moves on to books, then I’m off round the country viewing original documents and authentic contemporary accounts, visiting sites, interviewing people. I love that side of it, and quite often experience strange synchronicities on my travels: when I was in Chelmsford researching, I went to find the spot where the gallows were erected for the July 1645 executions. I was early for my next appointment and, fortuitously, seeing that there was a pub (the Saracen’s Head) right opposite where the site would have been, decided to go in an get a drink then sit outside and soak up the atmosphere, make notes etc. Walking in I heard my name called out and found myself face to face with one of my old students. When I told her about my research she made a few calls and, within an hour, we were able to descend into the bowels of the old pub and view these horrid, tiny cells which, local custom insists, were where the witches were held before trial. It was very spooky and gave me a lot of material for several ghostly scenes.
Lots of the research for Witch Hunt distressed me, mostly because this stuff was real – people had to live and die through it. It was a terribly, bloody time and I’m glad I live in a twenty-first-century England.
At the moment I’m writing about an eerie fictional village on a remote island in Essex. It has a creepy Wicker Man atmosphere which I’m having lots of fun with. To develop my descriptions I’m visiting similar places, seeking out derelict churches and making weird ‘fairies’ out of coat hangers, fruit and candles. I love this job!
Class seems to be a big theme. Do you want to expand on that?
Witch hunts were about scapegoating and power, or lack of it. It was unusual to find the rich being victimised. When Hopkins got involved he used finger-pointing and neighbourly feuds to whip up hysteria, detect witches and so exact a fee. He made the whole thing into a commercial venture. And I thought that it was important for Sadie to be (or to think she was) an Essex Girl as that stereotype is on the receiving end of a whole host of pejorative judgements about sex and class, just like the witches. It made Sadie more likely to sympathise with the underdogs.
Some of your scenes are terrifying. Do you ever scare yourself?
Yes and no. I scared myself with the Pitsea station chapter. The little boy hanging was such a pitiful image. However, once I get those kind of scenes out of my head and onto the page they stop ‘haunting’ me, so to speak! I think it’s a bit like ‘tag’ – the stories touch/scare me, I write them down and send them out into the world to touch and scare others. What I hope to do is raise awareness of what happened back then and also, at some point, try to garner enough interest and funding to erect a monument to those lives that were lost whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the fact that witch hunts are in some form, shamefully, still trundling on.
For discussion
Reading groups may wish to use some of the following
questions to generate discussion:
To what aspects of the novel can you apply the term ‘witch hunt’?
Moths proliferate the story. What do they signify?
What is happening in the hospital scene with Dan?
Does Sadie’s character change as the novel progresses? How and why?
The story of the witches could be seen to be very much a female story. To what extent does it resonate with male readers?
Acknowledgements
I must first acknowledge a direct reference to the master of the ghost story, M. R. James. The bone pipe that Felix finds in St Boltolph’s bears a close resemblance to the object of evil which Professor Parkins stumbled across all those years ago, in ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, rated by many as the most terrifying ghost story of all time. For those of you whose whistles have been whet, so to speak, the story can be found in Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories, published by Penguin Classics.
I am also indebted to Richard Deacon’s book, Mathew Hopkins: Witch Finder General, which planted a seed of doubt concerning the circumstances of Hopkins’ death. And to Peter Gant of Manningtree Museum who pointed me in the direction of Malcolm Gaskill’s brilliant book, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-century English Tragedy.
Thanks must go to the dedicated staff of Colchester Castle Museum for their