Consumption: Memories of My Childhood
"In my previous book The Less Than Jolly Heretic I had wanted to run over the events of my life for others, to show them what had happened to me, and why I was as I am now. I had wanted to chart my relationship with my parents, and with those around me as I grew up, and all the things in our interactions over many years that had hurt me, all the unspoken things that, cumulatively, over a lifetime, brought me to my present-day melancholia, and my episodic psychoses. In this task I failed. I ended up writing more on the routine misery and the unexpected pain of my present existence than on my early life, peppered with casual observations and insights, and raw dark humour, and swiftly deviating into a political and historical exposition, and a scientific critique of psychiatry, artificial intelligence, Christianity, liberal humanism and deterministic materialism, where really I should have been speaking with the broken heart, not just the angry head. My hope with this fresh book is to try again. I owe myself that, for long years of doubt, inertia, and exhaustion, and probably a little stubborn laziness."
Benjamin Power, 12th September 2024
Consumption
I was born, six weeks premature, in St. John’s Hospital, on the outskirts of Chelmsford, a large town in the UK county of Essex, on the 12th of July 1985. My memories of my earliest life as a baby are, understandably, beyond my reach, but I’ll begin from my first visual recollections. There are earlier events naturally, but as to their contents from my own perspective, I have no idea bar to look at photographs taken of myself in my high-chair or cot.
As first I remember, I was sat in a long ceramic bath, with a little lukewarm water under me, staring at the old Armitage Shanks taps at the far end. The off-white hospital room was gloomy and unlit, but a weak sun filtered through the clouded glass of the window. I felt a pain, my first recallable sensation. The coldness of the water, the chill of the air, and a sharp stinging down below. A catheter tube had been inserted into my genitals, and the area was moist and sore, bleeding a slight red trace. Looking up to my left over the rim of the bath I couldn’t see anyone. I didn’t know where I was, and I felt scared, alone in pain. I cried a little. But I was very small, and my memory ends at that brief flash. I was too young to know the context of where I was or why, something that was only explained to me much later. For all I knew then, I thought only that I had in some way been injured, or was in the process of being injured, though whether by persons in it or by the environment itself, my mind was too immature to decide. From this amateur understanding, sadness did not envelop me, but I was made fearful, linking the world to the ghastly sensation of my predicament in that medical room. There are better ways to begin.
Perhaps a whole year had passed. My first full memory (although second to the lingering opaque sadness of the hospital discomfort) was of me sat in my nappy in the back of a dark blue Ford Sierra, on the right hand side of the passenger seats, tucked into the confines of a moulded plastic child seat, and being driven through the fields of Southern France in bright sunlight, rows of purple-green artichokes poking through the tilled soil to the right and left, stretching away to what seemed like the horizon, and then, as if a second later, of me clinging to the top of a flight of polished wooden stairs, looking up into the light, airy attic of a French farmhouse, huge dark wood beams above my head and lulling tides of ethereal dust motes suspended in the sunbeams, floating gently under an open skylight, the Sun's rays cascading down like a full, white pillar, and with the cool comfort of my ‘Little Sheet’, a scrap of spare white cotton sheeting with a blue and orange floral pattern on it clutched tight to my hand, functioning like a teddy bear, and very popular with me. Back then, I was awed by being alive, and somehow it always felt like Summer. Though my earliest childhood thoughts are patchy at best these days, I don’t have any memory of the rain at least, and always that bright, straw-hued sunlight, the tweeting of small brown sparrows in the bushes or the blue tits and robins on the garden birdfeeder, and the sensation of solar warmth.
