In this episode we talked about the 1981 novel The Scarecrows by Robert Westall.

Sound effects from freesound.org are water_mill by padyhady countryside by brunoboselli.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. Today we’re talking about the novel The Scarecrows by Robert Westall. Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Ren Good evening, Adam!

Adam Good evening! And a warm and balmy evening it is too, at least here in Suffolk. How is it up in Scotland?

Ren Moderately grey, I’d say. We haven’t had much in the way of heat since June, it’s mostly been raining.

Adam Gosh, it’s been clammy here. And I have a question before we really get into the thick of things with Robert Westall’s The Scarecrows. I have a question that’s arisen and I thought that Ren’s going to know the answer: Ren, what is an old-fashioned expression?

Ren (laughs) I did notice that that came up in this book. I mean, I can picture it, but I don’t know if I can describe it.

Adam What are you picturing?

Ren Something like a kind of sceptical expression, a kind of reserved expression.

Adam Oh!

Ren That’s what I think of it being at least, a kind of reserved scepticism.

Adam I assumed it must be a kind of expression that they made on the music hall stage. But it came up a couple of times throughout this book, a character making an ‘old-fashioned expression’ and I thought: ‘I have no idea what that means!’

Ren What I always think when that phrase comes up is like, a Victorian governess?

Adam (laughs) So because they are the quintessential old-fashioned person?

Ren I guess so! Or maybe someone's channeling the spirit of a Victorian governess.

Adam Right, okay. Next time I hear that expression I will think of that. If I hear someone at school saying ‘that child made an old-fashioned expression’ at me, I will assume that they’re channeling the spirit of a Victorian governess.

Ren I realise as you asked this that I have a very clear idea of what that phrase means, with nothing to back it up.

Adam Well, that is why I asked you. I was like: I’m sure Ren has a clear idea of what this phrase means! So I’m glad my suspicions were correct. But that is one phrase among many curious phrases—

Ren — In this curious, curious book —

Adam — That the brave and intrepid reader can encounter in Robert Westall’s Carneige-winning The Scarecrows, that one the Carneige medal for children’s literature in 1981, I believe.

Ren It’s an award for outstanding books for children and young people — other winners include: Watership Down, Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman, The Borrowers, The Owl Service by Alan Garner, and Goggle Eyes by Anne Fine, which is actually the book it reminded me most of, thematically.

Adam Oh, that’s not an Anne Fine I’ve read, actually.

Ren It’s only because it’s about the protagonist’s mother getting together with a new man.

Adam And presumably the protagonist of Goggle Eyes doesn’t like the new stepdad.

Ren That’s right.

Adam Because Simon Wood, the protagonist of The Scarecrows, really, really, really, hates his new stepdad.

Ren Yes.

Adam This is a book of fairly incandescent rage.

Ren Yeah. But before we go into it — what cover do you have?

Adam I do like discussing covers. I have this quite murky cover. It’s a painting of a very purple-brown-green turnip field with three scarecrows that look very scraggy and gaunt sticking out of it, with a blue cloud-strewn sky and some crows flying about. And it’s by Sophie Williams, apparently.

Ren I have a different one which is in ‘70s earth tones, and has a surprised-looking boy with a bowl cut, surrounded by three scarecrows, one behind him with a cap coming over its face but you can see straw coming out of it and it looks quite maggoty, and one facing towards him and away from the reader, and that’s the female one. And then one with its face right up close, taking up a third of the cover, with this russet balaclava and braided straw beard and moustache.

Adam It sounds a bit gnarly!

Ren It’s a very intense expression on this scarecrow’s face. This one’s by Alan Hood for the Puffin Plus edition, I don’t know what Puffin Plus means.

Adam It means you’ve got through the regular Puffins and now you’re ready for the hard stuff.

Ren For the weird stuff.

Adam For the weird stuff, yeah. And you can imagine: (man you meet down a darkened alleyway voice) ‘Hey kid, you want the hard stuff? Have I got the book for you’.

I'm going to say that this is the first book we’ve discussed where we’re going to have to censor ourselves, basically, and talk around certain areas because even though this won a children’s literature award, I think it’s fair to say this has some troubling stuff in it!

Ren Yeah, uh-huh! We were talking about Roald Dahl and sensitivity readers last time and I don’t know, my copy’s a 1986 edition and I feel fairly confident that if there are more recent editions it’s gone through something of a toning-down in the process.

Adam I feel like most sensitivity readers would just say: ‘nope’, if I’m honest.

Ren And like Adam said, we’re not going to go into everything, because it’s a bit much, if I’m honest! It’s a bit much for the podcast.

