, this time at least, she isn’t a little liar. She entices Belladonna back to the house and ushers her into a room to wait…where Belladonna sees the stone bust of a girl. Touching her own neck, Belladonna;s self-awareness sees her move from friendly innocence to suspicion, fear – and terrible rage. Finding her way into the cellar, she finds a coil of the same chain which was instrumental in bringing her to life, and she takes it, escaping into the world outside.
In some ways an alternate spin on The Boy Who Cried Wolf, The Stonewalkers also skirts close to the Frankenstein story, albeit refracted through the eyes and actions of a group of terrified children – one of whom definitely didn’t mean to be a creator and is at first such an uncongenial character that, as Belladonna’s first model of humanity, she is bound to cause problems. For the statues aren’t evil – they’re emulatory, curious, trying to act like the organic beings they resemble but aren’t. Some of them seem to learn, however, adding a layer of poignancy to the end sequences of an unsettling and memorable tale. Poppy, too, has the opportunity to develop and grow.
And well she might, considering the way the growing army of statues begins to behave and how hard she has to work to literally save her own skin. I said that Belladonna was curious, in a very human manner – well, when you think about some of the behaviours justified by human ‘curiosity’, it shouldn’t surprise you that Belladonna soon shows she has the capacity to act viciously, and many of the scenes here are pure horror – showing to readers an unflinching, unsettling menace, the acting-out of that special sort of helplessness which stems from knowing utterly that you are physically vulnerable to something bigger, heavier, even more belligerent than you are. It’s been the mainstay of horror cinema for years, and it’s here in abundance too – in a book, let’s not forget – that is about kids, as well as targeted at kids.
However, perhaps more in line with children’s literature (and even a lot of horror cinema), for all its scares – the scares which stopped me sleeping – by the close of The Stonewalkers, there’s space enough for a restrained, but happy ending. This is something of a counterweight to all of the nightmarish images which precede it…of living statues, bathed in moonlight, purposefully and slowly crossing the moors…though this ending never, fully, dissipates the terror of all this. The Stonewalkers achieves a great deal in its few pages, and it continues to stand out as one of the seminal reading experiences of my childhood.