I was always quiet as a 4 and 5-year-old child, not yet old enough to venture outside the house by myself, content to lie under the covers between the white textured wallpaper of my bedroom, avidly browsing the colourful children’s story picture books that my mother had purchased for me, enthralled by the exotic animal art of Hot Hippo, Greedy Zebra, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and Bush Vark’s First Day Out (the latter of which came to resonate powerfully with me once I started school), with me lying under the soft white duvet of my bed, always with the sunlight beaming through the broad West-facing double-glazing of the windows above the small square garden, and a couple of teddy bears beside me, all given suitable names, like ‘Gizmo’, ‘Bunny’, ‘Big Dragon’, or my standard naming favourite, ‘Mr. Bear’. When I didn’t know how to read my mother would sit with me and turn through the pages, often for hours, and I would point to various pictures that interested me, commenting on the eccentric style (and occasionally the narrative), delighted at the humorous antics of the animals in each story. I had toys to play with as well though.
One morning, on a Saturday, I was lying stretched out on my parents' bed, cuddling with my mother as she lay there half-asleep, a tight, comfortable atmosphere peppered with loud snores and the dry, pungent smell of her exhaled breath, with the periodic rolling motions of her body, clad in warm, woollen pyjamas with a picture of a Polar Bear on them, her pale, freckled skin hot and vital. I had learnt the days of the week and how to associate then before attending any school, as my mother read Peter and Jane books with me, establishing basic comprehension and verb and noun-use, and besides, I watched Playdays on the Children’s BBC (which themed the daily episodes by day, cycled weekly), along with Charlie Chalk and Big Bertha, although Trapdoor, The Clangers and The Magic Roundabout were my firm favourites, the fantastical colourful settings with their idiosyncratic puppetry and charming clay animation, and the mischievous animal characters always the biggest appeal to me, prone to mimicking Dougal the dog's dry-witted, humorous antics in his hunt for sugar lumps, or impersonating the languid, drowsy tones of Dylan the rabbit.
I was always up early in the morning, not long after sunrise, and long before my mother, and would habitually rush into their bedroom and leap onto the bed to snuggle with her. I think since the hospital I had always felt a little distanced from others in the world, not quite lonely, but atomized, as if physically displaced, and in need of a lot of comforting. I could distract myself, but in general I liked to check in, and to be checked on, and did not do well alone if I didn’t know my parents were nearby.
Suddenly, I heard the door shut loudly downstairs, jolting me alert. I wasn’t sure what was happening and looked up to my mother for consolation. She smiled down at me though, and said “sounds like Daddy’s home! He has a surprise for you!” My father worked long hours at the time, as a project leader at a Northern Telecom (Nortel) site in Stevenage, a lead software engineer with a small team, following his time as a periodic contractor programming satellite technology. He commuted for over two hours each way every day, to the outskirts of London and home, and was often called in on weekends. I’m sure he was around the house in the interim, but this is the first time I remember seeing his face.
I thought it was just a man walking into the bedroom, a tall, thin man with dark brown, heavily greying hair parted to the side, wild eyebrow strands, whitening like coiled wire, fresh stubble, and a big nose, panting and slightly fraught, a thin beige overcoat covering his deep red pullover and white, grey-striped office shirt. He had a large white plastic bag in his hands, his dry fingers already cracked around the joints, and with plasters over the red cuts on his fingertips from a skin infection stimulated by steady hours at his keyboard.
He was awkward as he entered the room, but smiling. "Look Benjamin, it's your Daddy!" my mother announced, and then my Dad spoke to me, his voice soft and deep, a pronounced remnant of his Derry Irish accent still present beneath his long years of Anglicized speech, “Hello Benjamin! Here, I thought you might like this!” He handed the bag to me, and I greedily took it in my hands, and reached inside, pleased to receive his gift. It was a Ghostbusters figurine set, with two plastic moulded characters, Egon Spengler, and Slimer the ghost. I pushed the back of the clear packet until the cardboard burst and slid the two toys out onto the bed overjoyed. “Thank you so much Daddy! I love you!” I called, and heard him reply, “That’s OK son, I hope you enjoy them!”, standing there above me, a shy smile on his tired face, and moving to rest his hand on me and rub my shoulders a little, his long, sore, bony fingers cool and clammy to the touch.