Adam And it’s tricky, because there’s some great stretches of writing in this. And it’s trying to get into the head of a very angry and confused 13 year-old boy, and frankly this 13 year-old boy who is angrier than I ever was, he’s really angry! And I’m sure there are some kids who have read this and found it really comforting and relatable.

And it doesn’t shy away from really difficult weird emotions, and I think that’s something that really great children’s and young adult fiction can do. That said, I wouldn’t give this to my coming up to 12-year old stepson. I wouldn’t be okay with him reading it. Without going into it, it’s a bit of a Freudian fever-dream in places.

Ren Yeah. Also just sone off-the-cuff seventies homophobia going on. Multiple uses of ‘pouffish’ as an adjective.

Adam Yeah. This book’s a lot.

Ren Where did you get this from?

Adam Well, this old man came up to me in an alley, opened his brown mac and said: ‘Hey kid’.

I think I must have just looked up ‘scariest young adult fiction’, to be honest. I think it was just on one of those lists. And I assumed it would be a folk horror, and there are elements of that. There’s someone from outside the country going into the country, and there are eccentric country folk, to some degree, and it’s certainly about ancient secrets coming back, and the pull of the land. And turnips.

Ren It’s definitely about turnips.

Adam Definitely about turnips. Turnips are very symbolic in this book. I have no idea of what, but they’re definitely a symbol.

Ren (laughs loudly)

Adam There’s a lot of turnips. Just scattered throughout. ‘The turnip air’, ‘He sat down upon the turnip seat and nodded his turnip head’.

Ren I wondered if you related, because I know you lived near a cabbage field.

Adam That is true. But they're not everywhere. I don’t go out the door and see cabbages all the time. I might smell the cabbage field and go: ‘Urgh, cabbage-y’. They don’t occupy my consciousness in quite the same way. But anyway, shall we give the readers some sense of the mystery of this very strange book?

Ren Okay, so. 'It was the night before the Fund-raising Effort that the devils came. So it seemed to Simon Wood ever after.’

We get right into the horror with this one, beginning with a dormitory of 13 year-old boys at a boarding school.

Adam I thought we’d had enough of this stuff with Roald Dahl, last time!

Ren I know! Coming right after The Swan I was like, ‘Oh God, do we have to?’. Right in with this bully, Bowdon who is choosing his victims, throwing various insults at other boys’ parents.

Adam Really nasty ‘your momma’ jokes.

Ren Yeah, really unpleasant stuff. Luckily the book changes direction, Simon goes away for the holidays, because I couldn’t handle a whole book of ‘orrible boys in a boarding school.

But Bowden starts in on Simon’s mum, who he saw playing tennis at a previous parent’s day, and that’s when the devils come for Simon for the first time, and he gets out of bed and attacks Bowdon:

'That was when the devils came. Simon got out of bed without willing it. Felt the floor cold under his feet, like in a dream. Walked steadily across to Bowdon’s bed. He knew he was being insane. Bowdon was twice his size; Bowden would kill him.

Calmly, he reached for Bowdon in the dark, got hold of his pajama-coat. “Hey, what’s up wi’ you?” said Bowden querulously. Simon hit him with all his strength. He could remember nothing after that, except Bowdon wrenching and heaving under his hands, and Bowdon’s pyajamas tearing, and chairs falling and the iron pain of bed-legs and slithering on the smooth polished floor and then… nothing.

Until he was standing in the washroom, with the lights on. Something was dripping off his nose and splashing on the floor. He looked down. There was a track of blood all down his pajamas, right to the crutch. And one of the toilet doors stood half-open with the lock smashed off. He gaped stupidly at the splintered star of bare wood in the blue door. “Who did that?” "You did, my lad,” said a grim voice above his head.’

So that’s the first instance of the devils, where he attacks Bowdon. But Simon’s not really a hard lad, he’s an angry lad but not a hard lad. He reads Watership Down to calm himself down and he has a soft spot for cats, that we’ll see later. But when the devils get into him he loses control over himself.

At the next parent’s day, his Mum shows up with a man, who Simon describes as a yob, but is revealed to be a somewhat well-know artist and political cartoonist Joe Moreton.

Adam And Simon idolises his father who died in combat — possibly in the Second World War? Or afterwards. It took me a while to work out when exactly it’s set.

Ren I think it must be after, I think it’s set in the mid-70s, based on later when they find a newspaper from the Second World War and Simon says that it was thirty years ago. And it also says that his father’s grave is in a military cemetery where Arab children can see it, so I assume it’s somewhere in the middle east. But I don’t know my military history well enough to know which war that would have been, in the 60s?

Adam It says here that ‘Simon Wood’s father was a hero, a commanding officer in the British Army’, so that’s the essential information. His dad was a commanding officer who died in combat and Simon really idolises his father.

