Professor Parkins is not superstitious. So when he digs up an old whistle while investigating the site of some ancient ruins, he is not afraid to blow it. He would have been wiser to take heed of the cryptic inscriptions...

A new, original recording of a classic public domain text, read and performed by Simon Stanhope for Bitesized Audio.

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Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was a medievalist and scholar, and is probably the best known and most celebrated English ghost story writer of the 20th century, although he actually began composing supernatural tales in the late Victorian era, beginning with 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book' (1893). He was born in Kent, but spent most of his childhood in Suffolk, a county which features prominently in many of his stories, including 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'. Several of James's protagonists also reflect his own antiquarian interests, with academics and historians featuring regularly. James published four volumes of ghost stories in his lifetime: 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' (1904), 'More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary' (1911), 'A Thin Ghost and Others' (1919) and 'A Warning to the Curious and Other Stories' (1925).

During a long academic career which encompassed several positions at King's College, Cambridge, and Eton College, M. R. James developed a tradition of reading his ghost stories aloud to a group of friends, most famously on Christmas eve, and the majority of his published stories were first heard in that setting. 'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad' was the Christmas 1903 offering. It was subsequently published in book form the following year as part of James's first anthology 'Ghost Stories of an Antiquary'. It has gone on to be probably his best-known story and has been adapted numerous times for stage and screen, most famously in Jonathan Miller's 1968 BBC production starring Michael Hordern as Parkins. The title of the story is taken from a 1793 poem by Robert Burns.

Recording © Bitesized Audio 2021.

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