rejectamentalist manifesto

You know the picturesque when you see it. Higgledy-piggledy, a winding country path, overhanging hedgerow, tumbledown cottages. You can point at it, and sometimes that’s the best you can do, because when you try to define it it becomes evasive.

That disinclination to settle into meaning is constitutive of the category. One of its founding theorists, Uvedale Price, in his 1794 Essay on the Picturesque, gropingly describes it as ‘an uncertain idea of some character, which was not precisely beauty’. But ‘the cultural importance of the Picturesque’, insist Stephen Copley and Peter Garside in The Politics of the Picturesque, ‘stands in direct proportion to the theoretical imprecision of its vocabulary’.

You know it when you see it. The word, pilfered from Italian pittoresco, has at its heart the likeness to a picture. Pictureness. The picturesque is the framing and formulation of a landscape, and it inheres in the gaze. Not precisely beautiful, but pretty. Charming. Scenic.

But inextricable from the picturesque is a countertradition, exemplified by that nameless poem. It manifests, too, in a plethora of more overt and less restrained examples. It is not a contradiction to the picturesque, but its bad conscience.

A Year in the Country is a project of ‘searching for an expression of an underlying unsettledness to the English bucolic countryside dream; an exploration of an otherly pastoralism’. From this comes a book, discordant and terrifying albums entirely constructed from sounds of the hinges of a front garden gate. The furniture of the picturesque repurposed to provoke unease.

The video game Sir, You Are Being Hunted is set in what it calls ‘the spooky countryside’, where the figures of the traditional rural picturesque have become predators: scarecrows, huntsman, landowners. Its occasionally laboured steampunk kookiness can be underwhelming, but its soundscapes and its ab-pastoral uncanny landscapes are genuinely unsettling. Digital crepuscularity skewing the randomly-generated picturesque.

The 1980 episode of Hammer House of Horror, ‘Children of the Full Moon’, opens with a slow pan of picturesque imagery: a gnarled tree, undergrowth, dense flowers. A child sings ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ as she strokes a lamb. She turns to camera, and we see her blood-smeared face. She has torn out the animal's throat. A heavy-handed horror bait-and-switch subversion of the picturesque.

There are examples beyond number: more Hammer, like the 1966 village horrors The Reptile and The Witches; that maypole nightmare The Wicker Man, of course; several of the ghost stories of M.R. James, such as ‘The Uncommon Prayer Book’, set as it is in a ‘highly picturesque’ area. Those strange pastorals of the film-maker Ben Wheatley. The most disturbing moments of Peter Strickland’s extraordinary 2012 meta-horror, Berberian Sound Studio, are snippets from an imagined documentary about the English downs, visited by tourists, bucolic Englishness made uncanny by their and our gaze.

This bad picturesque works by skewing the framed scene, the picture of which the -esque is expression. It mispronounces the terms of the picturesque, so let mispronounciation give it a name. 

This is the pictureskew.

The pictureskew is one element of a whole fabric of affect and aesthetic, brilliantly outlined by Robert MacFarlane in his work on the ‘English Eerie’. There is a slippage between uncovering that eerie as an existing aesthetic in various works; expounding it as a methodology of reading in other, perhaps less overt or obviously so inflected, works; and as a potential artistic practice itself. That is neither unusual nor criticism: it is part of what can make such paradigms rich. The same is true, for example (not unrelatedly) of post-Derridean ‘hauntology’, deployed as it has been in music criticism and in music. And historically it is true of the picturesque itself, which was from its 18th-century birth an unstable negotiation between a theory of aesthetics and an aesthetic style.

Each iteration of this (post-)English Eerie fits its own moment. Now in this anguished anthropocene we might expect waves of what the poet Joyelle McSweeney calls ‘the necropastoral’, ‘a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of “nature” which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects.’

It is telling that McSweeney focuses on the pastoral. There will, concomitantly, come to be more and more mutation and death in the pictureskew too.

The discussion here is mostly addendum to Macfarlane’s, and predicated on one of few points where of respectful disagreement. Because he writes of M.R. James that ‘[l]andscape … is never a smooth surface or simple stage-set, there to offer picturesque consolations’, and calls the eerie ‘a counter-narrative to the recognisable traditions of the picturesque and the pastoral in British place-art’. But to suggest that its consolations hold is to take the picturesque at its own unconvincing word. That very claim is what the pictureskew rebukes. 

The rural eerie is not precisely coterminous with the pictureskew: there are unquiet landscapes that are more and less picturesque, more and less pictureskewed. But not only is the pictureskew a subtradition of that eerie, but it is a centrally important one. And its categories spread like the filament of mycelium.

Any genealogy of the pictureskew needs one for the picturesque itself.

In 1792, William Gilpin, in Three Essays on the Picturesque, ruminated on ‘that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’, for which neither of the two aesthetic categories offered by Burke in 1757 quite worked: it was not the pleasing, relaxing beauty based vaguely on ‘smoothness’; nor did it fit with the opposed term, that favourite of the Romantics, the Sublime — a sheer vastness provoking awe, if comingled with pleasure, of which, Burke says, ’terror is in all cases whatsoever the ruling principle’. It was between those two, said Gilpin, in perfectly composed images of rolling hills, tangled trees and rivers and cottages, was the picturesque.

After Gilpin came Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, John Ruskin and others, through the centuries, developing that seminal post-Burke take. For Gilpin the picturesque, unlike that smooth beautiful, was variegated – ‘broken’, ’rugged’, ’rough’. And nature needs help: composition is its weak point. Gilpin therefore instructs the reader in how to locate the gaze – favour low viewpoints, direct attention, not from a godlike (sublime) vantage down, but up. And where nature lets you down, change it in your representation, and make picturesque with artifice. Do not be restricted to ‘a painted survey, a mere map’. ‘[D]eem not Art defective, which divides, / Rejects, or recombines: but rather say, / ’Tis her chieff excellence’.

For all its agreeableness, its charm, Gilpin knows that enabling and underlying that picturesque gaze are startling dreams of violence. 

A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant. … But if we introduce it in a picture, it … ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps.

And central, too, to the picturesque, alongside such brutality, is Englishness. 

In point of fact, Dora Wiebenson and others have shown how much the concept was influenced by the writings and garden-designs of France. And the very Englishness of the picturesque does not mean the concept does not, and did not always, have wider application and resonance: Ruskin located the quality in French cottages and in Venice. It has long been globalised. But it was first systematically developed in Britain, if often by Scots, and associated both as theory and style, including by Continental writers, with England. The association was deliberately propogated.