Ren Yes, and his mum knows this and is trying to keep the information that she’s dating Joe a bit quiet from him, although it seems fairly obvious.

When he’s at home for the holidays, Simon goes to a gallery opening to see where his mum has been spending all her time, and it’s an exhibition of Joe’s drawings.

Adam I kind of pictured Joe's drawings a bit like Gerald Scarfe’s.

Ren Oh, I don’t think I know him?

Adam He’s the famous political cartoonist who did the cover for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as well as the art in The Wall the Pink Floyd movie.

Ren Oh yeah, definitely. I think that’s exactly what he’s going for. I’ve got a description of the drawings here:

'The Chancellor of the Exchequer was made up from a jumble of dollar-signs and trade-graphs. Behind him was the Bank of England, all falling down and twisted. It was just a jumble of pen strokes close-to, but if you stepped back it looked just like him, as he appeared on telly. All efficient and sensible on top, and dead scared underneath. All Joe Moreton’s people looked scared underneath, like the people at Granny’s funeral. It made you feel scared yourself; as if nothing in the world was what it seemed’.

Simon really dislikes Joe’s drawings, he thinks they expose too much and it makes him uncomfortable.

Adam Yeah, Joe’s all about upending the establishment, although often as it goes with satire, the establishment kind of love him. But clearly this is really offensive on some level to Simon, and like Joe is degrading or insulting his father, and what his father stood for.

Ren So at this gallery he overhears a couple of people talking about his mother and Joe, and the next time his mum comes to visit, she tells him that she and Joe are getting married, and going to live in Joe’s old house in Cheshire with Simone’s little sister Jane.

Simon does not take this news well, and tries to avoid going back for the summer holidays. Goes to some kind of army thing? With a man who’s a friend of his dad’s.

Adam I’m glad you had no idea what this army thing was either.

Ren Yeah, not a clue! Some kind of army camp. He went and did some army for a bit, and then he left. I dunno. Well, actually he says it’s Aldershot, so it’s a kind of army training situation. Betraying our lack of interest in army —

Adam Well, Robert Westall is clearly quite interested in war and both World Wars, because the only other book of his I’ve read, which I’ve given to George is Blitzcat. It combines war with cats, so that’s a shoo-in for George, he’ll like that, a cute cat in the wreckage of the blitz.

But that investment in Britain’s role in the wars, and in army life, colours this book in an interesting way. It’s very hard… so, Simon is really angry. And often has these bursts of violence and these very dark, angry thoughts so he can be quite alienating as a protagonist. But Robert Westall clearly put a lot of effort to very convincingly get inside Simon’s head.

So Simon really believes in the British Empire and the values that represents, but also stoicism and British fighting spirit and other things that are part and parcel of that ideology. Whereas Joe Moreton is very mocking of this, and Simon sees Joe as this grotesque, cowardly court jester, basically. He’s not man enough to go and fight himself, but will stand sneering on the sidelines. But it's really ambiguous, I think, which makes it interesting, but also sometimes a difficult book to sit with, where Robert Westall as the author sits on that. Because it’s definitely not a straight forward book where we realised that Simon is completely wrong and that Joe, this anti-authority figure, is a hero all along. His idealisation of traditional, patriotic, masculine values was mistaken — I really don’t think that’s what the book’s doing. Which, while that would be closer to my own sensibilities, would probably make for a less interesting book.

Ren Yeah, but also Simon is so unpleasant that you can’t fully —

Adam — You wouldn’t want to be Simon, right? Simon’s consumed by hatred pretty much all the time! It’s a tough book to read because being inside Simon’s head is not a nice place to be.

Ren There’s a really powerful moment later where Joe draws him and reflects that hatred back to him, showing him as this goblin figure consumed by hate that he can’t bear to look at.

Adam So he has to move in over the holidays, to Joe’s farmhouse.

Ren Yeah. And when he sees Joe acting as part of the family, Simon feels the devils return in him. He runs out the house across a turnip field, starring role, and finds the old mill, and in the old mill there’s an old front room with a newspaper from 1943 that crumbles to flakes as he touches it, and an old bitten pipe.

He feels as if he’s being watched, but it’s only three old coats and hats, hanging on pegs, two men’s and one woman’s. He tries them on and parades up and down, but he feels that the old inhabitants of the room don’t mind, and become friendlier to him as he tries on their clothes. He goes to explore the rest of the mill and do you want to read the part where he thinks he sees a man hanging?

Adam ‘It wasn’t totally dark. As his eyes adjusted, he could see several rows of faint blue horizontal slits, set into the walls. And the blue light bounded round, picking out corners of great wooden wheels and axles. Only the mill machinery; nothing to be afraid of.

