Fear of the dark

I didn't know you knew my mum - and I'm not sure what that thought has to do with this.

Oh, the things that made me scared of the dark. Do you think its an innate fear or is that just a fancy we have, a pseudo-bollocks link to a romantic idea of cave dwelling.

The dark, it does seems intuitive that it would be scary and for good reasons. The dark is where we trip over things and step on plugs. The dark is where we loose things. The dark is where the murderers lurk; they lurk in the dark and around corners. Perhaps we should fear corners too - and hidden dips.

So a fear of it seems fine. We could leave it at that. So why do we do the other things to people? Put the willies up 'em....

When I was little I often stayed in my Grandpa's big, old, scary house.

I was scared of it in the day - there were odd people about, staff, patients, Johnny the odd job man and Mr Thing (I forget his name, he lived in a lodge up the driveway) and Mr and Mrs Other thing that lived in a cottage built into the side - she being deaf for years through shock at the death of her child.

There were lots of odd staircases and cupboards in the walls and odd trap doors in the floors. There were religious pictures and crosses and paintings of my Grandpa healing the sick - his big, caring hands reaching out... black and white photos of him with his hands healing children in callipers.


Scared the wotsits out of me... And the pipe organ. And the dead wheelchairs. And the old tellies the size of tables sitting in dead damp rooms... and the lofts with rotten beams for floors where my cousins locked me in the inky black, terrified to move and fall off the beams and through the ceiling below.

Big old scary paintings and busts, beheaded dead people, masks and the gong.... Everything creaked and went thud in the day...

The night. As a small child I was put to bed on the top floor, up the back stairs, 2 flights, and up the extra twisting flight to the old servants floor, through the narrow door. Along the long corridor, up more steps, room on the right.

In the bed under the large painting of furious charging elephants. I was about 5 mins from another human, all down dark corridors, down dark stairs, around corners... I was not even that sure of the way and not in the dark.

I loved Winnie the Poo but for the Hefalumps that filled my nightmares. They were not the lumping beasts as drawn in the books, no. Mine were the huge, furious, charging bull elephants in the painting above my bed. They seemed to swell with rage as they were picked out by the moonlight through the window with the trees and the evil faces that lived in the branches.

I wanted to come down to my parents - downstairs chatting in the warm, in the light. But I wasn't going to move. I lay there fixed with terror.

Perhaps I could have managed to trick the elephants, sneak out without being seen. Out into the dark long corridors. Past the old bathroom with the toilet high on a plinth in the middle of the room its chain hanging like a noose. The smell of cold water - Edwardian plumbing smells of lead and rust and cold.

Past all of those old dark cupboards, down all of those dark stairs. But no.

No because of the Boggiemen. They lived in the darkest deepest cupboard set into the wall of the lower back stairs. I knew they were in there. My mum told me so. She said they were in there and she said "the Boggiemen will get you".

I'd looked in the cupboard in the day light (and looked again recently after not having been there for 30 years) and it is backless and bottomless. The Boggiemen live in its unfathomable depths. The Boggiemen will get you - the fear of them seemed to crush my chest.

Perhaps when I catch a Boggieman and take him by his heels writhing into the daylight I will see that he is just as fearful as me and at least I don't have to live in a cupboard on an old mostly forgotten staircase as a child catcher.

The dark - we walked in woods once so dark that I could not see my hands. We crashed about stoned and scared dozens of screaming crows - and down on the ground we saw the phosphorescent emerald green glow of fungus. Deep in the wood in the black of the night - alive.

And, my mum, I do love her so deeply.