Things that terrified me when I was a child…
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33 Comments
Why is it that all bullies except Chris Burdekin are called “Cleary” ? Usually “Mick Cleary” I had to walk past his place to get home from school - I adopted a kind of fartlek training regime - walk-run-walk-run.
And then the f*cking magpies.
I was off sick quite a lot.
Hello FD
My sister was always frightened there was a pig under the bed.
Me, I kept getting terrifying images of a very mild comic strip pirate, so my parents took away the ‘too scarey’ comics like the phantom but let me keep the scarey one because they didnt believe me. The pirate had an eye patch.
Robbers coming in and killing me. I couldn’t actually leave my room, so I kept the door open a crack and watched the strip of light obsessively for shadows.
That all our politicians were more stupid than Billie who had to pick up papers in the playground all day and wasn’t allowed into do any maths and they had bombs which Billie didn’t. .
ps Billie now runs a courier company.
Witchiepoo from H.R. Pufnstuf - she scared the bejesus out of me as a child. I get the shivers thinking of her now for that matter. Leave my magic flute alone biatch!
I had a recurrent dream:
I was alone at a football field at night. Midway along the side of the field was a wooden screen with a narrow horizontal opening at eye level. Behind the screen, I knew, lurked a masked executioner with a huge axe. I had to run from one end of the field to the other while the executioner watched through the opening. As soon as he saw me he would run out and try to catch me. If I reached the end of the field I was safe. If I didn’t, …
I’m not sure if another recurrent experience was a dream or if it was the product of a vivid imagination when I woke at dawn:
After a night of terrifying dreams and imaginings, I would see a lightening of the darkness outside the window and a beam of multi-coloured stars would enter through it, signalling that the terror was over and I could safely fall asleep.
And yes, it did just about take a stick of gelignite to get me out of bed each morning.
When I was little I had the same dream everytime I got sick and it made me terrified. A monster came and took my dad away and our chances of getting him back got smaller and smaller as the dream went on until the final ‘scene’ when there was a pin/needle tip which broke, signifying that we’d never get him back.
The background was always moving, there were squares within squares all growing bigger and moving outwards (looked a little like this except it was symetrical: http://cs.nga.gov.au/IMAGES/MED/80340.JPG).
There was this horrible orange colour that makes me feel uneasy to this day: http://movingrightalong.typepad.com/moving_right_along/images/2007/07/19/gradient_2.jpg
I should have been more terrified of my sister who used to lock me up in her shoe cupboard.
That the big nasty military-type apes from the Planet of the Apes would take over Coffs Harbour Infants School and I would be forced to hide from them in the big rolls of left over carpet piled up right near the kindy kids cloakroom.
Growing up to work alongside an eccentric cartoonist who follows the Western Bulldogs…
I was afraid of a “Mick Cleary”
Dear First Dog, after many years feuding with my sister I won the rights to sleep in the sunroom. Just outside my door were many, many indoor plants. All was going well until I watched Dr Who Seeds of Doom episode, and from that point on I lived in terror of the murdering pot plants. I swear those things were waving and calling to me daring me to make a run for it all night (it was still preferable to sharing a room of course).
5 things that terrified me as a child:
1. The mythological funnel web spider at the bottom of the garden (We had found and killed one several years prior and I was convinced it had survived and would take revenge)
2. The eyelashes of Sesame Street’s Snuffleupagus (I have no explanation for this)
3. Paul Keating (…or this)
4. The edges of trampolines (because my father said that if I fell through the springs, I’d break my leg)
5. Wasabi (Because my brother fed me a spoonful of it after saying it was marzipan)
Russ Hinze
Being caricatured by a political cartoonist and portrayed as a sad dog, probably alongside a Quoll.
a couple of things:
1. spiders would eat me (particularly human sized ones that would cling to your back)
2. getting shot repeatedly (has sneaked into the lounge room while my parents were watching the Godfather)
3. getting old (actually still scared of this one, though death doesn’t faze me…go figure)
Worried about where I’d be if I hadn’t been born. A head spinning through space, perhaps? Not unlike Kevin as balloon head, only with a dark background and stars. Cartoon that, Mr Dog on the Moon. If you like.
Oh, and the welt/scars on trees after the limbs were cut off.
And wasps. Possibly also bees.
And catching rabies and having to have an injection in the stomach.
oh oh oh and stink bugs!
Sister Mary Norberta.
“When you go home tonight, children,” (said in a broad County Kerry accent), “You could be run over by a bus and die! And if you had wan mortal sin on your conscience, you would go straight to hell and burn for all eternity!!!!”.
This is then followed by descriptions of the torments of the damned, the visions of St Theresa (souls falling into hell like leaves in autumn), and reminders of the omnipresence of both God and the Devil.
This to a class of five-year-olds.
I ws terrified that Black Mountain was a volcano and would erupt all over Canberra and bury us all like Pompeii. Also I was afraid of very high tides (strange seeing as Canberra is 3 hours drive from the beach) and ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’. And various monsters on Dr Who, but I would still watch them from behind the couch.