That sense still informs us. The picturesque is, somehow, defining of an English pastoral, of Constable’s Haywain, of little villages, of the poem’s ‘Cotswold rarities’.

Picturesque has been a propaganda of the English Imaginary, a cloying scent lingering around Albion like honeysuckle around a cottage door, inextricable from the Englishness of the Mind — ‘the sight’, as Stanley Baldwin had it, ‘of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land’. 

It is key, too, to a mooncalf socialist patriotism. Orwell’s ‘old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning’ are its most famous evocation from his egregious ‘Socialism and the English Genius’, but in his paean to ‘smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes’ he outlines exactly that undulating, rough variety of the picturesque. ‘As western people go, the English are very highly differentiated’, he says, describing their ‘knobby faces, their bad teeth’ — there is that variety and roughness again, now not only in the landscape in the English themselves. Here they are a picturesque people, and Orwell’s is a socialist picturesque.

The picturesque is all these things. It remains an organising principle, at work in cities no less than in the country. Not uncontested, by any means, but with real, bureaucratic, institutional, ideological, power.

The modern urban picturesque flowered after World War 2, over drinks in the Bride of Denmark in Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1. It was a densely, lavishly decorated place: all engraved mirrors and trompe l’oeil murals; brewers’ posters; a turtle shell. It contained a tatty stuffed lion, self-consciously self-effacingly English reference to a self-conscious, self-effacing post-imperial Englishness — though not nearly post-imperial enough.

The Bride of Denmark was not, in fact, the public house it was designed to resemble, but a private club. It was a ‘pub’, the dream of a pub, a metapub. At the time of its construction, in 1946, it was made to look always already smogged by decades of cigarettes, and brimmed with donated bric-a-brac and salvage from bomb sites, those ‘mutilated members around in heaps’ repurposed as pre-emptive nostalgia, designed and made by Hubert de Cronin Hastings, Hugh Casson, James Richards, Nikolaus Pevsner and other stalwarts of the journal Architectural Review.

There as post-war blinking began, in that constructed picturesque of English conviviality they constructed another picturesque, a new urbanism, that, riffing on landscape, they called ‘Townscape’. They conceived of it as a theory of liberty against authority, of English individualism and variety. Townscape was, explicitly, a gently modernist urban extension of the picturesque. In the 1949 editorial that was as close to a manifesto as it got, Hastings drew on Uvedale Price to argue that picturesque was ‘radical’, repudiating aesthetic totalitarianism — it abjured grandiose (foreign) vistas or plazas, for an emergent order of agreeable, moderate gallimaufrey, a domesticated surrealism of quirkiness, all combined with what one practitioner called ‘the scenic use of existing buildings’. A respectful continuity with the past.

As Richard Williams has argued, it retained the detached, aristocratic viewpoint of the picturesque, wherein even labour is a spectacle: ‘The mode of vision it proposed is one of privileged play’.

In an astonishing passage from Gordon Cullen’s The Concise Townscape from 1961, buildings are imagined as bourgeois guests at a polite dinner party at precisely that point where they are not too drunk, but just drunk enough to play that privileged play: ‘out of the straightjacket of orthodox manners and conformity real human beings begin to emerge … Miss X’s sharp but good-natured wit is just the right foil to Major Y’s somewhat simple exuberance. And so on. It begins to be fun. Conformity gives way to an agreement to differ within a recognised tolerance of behaviour.’

It begins to be fun. Picturesque encourages a mannered eccentricity, a certain naughtiness – within limits, of course – all the better to reinforce the social order. ‘[B]ats on the bottle’, as the poem has it of those veering nightfliers, ‘rescuing the past’.

Which rescue of the past brings us to Poundbury.

Poundbury, in the outskirts of Dorchester is a toytown for Prince Charles. Here his architectural views have been given reign. It is an ‘unashamedly traditional’, low, zoning-free faux Georgiania, of car-less dream alleys and not-too-high towers, a market-town fantasia. That the market-hall design was sponsored by a millionaire greetings-card entrepreneur seems a bit on the nose. Poundbury, a regular target of critical scorn – in Stephen Bayley’s words, a ‘sterile, suffocating dormitory town … the furniture floor of a provincial department store in 1954, translated into architecture … fake, heartless … grimly cute’ – is ground zero for anyone who doubts the picturesque’s concrete, lived, authoritarian reality. The paths are gravel for appearances’ sake, for the sake of the picture: that gravel spreads and is a nightmare for pushchairs does not matter. 

Many of the 25-year-old exteriors of Poundbury have been constructed with fake bricked-up windows, emulations of the real avoidance-mechanism dating from the 1696 Window Tax.

In Poundbury, strict rules disallow illuminated signs, or clothes-driers, aerials, metres, air extractors, ventilation openings, dustbins, solar cells being visible from the street. And yet here are unwindows, a facile and putrid kitsch homage to a devastating, unsanitary and hated repressive measure, that condemned people to unventilated darkness, is a tasteful detail.

Here, the bad picturesque lives, or is at least undead.

Another from the sequence. 1952. Skewing the picture.

Christmas. Postman mouse, watching the mapmaker trials of a barnstormer. Poor men’s flowers, schoolhouse ghost. Rook parliaments taking risks with food, bees and their scents: a Persian half-hour.

In the winter, the snow comes down, and looks momentarily lovely as snow always does. Pretty as a picture. But try to clear it away, as infrastructure demands, and that recalcitrant gravel comes with it. Such are the mapmaker trials of the Poundburian, living in notionally civically educational simulacra, haunted by unease: ‘Poor men’s flowers, / schoolhouse ghost.’

That unease has always been there, just as the picturesque has always been contested. Any invocation of it, even by an adherent, has to involve apology.

Townscape, said Hastings, must rescue the picturesque from the ‘frivolous embroidery’ with which it had become associated. Turn to definitions: the picturesque is ‘visually attractive, especially in a quaint or charming way’. How damning, with such very faint praise. The same terms recur: delightful, pretty, lovely, pleasant, scenic. Charming. Quaint.

Say ‘picturesque’ and what you bring forth is chintz, china shepherdesses and chocolate boxes in at least as much quantity as tumbledown stiles and rolling hills. Those distasteful ‘poor men’s flowers’ to which the poem adverts have long been visible amid the more successfully artful undergrowth. It is only a very short step from pretty to pretty-pretty, from picturesque to charming to quaint to twee. Hence, as John Macarthur argues, ‘[m]any think of the picturesque with a tinge of disgust’, as ‘a too easy reconciliation of past and present’, ‘a cloying whiff of pot-pourri, that it is ‘trivial, sentimental and ultimately disgusting’.

