N

Arthur Machen

Stoke Newington in North London (or Stokey as it’s known) is not the first place that springs to mind when thinking about Britain’s ghostly woods. That’s not to say that there aren’t some notable trees here: Clissold Park, for example, has many fine specimens. But in ‘N’ by Arthur Machen (1863–1947), it’s not as much a matter of the trees you can see, so much as the trees that you can’t see, concealed as they are in a parallel dimension. Keep this in mind if you ever find yourself among the hipster coffee joints and indie boutiques of present-day Stokey. There is, in Machen’s imagination at least, another magical Stokey beyond: in certain rare circumstances you may just catch a glimpse of it and its strange, magnificent trees and exquisite flowers.

Arthur Machen is the pen-name of Arthur Llewelyn Jones, a Welshman from Caerleon who made a name for himself as a journalist, actor, occultist, novelist and short story writer. There is much in Machen’s work to enthuse lovers of gothic forests. His most famous work is the novella ‘The Great God Pan’ (1890), one of the great pieces of horror fiction; here the sensational subject matter (sex, madness, Satan) is closely connected to the Welsh woods. ‘The Children of the Pool’ (1936)—one of Machen’s final works—is another heavily forested tale. Here Machen balances a Romantic appreciation of the salving effects of a woodland walk—“under the green leaf in quiet” with “the stream trickling from the heart of the hill”—against the horror of a group of dead trees around a swamp “white and bare and ghastly, with leprous limbs”. Like ‘The Children of the Pool’, ‘N’ is one of Machen’s later works, and the only story in this collection that has a predominantly urban focus. Much public attention had been paid to the urban forest over recent years, especially in my home town of Sheffield, where a bitter dispute between the council and the community about the fate of the city’s street trees ran on for many years. ‘N’ is a story that helps us understand the deep appeal of trees in cities: the contrast between the grey and the green, the abundant life against the tarmac, a touch of mystery in the workaday world.