Tag: John Gordon

‘If She Bends She Breaks’ by John Gordon

Though I was born in Bolton, I now live in the Cambridgeshire Fens, an eerie flat landscape with hanging mists that sit below sea level and has a distinct atmosphere all of its own. John Gordon lived here too, even went to the same school as my son and was deeply inspired by the landscape. I love everything he’s ever written but this story is my favourite. Set on a freezing winter’s day in a Wisbech classroom, it tells the tale of Ben who cannot focus on his lessons. The strangeness of the day is evoked straight away, in the opening lines, “Ben had felt strange ever since the snow started falling. He looked out of the classroom window and saw that it had come again, sweeping across like a curtain. That was exactly what it seemed to be, a curtain. The snow had come down like a blank sheet in his mind.” The narrative voice and boy’s Fenland idiolect are perfectly rendered, but Gordon’s genius in this piece, for me, lies in disclosure. The reader travels, or is steered, through this dreamtime day, slowly, surely coming to realise, at exactly the right moment, the truth of Ben’s backstory. This is the sort of tale you have to read again the minute you finish it to resee the moments with new eyes. I never tire of this tale. It gets better with the reading of it, even when you see the skill of the storytelling.

First published in Catch Your Death and other ghost stories, Patrick Hardy Books, 1984

‘If She Bends, She Breaks’ by John Gordon

For my second choice I’m going back to a story that was one of my stand-out reading experiences as a young boy. Aidan Chambers’ ghost story anthology for children, Ghost After Ghost, contains various tales that gave me an enjoyable shudder. But this one got right under my skin. Perhaps the East Anglian setting made it feel close to home – it is set in the Fens and I lived in north Norfolk at the time – but mostly it’s to do with John Gordon’s ability to convey the unforgiving bleakness of a fenland winter, the way we begin to sense the fear beneath the joshing schoolkids’ bravado as they dare each other to step out on to the frozen drainage dyke, and the skill with which he reveals a chilling realisation about the narrator. Maybe that twist would be more quickly apparent to an adult reader, but to the eight-year-old me it prompted a shiver down my spine as cold as the black water beneath the ice on a fenland canal.

First published in Ghost After Ghost, ed. Aidan Chambers, Kestrel, 1982, and collected in Catch Your Death and Other Stories, by John Gordon, Patrick Hardy, 1983; regularly anthologised thereafter