Much of this aesthetic disgust is class scorn, as smug as such scorn tends to be. But there is a real venom to it too, and/or an unease, undermining the superiority scorn demands. This gives the anti-picturesque animus an anxiety of embattlement. The sense that in the picturesque might be threat. Because the brutality that undergirds the gaze of the picturesque is not restricted to taking an imaginary mallet to a displeasingly unfucked temple in a sketch.

John Ruskin excoriates the picturesque ideal as ‘an eminently heartless one’. 

[T]he lover of it seems to go forth into the world in a temper as merciless as its rocks. All other men feel some regret at the sight of disorder and ruin. He alone delights in both; it matters not of what. ... The shattered window, opening into black and ghastly rents of wall, the foul rag or straw wisp stopping them, the dangerous roof, decrepit floor and stair, ragged misery, or wasting age of the inhabitants, – all these conduce, each in due measure, to the fullness of his satisfaction. What is it to him that the old man has passed away his 70 years in helpless darkness and untaught waste of soul? The old man has at last accomplished his destiny, and filled the corner of a sketch, where something unsightly was wanting.

Ruskin’s denunciation of the aestheticising picturesque is bracing. But it does not go far enough, or address the beam in its own eye. It is not a criticism of the picturesque tout court, but of its most vulgar iterations, which he calls the ‘lower picturesque’, and to which, as part of a shout-out to Turner, he counterposes the ‘noble picturesque’. One of the crucial elements of which is that of knowing. The picturesque here is unconscionable insofar as it is unconscious.

The noble picturesque does understand the reality on which it gazes. It is acutely aware of ‘suffering, of poverty or decay nobly endured by unpretending strenth of heart. Nor only unpretending but unconscious’. The unconscious returns, but whereas in the lower picturesque it is in the gaze, for the noble picturesque it must be in at what the gaze knowingly gazes — ‘the unconscious confession of the facts of distress and decay … no pity asked for, nor contempt feared’. The gazer may, should, feel sympathy, perhaps even, with suitable propriety, donate to charity or some such. But though the noble picturesque is melancholy, as Macarthur points out, it is still predicated on the naturalisation of poverty, misery, ‘distress and decay’. If anything, perhaps, even more so.

Anne Bermingham has traced the relationship of the picturesque to the enclosures, the mass expropriation of common land for private landowners. ‘In its celebration of the irregular, preenclosed landscape, the picturesque harkened back nostalgically to an old order of rural paternalism’, she writes, ‘idealized a nature that was in fact rapidly vanishing’, ‘sentimentalized the loss’ of agrarian paternalism, ‘mystified the agency of social change so that fate, and not the economic decisions of the landowning class, seemed responsible. In this respect, the picturesque represented an attempt to wipe out the fact of enclosure and to minimise its consequences.’ Paradoxically, those very enclosures that it sentimentally obscured could be the mechanisms by which the picturesque spread.

In 1816, Humphrey Repton published Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. He included a before-and-after picture of the view from his Essex garden – artfully constructed with paper folds – to show precisely how he made it picturesque, by enclosing common land.

‘[B]y the Appropriation of 25 yards of Garden, I have obtained a frame to my landscape.’ By the planting of that Garden Repton he was able to hide the butcher’s shop that displeased him, and, pointedly, to preclude the poor — in his ‘before’ picture, a disabled begger — from coming close to his garden and so much as seeing it. All because when his view ‘looks as if it belonged to another’, it ‘robs the mind of the pleasure derived from appropriation’.

It is not that with these improvements Repton is able to forget the poor and the shop. He draws attention to what he has hidden, and how he has hidden it. The obscuring is visibly invisible. He can now pretend the poor are not there while knowing they are. This picturesque Tory gaze is not only expropriating and exclusionary, though it is that: as aware of ‘distress and decay’ as is Ruskin, but without even the melancholy with which Ruskin excuses that awareness, it is sadistic. It does not forget: it remembers to efface.

The disgust the picturesque evokes is multifarious. Righteous unease at this obfuscatory aestheticising manoeuvre; and unease at the returned repressed itself, the abject reality the picturesque disavows.

The unease, the eerie, the uncanny, the horror of the pictureskew, then, is not some alien infection: it is there in the picturesque itself. The pictureskew is the picturesque with its viewpoint moved a hair to one side or the other so what the constructed view obscures is just visible again. The picturesque itself made abject. The pictureskew sees not what this picturesque misses, but what it unsees.

Distinct from the ostentatious shock value of the undercut picturesque, as in the Hammer House of Horror, or in the subtler constructed unease of the too-close picturesque attention, as in Berberian Sound Studio, the insight that there is no picturesque without pictureskew, or vice versa, is particularly evident in pieces wherein the eerieness and anxiety are vivid but seem not to be deliberately or overtly deployed. They above all are picturesque and pictureskew at once.

Nowhere is this imbrication more clear than in works for children.

As Jeremy Fisher gazes skyward on a picturesque little river, the ravening rises from the abyss.

For the writer Sarah Lotz, it was the most full-on torture-porn horrifying of Potter’s works, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, that provoked horror and awe. In fact all Potter’s (astonishing) works are pictureskew, combining echt English picturesque with ruthless unsentimentality about the brute cruelty in its details, unto death.

All that violence, secret and unsecret, un/seen.

And, and yet, the pictureskew’s horror is not only in such disavowed brutality, the returned, but in the irruption of something more vast and alien and weird, a groping for the sublime of which it is uneasy relation. Perhaps the evasive specificity of the ‘eerie’ is that it mediates those two tendencies, of the repressed and unimaginable, unsublatable as they are. Because what the skewed picturesque sweats is not only the uncanny, but the abcanny.

The great horror writer Ramsey Campbell tells, in ‘My Roots Exhumed’, of his introduction to supernatural horror. As a very young child he read a Rupert Bear annual, containing the story ‘Rupert’s Christmas Tree’. Which tree uproots itself, stalks home through the woods at night. ‘The panel that was altogether too much for me’, he says, ‘shows the tree clinging with clawlike roots to a rock against a moonlit sky and leaning towards Rupert’.

Rupert’s pages are full of the chthonic unquiet.

They are full of figures as weird and terrifying as that ambulatory tree. 