Then he saw the blond man hanging; from a rope around his neck. Legs dangling, body swaying gently in the breeze that came out of the dark and passed through the door behind Simon. Simon felt his whole body go rigid; felt his knuckles go to his mouth; felt his teeth bite on them, bottling up a scream.

Woods did not run. Father, he thought, and walked towards the hanged man.

Touched him.

And the moment he touched, everything changed shape. It was far too light to be a hanged man.

A sack. Thirty-two years ago, the miller had hauled a sack of grain up on a hoist, and left it hanging, that last day. Over the years the sack had dampened, rotted, burst, spilling the grain on the floor. Now the burst bottom of the sack dangled down in rags, making the hanged amn’s legs. And over the years, the rope had chafed half-through; two pale strands of frayed hemp hung loose, making the hanged man’s hair. And animals had come and eaten the grain lying beneath, leaving only a clotted black mess.

So simple… But he still ran back into the living-room and slammed the door on the mill; he wasn’t interested in the workings of the mill, he told himself.’

Ren Yeah, there’s some good textues in this book.

Adam Well, in fact, my textures are mill-based, so shall we do Texture of the Week?

Ren Yeah, shall we?

(Assorted shuffling and banging)

Adam and Ren (banging) Texture! Texture! Texture of the week!

Ren Yeah, I wondered if you had picked the mill.

Adam I had, in fact I’d picked the second of Simon’s visits to the mill, where he actually gets the water wheel moving.

Ren Mmhmm.

Adam There’s some great sounds, I won’t read all of it but it says:

'Water was running into the mill. All over, different sounds of rushing waters, like little waterfalls. Then the noise of a dustbin being rolled by bin-men, right beneath his feet. A dustbin two inches thick…

Then tong… tong…tong tong tong tong tong a noise like a boy rattling an iron bar along iron railings. The whole mill began to vibrate gently up through the soles of his training-shoes.

Entranced, he moved about. The sounds changed and moved. Went deeper. Roaring, like a lion, chained up underground. Water going shee-shee-shee, like a heart beating. Rumbles like indigestion inside his own body, so deep-down were they. Again, shee-shee-shee, like the blood pounding in his own ears.”

But the actual texture at the end of this was a series of auditory descriptions that I really liked, it focuses on the cog wheels: ’the thick grease on the cogwheels was like blue-black butter’.

Ren Oooh.

Adam Yeah, I really like that. I don’t think it would be as effective if it was just black butter, but blue-black butter. So that’s my texture.

Ren That’s good, yeah, that passage was one I’d picked out as well, but as you’ve done the mill I’ll do turnips.

Adam The texture of turnip.

Ren ‘He could see nothing but turnips; a field of turnips growing in neat geometric rows as far as the eye could see. Their geometry only broken by pale random fringes of weed. The turnips were in full leaf, purply-blue-grey, full of darker blue shadows. The wind, coming across them, lifted their undersides in silvery waves. They whispered together like friends. Somehow, he felt they were happy. The smell of turnip soothed him.’

Adam Aw, it’s like Wordsworth with his daffodils!

Ren ‘They whispered together like friends’! It’s really charming. I feel like he’s spent a lot of time looking at turnips, for this.

Adam Do you think he has a turnip on his writing desk?

Ren I think so! At least one. He's a very good writer.

Adam Oh yeah! But why spend it on so much anger? Anyway, anyway, Simon goes to the old mill and he feels both entranced and repulsed by it. He feels compelled to go into it, although it scares him. But then the rest of the family turn up, Joe leaves his big footprints around the mill so the next time Simon goes he smooshes, or sweeps? I don’t know what the right word is, swibbles? He swibbles up the footsteps.

Ren And Joe says that when he was a kid his mother made him swear on a Bible not to go up to the mill, so we get a bit more dread in there. The next day Simon goes back to the mill, and on a whim, pulls the big lever to start it up.

Adam And that’s where you get all the amazing sounds that I read out.

Ren Yeah. He stops the mill again, but he just has a little go. And then he meets an old man sitting in a wheelbarrow called Tom Mercyfull, who was a First World War veteran, because it’s set in a time when there were still First World War veterans around, even if they were rather elderly. And Tom talks about his father being a ‘hoss brekker’, breaking in horses, and is generally a bit eccentric.

Adam I quite like that he’s given room to breathe. He’s given these quite rambling monologues about life in the country, but I don think they add a bit of texture to the setting. He’s quite an odd figure, you don’t really know which way to take him.

Ren You do get some interesting characters in this book.

Adam Oh yeah, a lot of characters where you’re not quite sure how you’re meant to take them. And a lot of potential charicatures for Joe, in fact. One thing I liked about having the character of Joe was that as soon as we were introduced to these slightly eccentric characters I was picturing how Joe would draw them.