I thought it was only me who knew about fartlek. Definitely true about the edges of trampolines. And about sleeping in the sunroom, except in my case it was the orange curtains in the lounge next door which looked like fire with the light behind them. Also, to raise the tone a bit, the famous Australian documentary film, The Back of Beyond, about the Birdsville Track. I still can remember the wind whistling around the deserted farmhouse. Too much for a 6 year old but you can read about this long-forgotten classic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Back_of_Beyond. But the worst … realising that I was trapped inside my head, that all of us are, that we can never get out…
1. I was terrified that my mother, a chronic asthmatic and chain smoker, would one day literally cough up her lungs in front of me (she died, quietly, of heart failure);
2. I often slept with hard-cover books under the covers over my heart to protect it from being stabbed by the boogie-man who lived under my bed (it worked - I still live);
3. I had recurring dreams of falling from a balcony of a flat we lived in until I was seven until I was in my twenties. I also dreamt about tidal waves wiping out our entire town.
4. The theme music from Perry Mason (which I wasn’t allowed to stay up and watch but could hear from my bedroom) used to make me pull the bed covers over my head (with an extra big, hard-cover book on my heart). This theme music still creeps me out.
5. Red-back spiders.
I used to have nightmares about a teacher in the TV show “Grange Hill”. He was angry all of the time and might have had a Hitler mustache.
Morlocks! When I was about five or six, after much nagging, Mum let me stay up well past the usual bedtime to watch the original movie version of HG Wells’ The Time Machine on TV. I spent the evening curled up next to her on the sofa, pretending not to crap myself every time one of these subterranean cannibals appeared on the screen (played by actors in loin cloths and blue body paint). It was fantastic! Except for weeks (possibly months) afterwards I had the classic monsters-under-the-bed thing going on. Lesson learned: be careful what you wish for….
The Angel of Death in the film The Ten Commandments. The movie was a must-see amongst my six year old peer group, and it took relentless perstering on my part to persuade my parents to take me to see it. I found the image of the green slime that snaked its way amongst the dwellings of the unsuspecting Egyptians, striking down their first- born children, to be so terrifying that for ten years afterwards I would not go up the hallway to my bedroom at night alone. Cecil BDM - you have a lot to answer for.
Many decades later, I was able to chuckle at my 4 year old son’s reaction to a television program on meteors. Shortly after retiring to bed that evening the telephone rang. He reacted with panic - urging us to answer it quickly, as it would be the observatory ringing to say that a meteor was on its way. Come to think of it - why did I think that was funny?
I had a recurrent dream of being pursued by a dark figure dressed like the scarklet pimpernel who had purple skin. After many many nights of getting really upset, I resolved (as a kid) to confront the demon).
He just turned and walked away. Never to return. I suspect he actually did return in high school as my maths teacher (Col Davis). Mr Davis described Stephens and me as ‘barnacles on the ship of progress’. Clearly a motivation expert.
The purple man going was one of the most liberating moments of childhood.
Now I just go over to the Pig’s Arms (www.pigsarms.wordpress.com/about) and fool around with the kind of folks who love the First Dog.
On the outside of our kindergarten building there was a small plaque near the building foundations that said “Cable Underground”.
One of my classmates said that the sign read “Cavemen Underground”. From then I always avoided playing around or scuffing the dirt near those plaques, lest I start a cave in and release the cave men.
I had a recurring dream of a huge hole in the middle of the school oval opening and catching the unwary kids. The bottom was lots of mud like a WWI trench.
I would also dream (but not realise I was dreaming) ghostly aboriginal-style cave painted footprints appearing walking up my walls, one by one.
Stop-motion apes on “Tarzan”. Lucky there was a lounge to hide behind while peeking at the TV.
I can remember my grandmother would put me in my pusher to go for a walk across the park going from East Melbourne to Spring Street. In Autumn, I think, there were quite a lot of catkins on the ground which had dropped from trees. I would always scream because I thought they were huge, fat worms.
I probably should have made my list a top 10 rather than 5 - after thinking about it some more I remembered the major 2 things that scared me as a kid (probably because I’ve blocked them out after all these years)
One was mercury - because in year 3 I was carrying a box of thermometers and tripped and fell, smashing several of them on the carpet. The teacher made a massive fuss and made me scrub my hands - then covered the area of carpet with newspaper for weeks. Mum then had to go out and buy battery operated thermometers because I had images of biting on it and dying because of the mercury.
The other was the sound of bathwater as it went down the plug hole. I always use to get my parents to drain the bath once I was in my bedroom with the doors closed. I imagined the sound was the water screaming in pain as it was pulled down into hell. That was school scriptures fault - my parents were atheists.
Spiders.
A daggy-woolled merino-cross wether tethered to a post in the vegetable garden at “Goree” near Widgewa. Its eyes had been pecked out by crows and it was waiting to be made into chops. I was about 5 years old and it was not so much frightening as appalling. It appeared in my dreams for years.
Eclipses. It seemed to me there was an eclipse every six months in the ’70s, and throughout the week leading up to the dreaded event, we would have it drummed into our heads at primary school to avoid looking at the sun on the afternoon of the eclipse; if we so much as glanced at the sun we would go blind. The night before one eclipse, A Current Affair even interviewed a man who had been permanently blinded by not following this advice, the segment I recall, was accompanied by the Manfred Mann song ‘Blinded by the Light’. My other childhood phobias were the old Dr Who theme and the Manson family whom I was convinced were moving to Australia to to create a little Helter Skelter in my family’s home .