They are stalked by Raggety, the avatar of unfriendly undergrowth.

They hint at hedgerow gnosis.

And, repeatedly, they tip into the existentially destabilising dark sublime. Nutwood is a place of the most thoroughgoing and frankly twee picturesque – and it borders an infinite void.

There have been at least two comics introducing Mary Tourtel’s bear to Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. And the joke is funny enough, but if it lands with something of a thud, that is not because it is too much of a stretch, but because it is not. Because it did not really need saying.

These days, if the great 19th-century nature writer Richard Jefferies is celebrated, it is for his 1885 post-apocalyptic After London. But his neglected children’s book, Wood Magic, from 1881, is a foundational text of the pictureskew. A vivid depiction of a country boy growing up in a Wiltshire farm, communing with animals and landscape, it is also an extraordinary vicious fable of war and revolution in the undergrowth, of savagery – and of the wrenching sublime of space-time.

As the two armies of King Kapchack the Magpie and Choo Hoo the wood pigeon meet, an eclipse occurs. Bucolic brutality and the bleak infinite combine, in this child’s bedtime story, hurtling towards horror.

Already the advancing hosts seemed to feel the shock of the combat, when a shadow fell upon them, and they observed the eclipse of the sun. Till that moment … neither the rank and file nor the leaders had noticed the gradual progress of the dark semicircle over the sun's disk. The ominous shadow fell upon them, still more awful from its suddenness. A great horror seized the serried hosts. The prodigy in the heavens struck the conscience of each individual; with one consent they hesitated to engage in carnage with so terrible a sign above them.

In that sidereal horror what breaks through the cracks in the pictureskew is a void of dread and inhuman deep time, amoral infinities, or worse. In the countryside, remembered Alison Uttley, ‘[t]his feeling of the proximity of another world than ours always pervaded me. I might be seized by a tree’s long branches and held captive; I might enter a rock and have to stay there for a thousand years; I was invisible and aware of other invisible shapes around me, claiming me’.

The top of Enid Blyton’s Faraway tree reaches into strange lands, but, as one character warns, ‘[s]ometimes the lands aren’t very nice. Once there was the Land of Bad Temper. That was horrid. And a little while ago there was the Land of Smacks’. In the canopy of the picturesque tree are entire ontologies of rage and pain. 

This should be no surprise: from its birth, recall, the picturesque was conceived as a mediation between the paltry beautiful and the awesome Real behind our symbolic order, the unrepresentable, the unthinkable, beyond language.

Another poem from the sequence. From 1953.

No trace of fear, A capful o’ crabs ormering under a Dutch roof. Mountains cast their shadows, an otter in Assam smocks, and smocking gannets on Ailsa Craig. Cornish mows when carters cry a fruit grower’s diary.

‘[D]elightful horror,’ said Burke, ‘is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime’. Delightful? Perhaps. For Schopenhauer it was caused ‘by the sight of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual, and threatening him with annihilation … a mere magnitude in space and time, whose immensity reduces the individual to nought’. How can the picturesque carry out its task to mediate the everyday with that?

It cannot, of course. There is no mediation. ‘No trace of fear’, the poem insists, protesting too much, as questioningly convincing as is Burke’s ‘delightful’. After all, ‘mountains’ – those paradigmatic locales of the sublime – ‘cast their shadows’.

The best that the picturesque can do is attempt a holding position, and it will be unstable and sublime-stained. Uvedale Price, sharper than Gilpin, knows this. ‘The limbs of huge trees shattered by lightning or tempestuous winds, are in the highest degree picturesque; but whatever is caused by those dreaded powers of destruction must always have a tincture of the sublime.’ Ruskin goes further: in a brilliant, horrifying phrase, he calls the picturesque ‘parasitical sublimity’.

The pictureskew is picturesque that knows it is a parasite.

We see this parasitism in the repeat appearance, in picturesques, of a generally very saccharine Pan. Most embarrassing is the ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ chapter of The Wind in the Willows, which tries to gloss the sublime as a kind of ecstatic twee.

[T]he rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. … In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir's shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder. … [Ratty and Mole saw] the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns … saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners’

And so, lengthily, on.

But the sublime will not be domesticated. Even here, comes terror: ’Afraid!’ says Ratty. ‘Of Him? O, never, never! And yet – and yet – O, Mole, I am afraid!' And there is just a glint, familiar to readers of that sadistic visionary Arthur Machen, of his most un-saccharine, monstrous Great God Pan.

The sublime will always push through, and the picture will skew.

The sequence of untitled poems that have punctuated this piece are from a magazine started in 1927 by J Robertson Scott, and still publishing today. The Countryman is now a glossy monthly with a circulation of 23,000, full of photos of idyllic villages, curio-mongering about historic farming techniques, chitchat on English folklore and nature. In The Making of English National Identity, Krishan Kumar says the journal did ‘much to spread — not necessarily intentionally — the idyllic image of the countryside for the townsman’.

Not intentional at first, certainly. Scott was a thoughtful, reformist editor, who had written excoriatingly on rural working conditions, and who described his own commitment to the country as ‘not a devotion to a scenic and airy annex to the towns, the abode of an interestingly bucolic and out-of-date folk, which was so pleasant to recreate in’. He was committed to rural sociology, education, agriculture, ‘the rural advance’, as well as to countryside aesthetics. But the Second World War changed the nature of all those things, and, vastly, of the land ownership on which they were based. As the picturesque modernisers planned Townscape in the Bride of Denmark, The Countryman, too, anxiously, slowly, began its own change.

’In every number’, Scott wrote in 1947, in his farewell as editor, ‘The Countryman has tried to give its town readers a sense of the countryside beyond the picturesque.’ But the aspiration was beyond, rather than without, because though it might hope to exceed it, it could not escape the picturesque. And as the balance between the country as workplace and home and that of scenery shifted, The Countryman shuffled slowly towards a new role as a minor part of the heritage industry, and the maw of a picturesque.

That picturesque, latterly, is relatively skew-free. But the poems quoted come from early in the tenure of the second editor, John, son of Stafford, Cripps, in those transformative post-war days when its picturesque was contested, and anxious – and violently skewing.

Here are those three exemplary poems once again.

And here they are as they were published.

Their author is history and contingency.

These fractured, trenchant, modernist, skewed investigations of the bucolic are the magazine’s contents lists, made poems by the gaze alone. Unaltered but for punctuation. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, issue after issue of The Countryman – just below its minatory B-movie-title subhead, ‘comes from the country’ – presented such texts. The bricolage of the troubled countryside, straining against its own picturesque, making these most poignant found pictureskews.

