Did any part of you childhood home give you the creeps?
There were a couple of places in mine that did. These fears began early on in the Sixties and lingered stubbornly until I left there in 1977.
The first and most seriously eerie spot was a cupboard in my bedroom to the right of my bed. It was probably meant to be a wardrobe but it was built INTO the wall and felt like another room, godforsaken and evil!
I had many bits of kit that could have been stored in that hole but I avoided it like the plague. Worst of all was at night. If the wardrobe door was ajar when the lights went out then began a long dark fever of hesitation - should I get up and close it or not? Will anything get me if I leave the cover of my blankets and rayon bedspread?
Terror usually got the better of me and I would make sure that NO part of my person was sticking out the covers lest some unspeakable cupboard beast claim it as a snack! All that I allowed myself was the tiniest of cracks to peer out of but if I did I would usually stop breathing so as not to make a sound.
The second fell locale was the coal cellar, a damp murderous oubliette leading straight to Hell. It was located at the base of the concrete steps down to the main cellar, to the left to be exact. The main well-lit cellar was initially scary as well when it was just a junk-pile of bakelite TV's and old train layouts, but I tamed it and made it my own. It became my teenage Kung Fu Dojo.
Not so the small coal cellar. This was an unused, unloved, unelectrified grime-encrusted box into which no light entered or escaped. The coal had long since become redundant and the flaking white-washed door was more like an event horizon than an entrance, never to be opened lest your heart be plucked from your rib-cage like a dripping red beetroot.
Even at the very end of our stay in the house in 1977 aged 16 I was pretty darn terrified of that old coal bunker and it would have taken an entire run of Monster Mags to have got me to stand in there. With the door to be closed behind me would have required at least a date with Suzi Quatro and that was never going to happen [Suzi's loss!].
Did you have similarly fearful childhood rooms and corners readers?
Hi Woodsy, My childhood home had an odd little room in the kitchen, called the larder. It was an obsolete space originally used to store food before every kitchens across the land had electric fridges. I remember the larder was a hostile environment, dark, cold, and populated by shelves of pickle jars and large, silent, fast moving, spiders. I never ventured into this silent no-go-area.
ReplyDeleteha ha, love that Tony...large silent fast moving spiders! They sound like the SAS! I remember larders from back then. they never got decorated. Or was that pantries? Is a pantry a larder?
DeleteYou big wuss, Woodsy. Funnily enough, I remember a young cousin (about 10 or 12) asking me if I was afraid to go to sleep if the doors of the cupboard in my room were left ajar. I was surprised, because it had never occurred to me to be. (Right enough, I was 26 at the time.) However, now I can see where he was coming from, as you shared the same fear as him. I guess it's quite common then, but it was never a fear I shared. (Of course, I am a superhero, remember.)
ReplyDeleteI am a big Jessie Kid! ha ha. No amount of monster movies could toughen me up. Or maybe that was the source of my cupboardophobia in the first place! Doh! I am pleased to say I can go anywhere now and sleep with the light off! Hope your cousin can too!
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