Ren Ahaha, yeah. That’s a good dynamic.

Simon’s spending all his time in his attic bedroom, avoiding the family, and he realises there’s a spot where he can listen in on his mum and Joe, who are generally despairing of Simon and say things like ‘he’s so bloody lonely - it fills the whole house, like the smell of a leaky lav’. He also listens in on them having sex.

Adam Oh gosh, yes. This whole stuff becomes very odd and voyeuristic, basically. It made me think of that Simpsons episode based on Rear Window, where Bart is shut up in his bedroom and goes a bit weird.

Ren Yeah, yeah.

Adam It made me think of that.

Ren Very much that kind of vibe from Simon.

Adam He gets quite strange and voyeuristic being shut away, and finds this crack where he’s like: ‘I can’t go to it!’ and then the next minute his ear’s to it and he’s listening all through the night, like oh dear.

Ren He’s not doing great, is Simon.

Adam I think that’s what’s quite startling about this book, actually. It’s a Young Adult book, and you have all these textured descriptions, but sometimes as an adult reader your mind goes back to: ‘Gosh, he’s really not doing well’.

There’s a bit later where he gets ahold of his Dad’s and loads it up and you’re like: ‘Fricking hecckkk’. Is he actually going to shoot someone? There definitely is that level of potential violence in this book.

Ren But also Robert Westall put in the bit about the cat as well to leaven that a bit and show he’s not just a complete —

Adam He has goodness in him, he’s just very angry! But yes, he rescues this scrawny underfed cat and him and his family help nurse her back to health.

Ren And she has kittens. But yeah, but before he gets hold of this gun he gives his mum a scare by setting up his dad’s old army kit by the side of the bed, to remind her, well, he says ‘to remind you he still exists, you whore!’.

Adam Yeah, I wasn’t sure if we were going to go there. He doesn’t just say it once, he shouts it repeatedly, at his own mum.

Ren He does!

Adam I mean, I haven’t ever read a kids’ book where the protagonist shouts that at his own mum, over and over again.

Ren I know. I have to remind the listeners that this is still us editing out the most troubling parts of this book.

Adam That’s not even the heavy stuff. But yes, as a teacher I’m now like: ‘Right, that’s the purple forms. This is all the safeguarding stuff’. Simon would be having lots of long conversations in the support centre, basically. I do wonder if some art therapy would be good for him, actually, but he’d probably be quite resistant to that, sadly.

Ren Yeah, he’s probably quite opposed to art, at this point. He doesn’t really have any to talk about this with. The closest was the army guy, but the army guy is doing his army things in Aldershot and isn’t really a feelings person anyway.

Adam I guess what makes the book interesting and maybe valuable is that there’s so much written now about toxic masculinity and incels and getting into the heads of violent young men, and I think that in some ways this book does quite a good job of that. There’s something kind of grim and tragic about how there’s so much violence in this book. Joe and his mother are sometimes sympathetic, but when they’re despairing of Simon they react with violence too.

Both Joe and his mum hit Simon, and his mum seemingly quite viciously. I’m not saying any hitting is okay, but there’s a really distressing sequence where his mum hits him over and over and over again. And so it’s a really bleak book in many ways about this deeply troubled boy who is trying to connect and largely there’s just violence. It’s a very violent book.

Which makes it very claustrophic — it's not an easy read!

Ren Yeah, and that’s before we get into the violent story of the scarecrows/the people of the mill.

Adam Oh my gosh, yes, I’d almost forgotten how horrible that is!

Ren It’s really grim.

Adam Like something from a frickin’ Junji Ito manga!

Ren It really is! So, another curiosity of this book is that the scarecrows themselves don’t turn up until…

Adam… two thirds full?

Ren Or more? But we get their foreshadowing with the abandoned room in the mill and the clothes on the back of the door.

Adam The book should be called: The Very Angry Young Man and The Scarecrows That Represented His Anger.

Ren Should it not just be called The Devils?

Adam Yeah, that’s a much better title!

Ren Because quite a lot of the reviews on GoodReads are like ’the scarecrows don’t even turn up until the end!’

Adam Well, it’s true! They’re on all the frigging covers. There’s more turnips than scarecrows in this book.

Ren But where the scarecrows actually come in is that after the explosion of anger at his mum, he runs out into the night into the turnip field, and calls out: ‘help me, help me, come and help me,’ but the book is very clear that it’s not his father's spirit that comes to him, it's the devils. And the next morning the scarecrows appear in the field.

Adam Wearing the clothes.

Ren Wearing the clothes. It says: ‘Two male, one female. The front male was big and burly. The female stood beside him, just on his right. The other male was much further back.’