Here is one last authorless poem. Perhaps the most extraordinary of the collection, an early specimen, from 1949.

Roses, castles and lozenges The other Garden of Eden Man against ants     Badger funerals Too many ministries? Peruvian Lillies Highland holiday No digging and all that Are the small villages threatened?

Let us attempt a reading.

‘Lozenges’, a heraldic term, the sign of a widow. We open, then, on sweet pastoral smells, antique defences – and on loss, those who lament, who have been left behind by death. From there a veer and pitch to a void, a shadow theology of simulacrum godhead. ’The other Garden of Eden’: the sublime made not for us. And that garden is, all gardens are, violent, harrowed not by a snake but by ‘man against ants’, a war of human and the alien, the carapaced. Then a space, a breath, and here is memento mori, a necropastoral, the beast ceremonials of those badger funerals. ‘Too many ministries?’ In the aftermath and shadow of world-wracking conflict, the land itself is godsick, with a surfeit of the numinous. ‘Peruvian Lillies   Highland holiday’: the picturesque and -skew goes international, global, precisely beyond control or design as the empire itself declines, from which ruling-class melancholy there can be no escape, no vacation, because a jaunt will only take you to the top of this little island itself. ‘No digging and all that’: the injunction dies away as soon as it is spoken, in the uncertainty and exhaustion of new agriculture, shamed, all countryside opinions now always already cliché.

And then come a heart-breaking query. The fear of the eradication of this dream England, that is dead but will not die, the terror of the end of the picturesque expressed in the picturesque, gnawing at itself, an autophagous picturesque becoming pictureskew.

‘Are the small villages threatened?’

Yes.

That's why I was so excited. And not just for me, but for Annie. Aylsa, her mum, said she didn't see the big deal and why was I a sentimentalist, but I knew Annie couldn't wait. She might have been 14, but when it came to this I was sure she was still a little girl, dreaming of stockings by the chimney. Whenever it's my turn to take Annie - me and Aylsa have alternated since the divorce - I do my best on the 25th.

I admit Aylsa made me feel bad. I was dreading Annie's disappointment. So I can hardly tell you how delighted I was when I found out that for the first time ever I was going to be able to make a proper celebration of it.

Don't get me wrong. I haven't got shares in YuleCo, and I can't afford a one-day end-user licence, so I couldn't have a legal party. I'd briefly considered buying from one of the budget competitors like XmasTym, or a spinoff from a non-specialist like Coca-Crissmas, but the idea of doing it on the cheap was just depressing. I wouldn't have been able to use much of the traditional stuff, and if you can't have all of it, why have any? (XmasTym had the rights to Egg Nog. But Egg Nog's disgusting.) Those other firms keep trying to create their own alternatives to proprietary classics like reindeer and snowmen, but they never take off. I'll never forget Annie's underwhelmed response to the JingleMas Holiday Gecko.

No, like most people, I was going to have a little MidWinter Event, just Annie and me. So long as I was careful to steer clear of licenced products we'd be fine.

Ivy decorations you can still get away with; holly's a no-no but I'd hoarded a load of cherry tomatoes, which I was planning to perch on cactuses. I wouldn't risk tinsel but had a couple of brightly-coloured belts I was going to drape over my aspidistra. You know the sort of thing. The inspectors aren't too bad: they'll sometimes turn a blind eye to a bauble or two (which is just as well, because the fines for unlicensed Christmas™ celebrations are astronomical).

So I'd been getting all that ready, but then the most extraordinary thing happened. I won the lottery!

I mean, I didn't win the lottery. But I was one of a bunch of runners-up, and it was a peach of a prize. An invitation to a special, licensed Christmas™ party in the centre of London, run by YuleCo itself.

When I read the letter I was shaking. This was YuleCo, so it would be the real deal. There'd be Santa™, and Rudolph™, and Mistletoe™, and Mince Pies™, and a Christmas Tree™ with presents underneath it.

That last was what I couldn't get over. It felt so forlorn, putting my newspaper-wrapped presents next to the aspidistra, but ever since YuleCo bought the rights to coloured paper and under-tree storage, the inspectors had clamped down on Aggravated Subarborial Giftery. I kept thinking about Annie being able to reach down and fish out her present from under needle-dropping branches.

Maybe I shouldn't have told Annie, just surprised her on the day itself, but I was too excited. And if I'm honest, partly I told her because I wanted to make Aylsa jealous. She'd always made such an issue of how she didn't miss Christmas™.

'Just think,' I said, 'we'll be able to sing carols legally - oh, sorry, you hate carols, don't you...' I was awful.

Annie was almost sick with excitement. She changed her online nick to tistheseason, and as far as I could work out she spent all her time boasting to her poor jealous friends. I'd peek at the screen when I brought her tea: the chatboxes were full of names like tinkerbell12 and handfulofflowers, and all I could see were exclamations like 'noooo!?!?!? crissmass?!?! soooo kewl!!!!!' before she blocked the screen demanding privacy.

'Have a heart,' I told her. 'Don't rub your friends' noses in it,' but she just laughed and told me they were arranging to meet on the day anyway, and that I didn't know what I was on about.

When she woke up on the 25th, there was a stocking™ waiting for Annie at the end of her bed, for the first time ever, and she came into breakfast carrying it and beaming. I took enormous pleasure in waving my YuleCo pass and saying, perfectly legally, 'Happy Christmas™, darling.' I was glad that the ™ was silent.

I'd sent her present to YuleCo, as instructed. It would be waiting under the tree. It was the latest console. More than I could afford but I knew she'd love it. She's great at video games.

We set out early. There were a reasonable number of people on the streets, all of them doing that thing we all do on the 25th, where you don't say anything illegal, but you raise your eyebrows and smile a holiday greeting.

Technically it was a regular weekday bus schedule, but of course half the drivers were off 'sick'.

'Let's not wait,' Annie said. 'We've got loads of time. Why don't we walk?'

'What have you got me?' I kept asking her. 'What's my present?' I made as if to peer into her bag but she wagged her finger.

'You'll see. I'm very pleased with your present, Dad. I think it's something that'll mean a lot to you.'

It shouldn't have taken us too long, but somehow we were slow, and we dawdled, and chatted, and I realised quite suddenly that we were going to be late. That was a shock. I started to hurry, but Annie got sulky and complained. I refrained from pointing out whose idea walking had been in the first place. We were running quite a while behind time as we got to central London.

