Witchwater Country

by Garry Kilworth

This is a book about the coming of age of four young boys who live on the edge of marshland country. The youths set off in search of the plane and remains of Amy Johnson, who crashed in the Thames Estuary at the end of WW2 and was never found. Their search ends in tragedy for one of their number and results in a stark and abrupt growing up of the three who remain mentally and spiritually scarred by their experiences. This is also a story of an adult relationship as seen through the eyes of the younger generation, with a grandfather and grandmother having moved apart in their old age, much to the consternation of their grandson. The marshland and estuary country create a mystical atmosphere which affect the visiting narrator, Titch, who tries to make sense of this remote rural swathe of landscape which harbours strange characters and hidden dangers previously unknown to him in his normal home town. It is a summer filled with bizarre occurrences and Titch goes from one escapade to another, attempting to withstand the emotional squalls that seem to spring from the very earth and sky, finally finding himself in danger of an early death alongside his grandparents when nature turns viciously savage one storm-blasting night and threatens to kill all three of them. Others go to cold, wet graves when a wild ocean, freed from its restraining walls, comes stampeding across the marshes A ferocious flood overwhelms cottages and houses and destroying property and people in its path. It is a cruel sea that claws at the dwellings of defenceless country folk and drags them from their beds, carrying them to a place from which they can never return.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published July 5, 1986

About the author

Garry Douglas Kilworth is a historical novelist who also published sci-fi, fantasy, and juvenile fiction.

Kilworth is a graduate of King's College London. He was previously a science fiction author, having published one hundred twenty short stories and seventy novels.

Reviews

[Mark Fuller Dillon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy book to read but a hard one to assess, Garry Kilworth's WITCHWATER COUNTRY (1986) deserves a long review that I cannot provide, because even though several days have gone by since I finished it, the book whispers to me within my skull. In its many details, it offers a paradox.

For one thing, the book is written with utter simplicity and clarity, with a narrative so straightforward that a child could read it, yet at the same time, the story is about the perplexity of not knowing: of not knowing your family secrets, of not knowing your own parents, of not knowing your place in a shifting hierarchy of childhood friends.

The story is also about not knowing what might come next. The book seems unplotted: as in life, things happen, often out of the blue, yet the book is also structured with a series of set-ups and pay-offs that make the unexpected events feel inevitable after they occur. Halfway through the book, I knew that something terrible would happen, and then it did, but not in ways I could have anticpated. Nor could I have anticipated the chapters that followed, in which anxiety gave way to a looming sadness.

Not knowing what might come next leads to the challenge of dealing with what does happen, and for the story's young protagonist, coping is frustrated by his inability to process fears and complexities as an adult could. Halfway through the story, abruptly and without warning, someone dies; an adult would confront grief and shocked surprise head-on, but the child protagonist has no understanding of how to do this, and so he falls back on childhood fears, on the dread of ghosts and witches. Later, his true feelings erupt in ways that are unexpected but all-too believable.

In WITCHWATER COUNTRY, childhood is a time of not knowing, and the setting of the story matches the shifting, uncertain moods of the protagonist. The firm landscape gives way to tides that come and go; droughts give way to floods; rainstorms give way to fire. The setting changes constantly while never quite changing at all, and matches perfectly the fears and doubts of the hero.

If that sounds abstract, the story is not: as in the best writing by Kilworth, the book thrives on physical detail, on the moods and colours, fragrances and textures of a place and its history. You can walk through this book to see it and feel it, but Kilworth never holds your hand, never explains more than he has to. In the simplest of ways, he has written a complicated book, and the result is unsettling, uncertain, as vivid as a dream and as baffling as life.

[Greg Sloman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, but appallingly typeset, this pastoral coming of age story of four lads growing up in post-war countryside vividly captures the embers of a summer childhood gradually fading away.

Four pre-teens, Dinger, Oaky, Milky, and Titch, move through the mists of Essex - hedgerows, salt marshes, mills, and woodlands - fearful of folk magic and concocting adventures, learning swear words, and plotting against the unseen occupants of a decrepit white house and its mysterious pond.

Narrated in the first person by the adult Titch, we are drawn ineluctably into the halcyon days of the lads' adventures, the balmy lowland country they inhabit, and the eccentric cast of characters scattered about. For reasons not immediately understood by the young narrator, Titch lives in a cottage with his adopted family: his monoped Grandad, his long-suffering Nan, and Uncle Dave.

Titch inhabits the adult world of his family, aware but without fully understanding their mysteries. Uncle Dave, Titch's hero, seems to be doomed to straddle the borders of adolescence and adulthood, unable to live up to his adult responsibilities. How did Grandad lose his leg and why is his explanation different every time? And Nan, solid and loyal to Grandad to the end but inscrutable and remote.

Several key events, some tragic and shocking, force young Titch to find his courage and thereby grow into maturity.

Witchwater Country is an atmospheric and evocative recollection of golden years, childhood's end and the mysterious, impending adult world to come, outstandingly told.

[James Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book at an impressionable age, 12, and it has had a lasting effect on me. Mainly this is through the descriptions and imagery of the low country in Essex that the author conjures up throughout the books. I have a relative there who I visit occasionally and whenever I travel through the region the roadside water-filled ditches etc have an aura of mystery that stems from reading this book 28 years ago.

[Rob Frampton · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we are young the world verges on the supernatural; all things seem possible. But reality gradually intrudes, what seemed normal and wonderful is slowly subsumed by things more difficult to accept into the childhood world: cruelty, violence, the breaking of trust and the power of nature itself to alter what was once immutable.
Garry Kilworth's striking novel brings all of this to life in a form part folk-horror, part childhood memoir that will stay with me for a long, long time.

[Alien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ein Entwicklungsroman. Ein Junge lebt bei seinen Grosseltern im Flussgebiet Englands. Er hat viel Phantasie, was er mit starken Ängsten bezahlt. Er stromert mit seinen Freunden herum, dann stirbt einer bei einer Mutprobe, als er von einem Kran ins Wasser springt.

Eigentlich nix besonderes aber ganz nett zu lesen. Der Verlag versuchte das als Fantasy/Horror zu verkaufen, was es einfach nicht ist

[Kalapani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich habe ein Buch bei BookCrossing.com registriert!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/11353431