They have this hierarchy, the scarecrows. Their position is significant. The one behind it says: ‘His head was tipped; facing down at the ground; his cap was pulled well down over where his eyes should have been. He had no face at all; just shadows in damp straw; but you could make a face out of the shadows. Only, each time you looked, the face was different. Somehow you could tell he was up to no good. And you could tell that the big man didn’t know he was there. But the woman did.’

So yeah, there’s this weird dynamic going on with these scarecrows. It takes him a while to realise that they’re wearing the clothes from the mill, but eventually he does and he pushes them down in a rage, but the man and the woman at the front fall in a way that looks obscene to him, as if they’re having sex in the field and he runs away from them and finds Mr Mercyfull who ends up telling him the story of the mill and the miller.

Which is a sordid tale!

Adam It’s the kind of thing that would have been recorded in a murder ballad.

Ren Definitely.

Adam Back in the sixteenth century.

Ren So basically there’s a young miller and an old miller. The young miler inherits the mill from his father, but he didn’t have the desire or aptitude to run it, so he brings in a man called Starkey. Starkey was robbing the young miller, any everyone knew it except him. Starkey gets close with the young miller’s wife, Josie Cragg, and one evening he came over, confronts them and then dissapears. The mill stops working, and it was only several weeks later, when the mill is being reclaimed by the authorities, that they cranked the big water wheel and ‘up came young miller three weeks dead. Jammed in t’wheel he was, an’ went round three times more afore they stopped it’.

Adam And then the police are summararily sick.

Ren Yeah! And In the end both Starkey and Josie were hanged: ‘he at Strangeways in Manchester and her in Holloway in London’. And that’s the grim tale of the miller. And now they’re inhabiting these scarecrows.

Adam Motivated by pure hate. I like that they don’t seem to have any agenda apart from to be hateful.

Ren Yeah, yeah. It says the scarecrows ‘were hungry… to live again. They had lived on their own hate for thirty years, and it was a thin, bitter, unsatisfying thing. Like endlessly drinking vinegar because there was nothing else. The dead, Simon knew now, were always hungry. And they felt entitled. They were coming to prey on the fatness of the living, and he, Simon, had opened the larder door and it could never be closed again’.

Adam Hehehe.

Ren Just some real malevolent scarecrows.

Adam Some really nasty scarecrows!

Ren And then we’re getting to the end of the book —

Adam It is really funny, right, because, you’d think that would be the set-up for the book. But we’re near the end now.

Ren We’re near the end! And this friend of Simon’s from school turns up, Tris la Chard, he’s a joker and we saw him at the beginning of the book where he defuses Bowdon’s bullying by making everyone laugh and he turns up again at the end to be a general chaos gremlin. Because Simon’s mum thinks that having Tris around will help Simon.

Adam And also maybe she just thinks Simon’s such a drag, at least his friend Tris is fun, I’d rather have him around. Because there’s a lot of Simon moping like, ‘why do they like Tris more than me?’ and it’s like, well Simon, let’s be honest mate.

Ren Yeah. Tris starts up the old mill again, just for a lark, bringing it closer to the brink of destruction and Simon thinks that the scarecrows are scared of Tris, perhaps because of his general chaotic demeanour, I don’t know.

Adam Yes, it’s quite odd because this seems quite key to the end of the book and the book’s last line. So I guess Tris is on the side of life? And chaos? And the scarecrows are on the side of… death and? I dunno?

Ren Yeah, uhh. Or are they scared of Tris because Tris nearly destroyed the mill and they’re tied to the mill?

Adam Maybe. But Tris only does that on a whim. He’s just like ‘eh, let’s pull this lever’. And suddenly all these TV crews are around, which is quite an unexpected turn of events in this book.

Ren Yeah, well, after nearly destroying the mill, Tris gets Joe to call the National Trust and be like ‘we have this really old mill that’s in bad disrepair, but maybe you should come and conserve it or something’, and it becomes this kind of cause once the National Trust get there, and the press start digging up the story of the young miller and Starkey and Josie Cragg.

Adam Which is just what those scarecrows want, possibly? They want to be on TV?

Ren Possibly? They definitely start moving closer and closer to the house and after some time of this Joe put on a kind of haunted house?

Adam I mean, this sounds great, to be fair. If I was unsure about Joe this is definitely a redeeming moment, got to admit. His house is apparently rigged out to allow people to do strange haunted house activities? Which wasn’t mentioned before, but okay!

Ren No, this is just among his skills, doing this haunted house ghostie thing.

Adam So him and Simon’s sister and his mum go upstairs to be monsters.

