I considered doing a whole anthology of classic weird women short stories (E. Nesbit, Du Maurier, Mary Elizabeth Braddon etc). These works are a huge source of inspiration for my writing. They often feature a gothic interplay between interior and exterior landscapes. The insidiously oppressive atmospheres arise from the writers’ attention to domestic environments and insipid social mores, and not from the wild gallop of plot rattling through them.

The children – Rhoda and her younger brother, Hector – in ‘Hodge’ (1921), living an isolated but companionable life in a strange, unbeautiful marsh in Somerset, speak of a ‘Miocene’ Forest so real to them they feel they’ve been there, “they would find themselves saying ‘Do you remember?’ in speaking of paths they had never traversed.” One day, they appear to find the fictional forest of their games at an exceptionally low-tide, but as they age away from each other, each maturing to a different social rubric, the reality of the Forest’s existence becomes a tussle between them until years later when Hector finds it again. This time, there’s something in it. “An ape – a sort of ape.” Prehistoric Hodge is, in some ways, like Rhoda’s experience of her brother Hector, “nearish to a man, but –”, and the teenagers enjoy their new Stig-of-the-Dump friend.

This coming-of-age story is haunted by the Victorian fear of devolving from civilised mores to crude desires, and the characters move from innocence to experience when their missing-link pet demonstrates his base interest in Rhoda.

First published in Metropolitan Magazine, 1921, and later collected in The Tales of Elinor Mordaunt, Martin Secker, 1934. Collected in The Villa and The Vortex: Supernatural Stories, 1916-1924, Handheld Press, 2021