'Come on,' Annie kept saying. 'Are we nearly there?'

There were a surprising number of people on Oxford Street. Quite a crowd, all wearing that happy secret expression. I couldn't help smiling too. Suddenly Annie was running on ahead, then coming back to haul me along. Now she wanted to speed up. I kept having to apologise as I bumped into people.

It was mostly kids in their twenties, in couples and little groups. They parted indulgently as Annie dragged me, ran on ahead, dragged me.

There really were an astonishing number of people.

I could hear music up ahead, and a couple of shouts. I tensed, but they didn't sound angry. 'Annie!' I called, nonetheless. 'Come here, love!' I saw her skipping through the crowd.

And it was really a crowd. Was that a whistle? Where'd everyone come from? I was jostled, tugged along as if all these people were a tide. I caught a glimpse of one young bloke, and with a start of alarm I saw he was wearing a big jumper with a red-nosed deer on it. I just knew to look at him he didn't have a licence. 'Annie, come here,' I was calling, but I got drowned out. A young woman next to me was raising her voice and singing a note, very loud.

'Weeeeee...'

The lad she was with joined in, and then his friend, and then a bunch of people beside them, and in a few seconds everyone was doing it, a mixture of good voices and terrible ones, combining into this godawful loud squeal.

'Weeeeee...' and then, with impeccable timing, all the hundreds of people sort of caught each others' eyes, and their song continued.

'...wish you a merry Christmas, We wish you a merry Christmas...'

'Are you mad?' I screamed, but no one could hear me over that bloody illegal rumpty-tum. Oh my god. I knew what was happening.

We were surrounded by radical Christmasarians.

I was spinning around, shouting for Annie, running after her, looking out for police. There was no way the streetcams wouldn't spot this. They'd send in the Yule Squad.

I saw Annie through the crowd - goddammit, more people kept coming! - and ran for her. She was beckoning to me, looking around anxiously, and I was batting people out of the way, but as I approached I saw her look up at someone beside her.

'Dad!' she shouted. I saw her eyes widen in recognition, and then - did I see a hand grab her and snatch her away?

'Annie!' I was screaming as I reached where she'd been. But she was gone.

I was panicking: she's an intelligent girl and it was broad daylight, but whose was that bloody hand? I called her phone.

'Dad,' she answered. The reception was appalling in this crowd. I was bellowing at her, asking where she was. She sounded tense, but not frightened. '... OK... I'll be... see... a friend... at the party.'

'What?' I was yelling. 'What?'

'At the party,' she said, and I lost the signal.

Right. The party. That's where she'd make her way. I controlled myself. I shoved through the crowd.

It was getting more bolshy. It was turning into a tinsel riot.

Oxford Street was jammed, I was in the middle of what was suddenly thousands of protesters. It took me anxious ages to make headway through the demonstration. What had seemed an anonymous mob suddenly sprang into variety and colour. Everyone was marching. I was passing different contingents.

Where the hell had all these banners come from? Slogans bobbed overhead like flotsam. FOR PEACE, SOCIALISM AND CHRISTMAS; HANDS OFF OUR HOLIDAY SEASON!; PRIVATISE THIS. One placard was everywhere. It was very simple and sparse: the letters TM in a red circle, with a line through them.

She'll be OK, I thought urgently. She said as much. I was looking around as I made my way toward the party, only a few streets away now. I was taking in the demo.

These people were crazy! It wasn't that I didn't think their hearts were in the right places, but this was no way to achieve things. All they were going to do was bring down trouble on everyone. The cops would get here any moment.

Still, I had to admire their creativity. With all the costumes and colours, it looked amazing. I have no idea how they'd smuggled this stuff through the streets, how they'd organised this. It must have been online, which means some pretty sophisticated encryption to fool the copware. Each different section of the march seemed to be chanting something different, or singing songs I hadn't heard for years. I was walking through a winter wonderland.

I went by a contingent of Christians all carrying crosses, singing carols. Right in front of them was a group of badly dressed people selling copies of a left wing newspaper and carrying placards with a photograph of Marx. They'd superimposed a Santa hat on him. 'I'm dreaming of a red Christmas,' they sang, badly.

We were beside Selfridges now, and a knot of people had stopped by the windows full of the usual mix of perfume and shoes. The demonstrators were looking at each other, and back at the glass. Over on a side street, a few passers-by were staring at the extraordinary spectacle. It brought me up short to see 'regular' shoppers - it felt as if there was no one but the marchers on the streets.

I knew what the Selfridges-watchers were thinking: they were remembering (or remembering being told - some of them looked too young to recall life before the Christmas™ Act) an old tradition.

'If they won't give us our Christmas windows,' one woman roared, 'we'll have to provide them ourselves.' And with that, they pulled out hammers. Oh god. They took out the glass.

'No!' I heard a man in a smart wool coat shouting at them. A contingent of the demo was looking horrified, laying down its banners, which read LABOUR FRIENDS OF CHRISTMAS. 'We all want the same thing here,' the man shouted, 'but we can't support violence!'

But no one was paying him any attention. I waited for people to steal the goods, but they just shoved them out of the way along with the broken glass. They were putting things into the windows. From bags and pockets they were taking little creches, papier-mâché Santas™, gaudily wrapped Presents™, Holly™ and Mistletoe™ and they were scattering them, making crude displays.

I moved on. A man stepped into my path. He was part of a group of sharp-dressed types at the edges of the crowd. He sneered and gave me a leaflet.

'INSTITUTE OF LIVING MARXIST IDEAS.

'Why We Are Not Marching.

'We view with disdain the pathetic attempts of the old Left to revive this Christian ceremony. The notion that the government has 'stolen' 'our' Christmas is just part of the prevailing Fear Culture that we reject. It is time for a re-evaluation beyond left and right, and for dynamic forces to reinvigorate society. Only last month, we at the ILMI organised a conference at the ICA on why strikes are boring and hunting is the new black...'

I really couldn't make head or tail of it. I threw it away.

There was the thudding of a chopper. Oh shit, I thought. They're here.

'Attention,' came the amplified voice from the sky. 'You are in breach of section 4 of the Christmas™ Code. Disperse immediately or you will be arrested.'

To my astonishment this was met with a raucous jeer. A chant started. At first I couldn't make out the words, but soon there was no mistaking them.

'Whose Christmas? Our Christmas! Whose Christmas? Our Christmas!'

It didn't scan very well.