Ren They’re doing this and have lights rigged up and sound and everything. And then things start to get weird. It starts to flicker and bump in ways that it isn’t meant to and there’s a deep voice that says: (deep voice effect) ‘I will be maister in my own house!’ And it’s not Joe's voice — is it Starkey? Or is it the young miller?

Adam It’s clearly a discussion between the ghosts or scarecrows of Starkey and the young miller, battling for supremacy over the farm house.

Ren And Simon realises that he has to run, he runs out into the field.

Adam Into the turnips.

Ren Into the turnips and… fight them. Yeah. I’ll just read a bit of it.

Adam Yeah, it becomes quite strange and impressionistic. The last ten pages of this book are quite feverish.

Ren I’ll just read some of it to give you some idea: ‘He ran. Smashed through the hedge as if it was a rugby-pack. Felt the branches clutch at his shirt and tear away despairingly. He darted between the figures of the scarecrows. Starkey was still lurking at the back. He almost ran into him, into the filthy smell of rotting straw; but swerved just in time. The turnip-leaves, full of rain, lashed at his ankles like whips and threw wet up his trousers. He trampled on the rounded bodies of the turnips as if he was in a black room full of hard solid rugby balls.

He didn’t run for help to the village. He had the ball; nobody else could carry it now. He was alone. Nobody backing-up. This was how it felt to be alone. Not terrible, but marvellous. This was how Father must have felt, driving his jeep at the Flossies… Father hadn’t really been lonely. He’d simply been alone. He felt one with his father at last. Head straight for what you’re scared of, Simon. It’ll usually run away, if you do. If not, you’re no worse off. With Father there he no longer cared if he lived or died.

He was panting now; great gouts of breath. Panting in total darkness, but still running, running for the mill. And somehow he knew, in all that turnip-filled darkness, just exactly where the mill was. If he was tied beyond hope to the mill, the mill was also tied beyond hope to him. It couldn’t escape him, no more than he could escape it.’

I’m now worried that ‘flossies’ is some kind of obscure slur that I’ve never heard of.

Adam Yeah, I don’t know.

Ren The pitfalls of this book.

Adam I like the phrase ’turnip-filled darkness’.

Ren Yeah, that’s good, isn’t it. He’s running into the turnip-filled darkness.

Adam I’ve got no idea, I’ve just got ‘having the quality to floss, downy, fluffy’. We’ll just assume it means that. Let’s hope.

Ren Let’s just go with that. And yeah he’s running into the mill, running at the mill, throwing himself at the wooden lever and making the mill run.

Adam Yeah it makes it sound like he’s spearing himself on the lever, like it’s a sword and he’s impaling himself.

Ren Yeah, yeah. And the mill can't withstand the force of being turned on again. Do you want to read that bit?

Adam ‘There came a crack that made him turn. Then a series of sounds like sheet lightning. A whole snapped beam of timber, sharp as a lance, speared upwards through the roof, sending a patch of tiles up into the air like birds. The windows burst out in hails of shining silver like snowflakes.

And then the roof fell in. For a moment the gable ends towered clean against the sky like bishops’ mitres, and then they too fell inwards. Water spurted, bursting out, finding new channels, making new waterfalls that changed under his very eyes as more of the mill fell. Every time masonry choked it, the water burst out again into a new place. There were pools forming, through which great bubbles of cloudy, floury air burst out, as if something was drowning. And then, with a last rumble, the mill-dam itself was breached; the wheel fell, and water covered everything in a huge spreading black pool that lapped gently around Simon’s feet. The bubbles and ripples continued a long time, and then were still.’ (58.19)

Ren So he has his final showdown with the mill and then he has his final showdown with the scarecrows. And he’s like, avenging his family as he topples the scarecrows.

Adam Which I don’t really get, to be honest! Because Simon’s largely the one who’s given his family a hard time!

Ren Yeah…

Adam Avenge them against what? Against himself?

Ren I don’t know! I honestly don't know!

Adam “This is for all the stuff I did to my family!!”

Ren It seems important to him?

Adam Flying at these scarecrows in a rage is definitely important to Simon, I agree with that.

Ren And it seems to give him some kind of… not closure, but something closer to a truce with Joe, because he’s avenging a scarecrow for Joe as well.

Adam Yeah, I think what’s so funny about this book is that there’s these moments, especially as an adult reading it, where you have to step outside Simon’s — it’s not first person, it’s third person, but it’s so bound to Simon’s experience — sometimes you have to step outside of that, because it’s not obviously a supernatural book, and you have to picture this wildly angry 13-year old throwing himself with rage against some scarecrows.

Ren Yeah! You know.

Adam It works for him. And it’s cheaper than therapy.

Ren Yeah, scarecrow therapy, where you absolutely mangle some scarecrows.

