As the nights draw in and we reach the end of October, we will once again be able to enjoy that newly-imported pastime of ‘trick or treat’ which, at any other time of the year, would be more accurately termed ‘demanding money with menaces’.
I
know this instantly brands me as an old curmudgeon, desperately out of touch
with the times, but I think it’s a shame that we seem to have embraced the U.S.
version of Hallowe’en, with its practical jokes, slapstick horror and fancy
dress, in place of the U.K. version that I remember which was much more subtle
and considerably more sinister.
Hallowe’en,
in my childhood, was not something to celebrate so much as to endure. It was a time, we were told, when witches
were abroad (well, the price of package holidays had come down a lot) and the
long, dark, autumn night could easily hide “ghoulies and ghosties and
long-legged beasties”. Autumn in the
1950s and early 1960s was not so much a “season of mists and mellow
fruitfulness” as a season of swirling fogs and choking yellow smogs. When we wax lyrical about the ‘good old days’
we tend to forget just how much certain things have improved and the effect of
the Clean Air Act on the atmosphere must certainly rank pretty high on the list
of improvements. The point is that, in
those swirling fogs and smogs, it was very easy to conjure up (in the fevered
imagination of childhood) sinister beings that lurked just out of sight but
never out of mind.
I
must admit that I had a fairly active imagination as a child and, being of a
rather nervous disposition, could easily conjure up ‘nameless dreads’ lurking
in every corner. In a previous article
(“When I was a child, I thought like a child…”. Steady Past Your Granny’s, Doveridge
Publications, 2005) I referred to an odd idea that I developed, after watching
some silly cartoon, in which I came to the conclusion that there was some awful
nemesis lurking in our upstairs toilet and that, only by getting downstairs
before the toilet had finished flushing could I be truly safe. This wouldn’t have been too much of a problem
had I been able to navigate the stairs in the usual manner but, due to my
pathological fear of heights, I was reduced to coming down stairs one step at a
time on my bottom. Trying to do this in
a blind panic merely replicates the Cresta Run and puts considerable doubt on
your future parenting abilities. As I
said in the article, “It’s funny how, as a child, you never share these
nameless dreads with your parents.
Somehow you and this mystical fear are in cahoots against the adult
world”. Maybe this is less so these
days, where children are encouraged to be open and talk through any problems
(and rightly so). When I was growing up,
the stiff upper lip was the order of the day and any fears and trepidations were
to be rammed down deep into the subconscious along with any other odd ideas
that the juvenile mind might generate.
As
an example of the extent of my impressionability in those days, we were due to
go on holiday to Cornwall
On
the way down we made one of our frequent stops (we had a hired Ford Prefect
that used oil in the ratio of 1 pint to every 2 gallons of petrol – we might as
well have had a two-stroke!) at Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor. With tales of piskies, ghosts and smugglers
swirling around my mind, I spent the whole time there clutching the wooden
bench as hard as I could, sure in my own mind that if I wasn’t spirited away by
the supernatural (and being grabbed by the ghoulies is not to be recommended –
sorry, it all went a bit “Two Ronnies” there for a moment) then I was sure to
be bludgeoned by rough men carrying sacks or barrels because I had failed to
“watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by” (Kipling, “A Smugglers
Song”). As adults, we pride ourselves on
having a clear divide between that which is real and that which is
imaginary. What we forget is how tenuous
that divide is in the childhood mind.
Although
I thoroughly enjoyed my holiday and still recall it with fondness, I could
never quite shake the conviction that something slightly unsettling lurked
under every stone bridge or at the bottom of every wishing well. I have been back to Cornwall
Encounters
with the paranormal in my childhood were mercifully restricted to works of
fiction and my imagination… except on two occasions.
When
I was 10 we moved into a pub. It had
been long-held ambition of my Dad’s to run his own pub and this was his big
chance. Although I had seen the pub’s
public areas on a number of occasions (usually being parked in a corner of the
passage with a bottle of pop and packet of crisps), I had never seen ‘behind
the scenes’ as it were and it came as a bit of a shock. I remember that I left our house in Anglesey Road Guild Street
However,
the shock was not just that I had walked into a totally alien environment. There was also the not inconsiderable
question of the domestic fixtures and fittings, which made it seem as if I had
somehow jumped through a time-warp into the 19th Century. The sink in the kitchen was a huge, ceramic Belfast
That
night, I tried to settle down to sleep but things did seem rather strange. My few pieces of bedroom furniture, which had
filled my small bedroom back at our previous house, were now cast to the four
corners of my new vast bedroom in the pub.
But what really preyed on my mind was that we now had an attic. Well, rather more than an attic really.
The
New Talbot Hotel had been a true hotel decades before we took over and, as
such, it featured what had been 6 guest bedrooms on the third floor of the
building. These were accessed by means
of a further flight of stairs that ran up to the third floor from the end of
the landing on the second floor, just by the bathroom and opposite the door to
the clubroom (of which more in a future article). These stairs, like much of the upstairs
flooring, were linoleum covered and were separated from the rest of the pub by
a latched gate. Nobody had used the
rooms for years and they were mostly empty apart from one or two which were
used for storage. Therefore it was somewhat
surprising that, as I lay in my bed trying to get to sleep, with the sounds of
merriment from the bar below me ringing in my ears, I could distinctly hear the
steady footsteps of someone moving around in the bedrooms above and the tap,
tap, tap of claws on linoleum as what I took to be a dog made its way down the
stairs from the attic. Naturally, I did
what any intrepid child of 10 would do in those days – I hid under the
bedclothes and hoped it would all go away (it’s not much of a strategy but it’s
served me well over the years).
For
the next two and a half years, the footsteps marching around the rooms above
and the tap, tap, tap of the non-existent dog’s footsteps down the stairs,
became a regular feature of my night-time pre-sleep routine. After a while, I came to the conclusion that,
whatever was going on up there clearly wasn’t going to interfere with me down
below and I became rather nonchalant about it all. Having said that, no power on this earth
would have got me up in those attics after dark, either then or now. The strange thing is that I never mentioned
any of this to my parents at the time or for years afterwards and I don’t
recall mentioning it to my friends either.
When I did tell my parents, many years later, they were shocked to learn
that I had endured this nightly experience without ever confiding in them. As I said earlier, it seems that children and
nameless dreads are often locked in some sort of conspiracy against the adult
world.
Now,
of course, it is entirely up to you as to whether you believe the above or
not. You may say that there was a perfectly
rational explanation for it all, and I would have to agree that there may well
be. You may say it was just the product
of an overactive childhood imagination, and I would agree that you might think
that, but I can assure you that it wasn’t.
And
my second encounter with the paranormal?
Ah well, if you found it hard to believe the story above, you would
really struggle with the other tale.
Let’s leave it as another story for another day…for now.