I passed a group I recognised from the news, radical feminist Christmasarians dressed in white, wearing carrots on their noses: the sNOwMEN. A little guy ran past me, glancing around, muttering, 'Too tall, too tall.' He started to shout: 'Anyone 5 foot 2 or under come smash some shit up with the Santa's Little Helpers!' Another shorter man started furiously remonstrating with him. I heard the words 'joke' and 'patronising'.

People were eating Christmas™ pudding, slices of turkey. They were even forcing down brussels sprouts, just on principle. Someone gave me a mince pie. 'Blessed be,' yelled a radical pagan in my ear, and gave me a leaflet demanding that once we had won back the season we rename it Solsticemas. He was buffeted away by a group of muscular ballet dancers dressed as sugar-plum fairies and nutcrackers.

I was getting close to the venue where the party was supposed to be, but if anything there were even more people on the streets now. The place was going to be surrounded. How would we get in?

Figures were moving in on the crowd. Oh shit, I thought, the police. But it wasn't. It was an angry looking, aggressive bunch, smashing car windscreens as they came. They were dressed as Santa Claus™.

'Fuck,' muttered someone. 'It's the Red and White Bloc.'

It was obvious that the R&Ws were out for trouble. Everyone else in the crowd tried to draw away from them. 'Piss off!' I heard someone shouting, but they paid no attention.

Now I could see cops massing in the side streets. The Red and White Bloc were drawing them out, chucking bottles, screaming 'Come on then!' like pissed-up Football™ fans.

I was backing away. I turned, and there it was, the site for the party. Hamleys, the toy store. The armed guards who normally protected it must have run ages ago, faced with this chaos. I looked up and saw horrified faces at the windows.

I should be up there, I thought. With you. They were the partygoers. Kids and their parents, besieged by the demonstration, watching the police approach.

And oh, there was Annie, shouting to me, standing under Hamley's eaves. I wailed with relief and ran to her.

'What's going on?' she shouted. She looked terrified. The Yule Squads were approaching the provocateurs of the Red and White Bloc, banging their truncheons in time on tinsel-garlanded shields.

'Bloody hell,' I whispered. I put my arms protectively around her. 'There's going to be trouble,' I said. 'Get ready to run.'

But as we stood there, tensing, something astonishing happened. I blinked, and out of nowhere had come a young man in a long white robe. Before anyone could stop him he was between the ranks of the Red and White Bloc and the police.

'He's mad!' someone shouted, but all the hundreds and hundreds of people were beginning to hush.

The man was singing.

The police bore down on him, the R&Ws made as if to shove him away, but his voice soared, and both sides hesitated. I had never seen anyone so beautiful.

He sang a single note, of unearthly purity. He made it last, for long seconds, and then continued.

'Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie.'

He paused, until we were straining.

'Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.'

The R&W Bloc were still. Everyone was still.

'Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light...'

And now the police were stopping. They were putting their truncheons down. One by one they set aside their shields.

'The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.'

More white-clad figures were appearing. They walked calmly to join their friend. With a start, I realised I was shielding my eyes. There was an implacable authority to these astonishing figures who had come from nowhere, these tall, stunning, uncanny young men. The white of their robes seemed impossibly bright. I could not breathe.

Now all of them were singing. 'How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is giv'n. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His Heav'n.'

One by one, the police removed their helmets and listened. I could hear the frantic squawking of their superiors from the earpieces they removed.

'No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin...' The singers paused, until I ached to have the melody conclude. 'Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in.'

The police were smiling and tearful amid a litter of body armour and nightsticks. The first singer raised his hand. He looked down at all the discarded weaponry. He declaimed to the Red and White Bloc.

'You should not have tried to fight,' he said, and they looked ashamed. He waited.

'You would have been trounced. Whereas now,' he continued, 'these idiots have disarmed. Now's the time to fight...' And he swivelled, and en masse, he and his fellow singers launched themselves at the police, their robes flapping.

The helpless cops gaped, turned, ran, and the crowd roared, and began to follow them.

'We are the Gay Men's Radical Singing Caucus!' the lead singer yelled in his exquisite tenor. 'Proud to be fighting for a People's Christmas!'

He and his comrades began to chant: 'We're here! We're choir! Get used to it!'

'It's a Christmas miracle!' said Annie. I just hugged her until she muttered 'Alright Dad, easy.'

Behind me the crowd were shouting, taking over the streets.

'That's the trouble with the Red and White Bloc,' muttered Annie. 'Bloody "strategy of tension" my arse. Bunch of anarchist adventurists.'

'Yeah,' said a boy next to her. 'Anyway, half of them are police agents. It's the first principle, isn't it? Whoever's arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.'

I was gaping, my head swinging between the two of them as if I was a moron watching tennis.

'What...?' I said finally.

'Come on Dad,' said Annie. She kissed me on the cheek. 'You'd never have let me go otherwise. I had to get you to walk here or we'd have been too early. Trapped like them.' She pointed at the still-staring prize-winners in Hamley's top floors. 'And then I had to run off or you'd never have let me join in. Come on.' She took my hand. 'Now that we bust through the police lines, we can reroute the march past Downing Street.'

'Well then, it's the perfect opportunity to get out of here...'

'Dad,' she said. She looked at me sternly. 'I couldn't believe it when you won that prize. I never thought I'd have a chance to be down this way today.'

'Someone grabbed you,' I said.

'That was Marwan.' She indicated the young man who had spoken. 'Dad, this is Marwan. Marwan, this is my dad.'

Marwan smiled and shook my hand politely, shifting his placard. MUSLIMS FOR CHRISTMAS, it said. He saw me reading it.

'It's not that much of a big deal for me,' he said, 'but we all remember how this lot came out for us when Umma plc tried to privatise Eid. That meant a lot, you know. Anyway...' he looked away shyly. 'I know it's important to Annie.' She gazed at him. Ah, I thought.

'Marwan's handfulofflowers, Dad,' she was saying to me. 'Off the internet.'

'Look, I have to tell you I'm pretty annoyed about all this,' I said. We were getting close to Downing Street now. Marwan had said goodbye at Trafalgar Square, so it was just the two of us again, along with 10,000 others. 'I bought you, I, I've lost a lot of, there's a big present in that party...'

'To be honest with you, Dad, I don't really need a new console.'

'How did you know...?' I said, but she was continuing.

'The one I've got is fine. I mostly use it for strategy games anyway, and they're not so power-hungry. Besides, I've got all the pinkopatches in my machine. It would be a pain in the arse to transfer them, and downloading them again is too risky.'