My mother reached across and gave me a little squeeze, saying, “Wow! Look at that! That was very kind of Daddy. And well done for saying thank you.” And so I sat there longer, very happy at my new toys, and distracted by them for the rest of the morning. I didn’t notice by then that my father had left the room, to go downstairs and freshen up, and then to sit in his cream woollen armchair at the right corner side of the living room, just under the wide patio doors, and to read his weekend copy of The Times and The Guardian, lingering over the cryptic crosswords, three or four sheets of plain paper on the ceramic-tiled mahogany coffee table to the right of him with the blue and white Dutch scenery on it, the delicate windmills and pipe-smoking, clog-footed labourers always covered in tiny, illegible numerical ideas, and indecipherable notes hastily jotted down in black biro.
I did not notice either, for many years, that my father would never, ever say “I love you” to me of his own volition, not once, and sometimes not even as a reply, though generally at those latter times he would rise to mimic the sentiment if it was presented to him. Perhaps he finds it an embarrassment to declare outright between two males, or an embarrassment in general, something inappropriately romantic and over sentimental, and I have never pressed him over the matter, as a shy, awkward, insular man himself, concerned always for his embarrassment levels, knowing he would be put out, and yet knowing, beyond sensing or hoping, and despite the lack of this confirmation in him, that he does love me, very much.
Still, this strange, sombre lack of an overt emotional bond has resonated with me my entire life, ashamed at myself that my Dad could not bring himself to tell me he loved me openly, wondering shyly if I had disappointed him somehow, that shyness softly flicking into sadness, much as my Mum tried to compensate by telling me herself, “love you!” (I notice the ‘I’ seems difficult for her, as if she herself was not there, and the latter generic sentiment less troublesome on the mind) or telling me in the third person what came to be the familiar narrative, “your father loves you very much!” or, “look at how much he loves you, he buys you all this and he does so much for you…” as I began to worry that I was somehow excluded as a category of fatherly affection, and noticed this more and more.
I love my father. The deepest, most intrinsic love, and one I could never shift or diminish, even if I wanted to, bringing me to tears as I think it, either for the puissance of that ever-present love itself, or for the wan, soft melancholia of its futility, glimmering away a little like cloudy tears somewhat behind my thoughts, and then the swift-growing cost of its neglected return.
Saddest of all to me, and a source of subtle shame, at the reach of experience, is the acknowledgment that I too, over the years, have learned not to say “I love you!” to my father, replacing this with "thank you!" and "I hope you have a lovely day!" and always the tiniest, covered-over pregnant pause as I come off the phone to him, made embarrassed too, conditioned by his muteness, wondering what his reply would be, hesitant, knowing he would squirm for a second, and that there would be a jarred silence, like the public reception of a soloist's wrong note, or a change of expression on his face, and loathe to see him experience that mildest of discomforts. Over many years of this, I think of all the missed opportunities, and the times I could have said such, and if I could have brought him happiness by doing so, but then I remember that in all those early years my first expressed love was never audibly reciprocated without what felt like obligation, even duress under my pensive eyes. Yet, given this, and beyond his base temperament, I never saw me Dad in sadness, not once seeing him shed a tear, or look down in face, or visibly disappointed, or indeed too expressive at all. If he has suffered since – and I’m sure he has – it has always been off-limits to me perceptively, though I have scanned his face many times, and in context, looking for a sign.
I have yet to hear my mother ever add that ‘I’, though “love you!” comes quite routinely now still, at the end of most phone conversations, almost a token parting by now, and the done thing, unless she forgets, as can happen if she is excited by news from her day, or if she slips back into the habit of offering a shielded "and you too!" instead, as if I had announced "cheers!" or, "have a good day", another simple means perhaps to preserve an antiquated dignity, somehow a little repressed. She reminds me now and again when I ask that "in Dad's generation, the men didn't show emotion", her own explanation for me, rendering him always reasonable to me, and, in general, a lifetime of explaining him away for my sake, in addition to the religious outpourings, serves as her own contribution to steady pedagogy.
