Chapter 2: Somerset – Gorn

Take two steps left from Pityford’s Oliver Stone Memorial, turn around, take 18 paces, cross a stile, take another 21 paces, hop-skip a streamlet, and then walk for two miles due north-south, and you’ll find yourself in the village of Gorn. Hemmed by a mighty crenelated defensive wall, constructed by King Jasper in 809, the village is renowned for its parsley cakes and sense of fun. Much like its neighbour, Pityford, Gorn has largely been an event-free affair of a place. It’s thought that a housewife was spooked by a squad of stoats in 1911, but the only source at the time was the Daily Mail, so thinking personages give the tale little credence. However, the hermetic bliss of this isolated commune was shattered in late-mid 1969…

By all accounts, Mudge Tonkinson was a friendly soul. He collected cherry acorns for children and was always willing to help the elderly and inept tune their radios in so they could listen to then rising star Tony Blackburn, who was in those benighted times widely held to be talented and entertaining. Tonkinson worked as a car pusher, earning ample to provide for his wives and husbands. Cool-headed and not given to suffer ghouls gladly, it was said he had no truck with the supernatural. All that changed on 12 October, at about half past nine. 

Tonkinson had been drinking heavily, as was his custom on weekdays, in the Blight & Like It, a cocktail pubbery on Gorn’s fourth street, a block down from Maple. After his friendly banter became somewhat too friendly for the women manning the bar, he was softly but with thrust ejected from the premises and made his way home – ‘home’ being a squat inside the remnants of the old town hall, the building abandoned in the 50s due to asbestos wallpaper. Perhaps a bit tipsy, the drunkard somehow managed to balloon down a side street, diverting him from his destination by some four miles. Tired and maybe a bit tipsy, the completely inebriated Tonkinson found himself besieged with bewilderment, as the fuzzy, spinning landmarks around him yielded no frame of reference. Tired and tipsy, the plastered polygamist let himself into a derelict building, keen to settle for the evening and sort out tomorrow what couldn’t be comprehended today. But the pissed pansexual had erred horrendously: he was in the confines of St Mogg’s Chapel, a building long believed cursed. 

Rustling in the gloom, the bashed bigamist constructed a nest of paper scraps and other rubbish and tried to sleep. Then began the most terrifying experience anyone called ‘Mudge Tomkinson’ had ever experienced while lying on the floor of a cursed chapel. Speaking to Airgunner Monthly two weeks later, Tomkinson said:

“I managed to sort of drift off. I’d had a couple but I did that thing you do when you’re in a strange place and need to get to sleep: I mentally listed all the people I hate and long to kill. Anyway, I must of started dozing because all of a sudden I was plucked fully awake by an agonising cry!

“Turned out, the cry came from my own mouth. A big rat was gorging on my left calve. I shooed the bastard away and that was when I noticed it: in the corner of the room, near the tabernacle, was a fully-fledged, fully-floating phantom.

“I was aghast. I tried to yelp but no yelp came. I was paralysed with horror. The thing began to gravitate in my direction. I prayed to every god I’d ever heard of. Save me from this monstrosity, I moaned. But the agents of heaven were deaf to my pleas that night. The manifestation plucked me from my makeshift bed and twirled me around the room as if I was a bag of Sugar Puffs.

“Holding me as tightly as an incorporeal being can hold, we tangoed about the joint for nigh on eight hours. I only know this because the spectre was, incongruently, wearing a watch.

“Exhausted beyond logic by the terror and the physical exertion of being swept about a religious relic by a determined dancing demon, I mentally collapsed into a state of pure slush.

“Accepting my fate as the play-thing of a rapacious hell dweller, I passed out in its unspeakable arms. 

“The next thing I knew, morning sunshine was glaring in my eyes. I managed to lift my battered and bruised body from the chapel’s floor and fled. The event changed my life and I vowed not to drink for three weeks.”

Interestingly, Tonkinson’s fantastical tale was semi-verified by the then boy-child Nigel Farage. Visiting Gorn as part of a school project to ‘go and look at things’, the future architect of Britain’s self-removal from the European Union had chanced upon the chapel while “seeking somewhere that I could pay to do things to people and there wouldn’t be any questions”. 

“I glanced in,” said Farage at a fringe meeting for patriots in Rochester, 2011, “thinking it might be the sort of place where one could unload one’s…ahem…woe, and saw the most extraordinary thing: a drunk man being manhandled by what can only be described as a ghost-like-entity. I thought about helping him in some way, but then I thought, ‘fuck it, he probably shouldn’t be here anyway’.”

Invited to expand on his observations on Ghost TV in 2017, Farage played down the incident: “I may have once said I saw a man being pranced around a deserted chapel by a ghost, but I wouldn’t get too carried away with that. I say a lot of things.”

The chapel was demolished in 1997 and a chicken liver bar was built in its place, which singer Liam Gallagher smashed to bits in 1998 after he became angrily confused about the difference between the words ‘golf’ and ‘gulf’. “Why two words when they sound the same, ya twat?” he hollered at the bar’s manager, before showering him in spit and breaking his jaw. The music press heralded the incident as “post-modern pop perfection” and made sure he was garnished with plenty of garlands come award season.