Adam Get it on the NHS.

Ren That’s what the NHS will be soon — just go and hit some scarecrows.

Adam And the scarecrows are mullered, as it were.

Ren And then he wakes up in the turnip field. The symbolic turnip field.

Adam And do you want to read the last few lines, the amazing last line of this book.

Ren ‘“Simon. We’ve been worried sick. We’ve been searching for you everywhere,” said Mum. "Hallo, you great turnip,” said Tris la Chard.’

Adam “Hallo, you great turnip.” (TMWRNJ Jesus voice) Ahhhh.

Ren Ahhh. What a strange book!

Adam Okay, so, Simon needs to accept that after all, he is the turnip? Ahh.

Ren He is the turnip.

Adam Consider the turnip.

Ren He is the turnip because he is in the field that belongs to Joe. And…

Adam So this is him taking his place as one of Joe’s sons, the turnip son. I am the turnip son!

Ren Yeah, yeah. But maybe it means he has friends, he’s not alone because the turnips are friends.

Adam Oh what, so he’s finally lost any touch with reality and he’s just going to think he’s friends with turnips! God, maybe.

I was trying to think, is this maybe about embracing positivity because Tris is at least a cheery fellow, but it’s not really though, because the end of the book is Simon being angry as ever and letting it out on some scarecrows! It’s not like he makes friends with the scarecrows.

RenNo…

Adam I don’t feel like Simon is particularly positive at the end. And also there’s the line about Joe, he says he’s avenging Joe, which is all well and good. He says: ‘Joe had a right to live too,’ which is like, alright, very merciful Simon, a right to live, ‘not maybe a right to mum, Jane or Tris but a right to live’. Like, what? Okay, he doesn’t deserve to be dead, but stay away from mum and sister and friend.

Ren You kind of feel like Robert Westall has given us this… he’s says he’s cooked you a nice dinner and then you look at the plate and it’s just nuts and bolts and a pencil sharpener. Like, is this a nice dinner?

Adam I don’t know what to do with this. It seems like a psychological journey has been gone through, but to what end, I have no idea! Does Simon leave this book a self-actualised young man or a boy who believes he is friends with turnips? Is that the best way to be self-actualised, I’ve got no idea! I dunno.

Ren I’m glad you were equally perplexed by this because I was worried that I just didn’t get it.

Adam No, Ren, to be fair, literally the last line of this book is: ‘“Hallo you great turnip,” said Tris La Chard’. The end. I’ve read Samuel Beckett, right, and that is genuinely more inscrutable a last line than I’ve read in anything by Samuel Beckett.

So listeners, if you —

Ren Sorry if we sounded completely baffled and bemused and befuddled throughout this entire episode.

Adam Yeah, because we are! This book is frickin’ weird and it won the Carnegie medal.

Ren It did!

Adam It’s like if someone was a really good painter and then just painted a side of gammon waltzing with… I don’t want to say a newt because that sounds like surrealist art, but just painted a side of gammon and it’s like, ‘you’ve done that really well, but why?’. I don’t know, there’s something about getting to grips with a lost angry young man, but there’s also a lot of turnips.

So anyway, if any listeners really liked this book — not that I disliked it, I just frickin’ don’t know — but if anyone really gets this last line and is like: ‘Obviously, ‘hallo you great turnip’, why are you not getting this Adam and Ren?’ please just email us or something.

Ren Yes, please. Stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com, we would absolutely love to know.

Adam So hopefully the next book we’re doing is going to be a bit easier for us to get our befuddled heads around. It’s about creepy dolls, right?

Ren Creepy dolls, yeah. And I think it is actually about creepy dolls, they turn up quite early.

Adam Oh good, it’s not called ‘The Creepy Dolls’ and then they turn up right at the end as a symbol for anger.

Ren So yeah, thanks for listening!

Adam Hopefully that made more sense to you than it did to us.

Ren Thank you if you got through this weird episode.

As I said, you can email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com if you have any suggestions of things we might want to cover, and you can rate and review us on apple podcasts and things like that. And we did actually recently discover some nice reviews —

Adam — Oh yeah, some really nice reviews on some website!

Ren Yeah, they were from years ago so sorry that we didn’t see them, but thank you to the kind person in Dublin, I think it was, who said they listened to our podcast when they were going to sleep!

Adam Can you imagine? Listening to our voices when you’re going to sleep?

Ren Me cackling like a demented crow!

Adam Amazing!

Ren But that’s very sweet of you, thanks.

Adam ASMR, I guess. Oh, sign-off.

Ren Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam Uh yeah, go and make some old-fashioned expressions at some turnips, creepy kids!

Ren Yeah, see you next time spooky kids! Bye!

Adam Bye!