Perhaps also, I would have liked his touch more instead, much as I loved his many gifts, and loved to see him. I cannot really remember his body as a child, at least in a conventional hug, or display of affection, though I knew my mother’s warm jumpers well, and her comforting embraces. At times I could sit on my father’s knee, and he would play the game with me where he rocked me back and forth, or side to side, or in a circle, me yelling with delight, and him putting on the higher-pitch falsetto of his excited voice, explaining to me about seismic waves, “first we have the P-waves!”, rocking me on his knees in the simulated alternation of the compressions and rarefactions, then, seeing me hold on tight for dear life, moving my body more vigorously saying, “then there’s the… S-waves!” effecting the transverse shear, and finally, after a brief intake of breath, growing excited himself and whirling me around on his knees making a rumbling noise, me screaming in glee, thinking I would fall, whirled round and round, as he announced, “and here’s the… N-wave!” pretending that the air was exploding in the thunderous energy of a sonic boom. In a real earthquake the waves appear in different order, but I think he (and I) liked the effect of escalating motions, shaking me back and forth, and yet held tight around the hips, and myself gripping his kneecaps, never once falling to the floor.
Aside from these playful sessions, there was never any sense of physical contact about my father, so I came to look forward to them more and more, even though, as with most of our interactions, even these days, he preferred his role to be that of a teacher to that of a conventional parent, and I always sensed a predominant part of that game was for it to function as a learning aid, although, beyond curiosity, I was never sure why a small child needed to know such specific phenomena as the permutations of mechanical Earth waves, or to experience the propagation velocity of this vast acoustic energy first-hand.
For many weeks after that Saturday in the bedroom, for years in fact, he would again come into the room in the mid-mornings, as I was sat with Mum, and present more toys to me, sometimes limited editions, or the more common figures that still I found the most appealing, suggesting he had put in time and researched the matter privately, so quite soon I had built up a veritable army of plastic models, and by then was more easily distracted, and what I thought was content. And then he would retire to his chair, to put his feet up on the rest, and to eat an apple, munching it down to the core, every last bit, his false teeth loudly chomping, and to read through his papers, or through a National Geographic Magazine or an issue of Scientific American, the thick carnation pink fabric of the drawn curtains open behind him, and the TV on, the sound dial twisted until a low murmur came from the box, drinking his black Nescafé coffee and listening over his paper to the BBC News, turning the TV off afterwards, and continuing to read and to jot down numbers and notes.
Sometime not long after the Ghostbusters delight, I was in my bedroom alone one morning. I had a thick hardback book titled The Natural World, from The Mitchell Beazley Joy of Knowledge Library, flicking through the detailed illustrations, with each main animal species laid out on a single page to a couple of pages, captivated by the pictures. It was one of my favourite books to look through, captivated by the origins of life and the long time scale of evolution from the Palaeozoic, 400 million years ago, and the denizens of Precambrian and Silurian oceans, with the rise of the first early fish, and then the detailed functions of cells, and the process of natural selection with diagrams of Darwin's Galapagos finches and giant tortoises, the world of plants, seeds and flowers, and yeasts and moulds, and my favourite opening illustration, showing Megatherium, a gigantic ancient ground sloth, and then fascinated by the lifelike full colour illustrations of squid, and octopuses, cuttlefish, hydras and sea anemones, staring for hours over eels, then streamlined sharks, ancient sturgeon, and awe-inspiring whales, dragonflies, marsupials, and the inhabitants of Northern forests and of the ice and snow, with a section on animal behaviour also, and a gripping illustration of fierce Arctic wolves surrounding a defensive phalanx of musk oxen bulls protecting their females and calves, and I dwelled on the book for years, along with The World Encyclopaedia of Animals, enthralled primarily by the majesty of the wide-winged, massive yellow moon moth, and the elegant selection of spiral-horned African gazelles, exploring each consecutive page of these books and lingering with the descriptive tableaus and with the beautiful forms of Nature in front of me, obsessed with the processes and delights of life and living systems on this planet.