'What patches?'

'Stuff like Red3.6. It converts a bunch of games. Turns SimuCityState into RedOctober. Stuff like that. I'm already up to level 4. The end of level baddy's a Tsar. As soon as I can work out how to get past him I'll have got to Dual Power.'

I gave up even trying to follow.

At the entrance to the prime minister's residence was a huge Christmas Tree™, in white and silver. Everyone began to jeer as we approached. The army were guarding it, so people made sure the booing was good humoured. Someone threw Christmas pudding, but everyone sorted him out sharpish.

'That's not what Christmas looks like!' we all shouted as we went past. 'This is what Christmas looks like!'

As the skies darkened, the crowd was beginning to thin a bit, before the police could regroup. We went through a contingent all in red bandanas, and joined in with their singing. 'Deck the halls with boughs of holly, tra la la la laaa, la la la la. Tis the Season for the Internationale, tra la la la laaaa...'

'Still,' I said, 'I'm a bit sorry you didn't get to see the party.'

'Dad,' said Annie, and shook me. 'This was the best Christmas ever. Ever. OK? And it was so lovely to have it with you.'

She looked at me sideways.

'Have you guessed yet?' she said. 'What your present is?'

She was staring at me, very seriously, very intensely. It made me quite emotional.

I thought of everything that had happened that day, and of my reactions. Everything I'd been through and seen-been a part of. I realised how different I felt now than I had that morning. It was an astonishing revelation.

'Yes...' I said, hesitantly. 'Yes, I think I have. Thank you, my love.'

'What?' she said. 'You've guessed? Shit.'

She was holding out a little wrapped package. It was a tie.

 0:19 - 0:21

Interior, a broken-down shack. Unkempt men and women surround Y. He says, 'They were taken!'

 A young woman says, 'By what?' 

-

 0:23 - 0:28

Montage of zombies. Some shuffle, some run. They are all taken, yanked into shadows by something unseen.

 V/O: 'First they walked. Then they ran. Now it's a new phase.'

-

 0:29 - 0:33

Close-up, a dead man's face. Camera pulls back. He is one of many zombies in a city square. They crawl towards the camera.

They do not crawl on their knees but on their toes, with their backs tilted, knuckles or fingertips or the palms of their hands on the ground. They move at odds with their own bodies, like humans raised by spiders.

-

 0:34 - 0:35

Director card.

-

 0:36

A dead hand slowly lowers a gavel.

-

 0:37 - 0:39

A schoolroom. An elderly woman speaks to survivors. Hers is the voice of the V/O.

She says, 'Life adapts.'

-

0:40 - 0:44

V/O: 'So does death.'

 Zombie alone on the flat roof of a tower. Looks down at humans on the street. Grabs its own solar plexus with both hands and tenses.

 Cut to humans below. Drop of blood hits one man's shoulder. He looks up.

 The zombie flies overhead, descending, dripping, its arms outstretched. It is tugging its own ribcage and skin apart, taut, making them wings.

-

 0:45

A bat crawls across cement, wrongly quadruped on the points of its folded wings and its stubby feet.

 V/O: 'There are new ways to be.'

-

 0:46 - 0:49

A man staggers in a book-lined library. A zombie clings to him with all its limbs, biting his chest. It stares at him. It is sutured to him, through both their flesh and clothes.

-

0:50 - 0:52

A cellar packed with fresh corpses is knee-deep in dark oil. A fat nozzle descends the stairs and gushes it, slowly filling the room and covering the motionless dead.

-

0:53 - 0:54

The hand continues to lower the hammer.

V/O: 'A different collective.'

-

0:55 - 1:00

A montage of crawling zombies. Some chase human survivors, some standing zombies. The crawlers tear their quarries apart.

 V/O: 'The walking dead and the walking living, we're both problems.'

-

 1:01 - 1:04

A zombie crawls vertically up the wall of an elevator-shaft. Human survivors stand, oblivious, by the open door a floor above.

 V/O: ‘Problems to be taken care of.'

-

 1:05 - 1:08

The dead hand touches the hammer to the wood at last. It makes a tiny click.

-

 1:09 - 1:14

Human survivors in an aircraft hangar, by a broken drone. There is growling. Dark smoke pours from the drone's engine.

 Cut to a control room. A dead drone pilot watches on monitors, blasts the jet’s engines with one hand. Pull back: he has been stitched spreadeagled throughout the room, a flesh web.

-

 1:15 - 1:18

Y hefts heavy hydraulic spreaders. There are fragments of the dead around him. He whispers, 'They didn't come back...'

- 

1:19 - 1:23

Night. A factory. Its windows are lit from within.

 V/O, Y’s voice: '...it’s that we haven't got there, yet.'

 -

1:24 - 1:27

Close-up of the face of the young woman. She is newly dead.

V/O, the old woman again: ‘Of course they’re angry. We're eggs that don't want to hatch.'

The corpse opens her eyes.

-

1:28

Blackness.

V/O: 'We knew it was war...'

-

1:29 - 1:33

A bridge over a river. Two zombies kiss so hard their faces distort as they shove into each other. Behind them rages a violent battle between crawling and standing dead.

-

1:34 - 1:37

A ruined office. The clicking of a keyboard.

-

1:38 - 1:41

A dark room. A group of long-dead corpses sit, quite still, around a table.

 At one seat is a living man, shivering with cold. He pushes a sheaf of papers forward, as if for consideration.

-

1:42 - 1:45

A rocky hillside. Hundreds of zombies crawl into the entrance of an old mine.

V/O, A: '...We didn’t know it was civil war.'

-

1:46 - 1:49

Night. Zombies stand motionless by a wire fence. Beyond it are rough edgelands.

V/O, A: 'Between the second dead...'

-

1:50 - 1:55

Close-up of swaying flesh. Pan back to show a zombie sat on the back of another, that is on all fours. The shot pulls back to reveal hundreds of the crawling dead. A few are mounts for zombie riders.

The crawlers labour on hands and feet through scrub and trash, towards the town. We can see the wire, the standing zombies waiting.

-

1:56 - 1:58

Blackness. Title card.

-

1:59 - 2:04

Close-up, wooden floor. A decaying hand slaps down in the centre of shot. It lifts away and a foot replaces it, on collapsing toes, then hauls out of shot.

They leave a wet stain and crumbs of flesh behind.

V/O, new voice, guttural whisper: '...And the Crawl.'