Childhood Fears

The rail line was sunk down lower than the house, the side of
the garden fenced with an embankment going straight down
from this to the track. The family were so used to the noise
of trains day and night that when this or that visitor asked
how they put up with all the racket the response was 'what
noise' and the rumble, the smoke, the rattling of the window
frames at each passing train did become a friendly familiar
sound those nights when I was, supposed by others, to be
sleeping. The hissing gas mantles and the shadows they cast
were the more difficult to ignore, but I was very reluctant
that they be turned off and would only agree to them being
turned down under duress as this led to an unvoiced fear that
the flame may die, and I also, along with the escaping gas. In
retrospect I feel this would have been an unlikely event due
to the blasts of air drifting across from the ill-fitting window,
freezing my features, as well as my already frozen thoughts
- I did not lie easily in that room from which, I found out in
later years, was the room from which my great uncle had
tried to jump to his death. Those Xmas nights when we
children were taken to bed with the light of a candle on the
dark stairs, and knowing that there was no way to search out
the disappearing adult, without the candle that went away
with her, were spent by me, in a fever of mixed excitement
and fear.

Nor was it easy when at the first Xmas after my grandmother
died, when I lay frightened to close my eyes, with my gaze fixed
on some old black dresses she had worn, as if expecting them to
suddenly come to life. These still hung on the outside of a
cupboard as if waiting for her, and was a cause of muttered
consultation between the 'aunts who had left home' about the
'aunt who lived at home' and the suitability of this continuation.
Suitable or not they were still there as I entered my teens and the
dresses and I continued to share the odd rare night in that same
room. There was a second door which led directly into another
bedroom which was by then no longer used - and another cause of
distress to me as I expected this to suddenly open at any
moment and reveal horrors that I dared not dwell on too deeply.

The atmosphere of that room was such that I knew, if there
were ghosts - that was where they were. It had been the room
my mother and two aunts had slept in during their growing up
years, but the ghosts were not connected with them, it was
something else, something, just something about that room.
The only place I have ever been where, yes - even in my adult
disbelief of such - my flesh did creep. There were two steep
steps down onto a brittle lino with indiscriminate pattern and
colour on a floor sloping downwards and unevenly toward a
window at the end. It was quite a long room and half way down,
or up when you came back from the window, there was a most
unpleasant icyness, but more than that and unexplainable, which
well matched the musty dankness due to the constantly wet
walls. This had been a worsening problem over the years, (it
would have had to have been, or how would my aunts and
mother have survived their childhood) and the result of a
lamentably bad building project - the room had been added on to
the house at some point, being built over the top of the equally
damp dank scullery. My mother told me that wallpaper was
pasted on layer after layer and that was what, most likely, kept
the walls standing. She used to lay in bed and watch the bug and
beetle life moving under the bubbles in the paper as they went
about their own concerns.

Then there was the cellar - this lurked at the bottom of some
steep stairs that led from the hall down to the kitchen and
scullery, the kitchen door was often kept closed, due to drafts
from - well, everywhere really. I did not often venture down
unless the door was opened first, and would even at times decide
against doing so if there were many gathered, in order to avoid
the inevitable attention and amusement it would cause if I
shouted for the door to be opened first. With no windows this
was a very dark area without a candle and one certainly did not
want to linger down in the well in front of a closed door with the
entrance to the cellar to the left of you. The opening to which
lacked a door, instead there was a curtain which when pulled back
revealed a walk-in larder cupboard, shelves stocked with food,
once in you became aware that one wall was missing and staring
into the gloom you could just about make out a drop of steep
rickety steps that creaked alrmingly and, with no rail, you found
yourself clutching the rough brick wall as you descended,
desperate not to drop the candle, and be plunged into a deep
blackness. The wall had at one time been optimistically
whitewashed but the optimism had obviously faded along with
the whiteness.

There were two distinctly different cellar rooms - one was used for
storing the coke or coal which the range and the boiler gobbled up.
Alice had to make many trips during a day down into what
amounted to a dungeon, enduring the cold and unpleasant
atmosphere and one can but wonder how she endured all the
dangers and hardships of her victorian life, while for the most part,
managing to keep her babies and small children from succumbing to
the many dangers that lay in wait in that house. There was a trap
door, over-head at one end, for the coal to be heaved down, set into
a very low wonky looking ceiling, so low that even as a child I felt I
should duck my head. Looking at it I did at times imagine the whole
house collapsing on top of me and that I would indeed be well
advised not to linger for too long - just in case. The trap doors, like
those you see set in pavements outside public houses, opened up
top into a covered area at the back of the house where the milk cart
and old churns and bottle racks - and other accumulated flotsum,
were stored. The other cellar was much more interesting, being a
collection of all the usual household throw-outs - not good enough or
wanted in the house but too good for the rag and bone man - and it
might be needed one day anyhow. I was always urged to "come
along, lets go up" when I would have liked to explore everything
around me. In spite of the dark, the coal dust, the cold seeping
through my clothing - and as long as I was not alone - I thought this
was treasure and it was wonderful, an Aladdins cave in the eyes of a
child then, and perhaps even more so now, were I to look with the
eyes of an amateur family historian - and with the odd thought
towards the 'Antiques Road Show.'