I simply loved it, except one single illustration. A black, bulbous velvet worm scaling a fallen branch to the left of one of the middle pages. This image used to terrify me in some unsettling way. I’d stare at it, after having enjoyed all the other pages and the myriad arrays of wild creatures. I found the animal so threatening, so alien and weird, with slimy front feelers like sharp grey horns, rushing along the wood like a living train, as if to attack, on tiny black splodges of legs, that I had to put my Natural World book down in the end, and was always afraid to open it from then on, afraid that I would open it on that page, and have to be confronted with the hideous, offensive sight of that bizarre invertebrate, black, scaly, and unappealing, like an devilish caterpillar slug. The stark black colour always scared me also, compared with the vibrant shades and pigments and aesthetic beauty of the more attractive animals. I imagined the unsettling creature magnified, unsure altogether as to the scale, and climbing up my body, hissing, ready to bite me on the neck. Sometimes I would challenge myself, knowing it was there, and deliberately turn to that page, to see if I could master it, but the image’s oppressive horror never faded with me, and, with the one image logged and filling my consciousness, the book was abandoned in the end, save to sit on my shelf these days, ever unopened. I think it would scare me today.
My parents are by nature gentle. Rarely if ever throughout childhood did I hear them openly argue, and I never felt any sense of tension or fear in the air in that regard. Sometimes my Mum would pester my father, or get caught up on some small detail, sensing an unintended slight, and then become snappy with him for a few seconds, but his exasperated, "Look, Mary..." response always established a firm and immediate détente, causing her to back down, and there was never fighting, or the sense of any lasting resentment, as the moment of frustration closed as quickly as it had started. This sense of dignified placidity was imparted to me also, and in my very youngest years I was never shouted at or treated harshly. All bar one occasion.
I was on all fours in the hallway to the front door, down on the carpet, pushing my yellow four-wheeled crane toy back and forth on the carpet in front of the glass-panel of the front door. Mum was just around the corner in the living room, four metres from me, sat with Dad also, reading his papers, and relaxing on another pleasant Saturday morning. The weather was cool and the air moist, an overcast sky gloomier than I can remember from before, but the spacious rooms of the red brick semi-detached house, with white walls, soft padded furnishings and many windows, always compensated, and I felt happy, charging my favourite new toy along the floor excitedly.
Then my mother moved into the hallway. She was wearing her dark high-heeled nursing shoes and a pair of small gold stud earrings, with her pale green brushed cotton dress stretching almost to the floor and a navy blue and crimson jacket with padded elbows, the sweet, bitter, vetiver-like aroma of her perfume on the air (a thick, dark, spicy blend, with a little hint of plum, always worn throughout my childhood, and never my favourite smell). She had an informal get together with her professional health visiting colleagues to attend down at the village hall, and needed to leave as soon as possible, leaving my father to watch over me. Of course, I had no idea of this at the time. All I understood was, "Mummy has to go out now for a little while Benjamin" and, "it's OK, Daddy's here", but I was still inconsolable, my happy smile swiftly fading to a mournful, desolate frown, looking up forlornly from my toy vehicle as she edged past me along the hall, giving me a brief hug goodbye and worrying that she would be late, having left it until the last minute. "Don't go Mummy!" I called, "No, please, don't go!"
It was not that I did not want to be left with my father, for I loved his company when it was there. I simply needed my mother too at that moment, and liked her to be around also, that perennial need for comfort, and the security of knowing I was watched over by two pairs of eyes, the sense of safety that comes from a complete family. As she passed through the crack of the opened front door, I sped along the hall after her, clumsily holding onto her skirt hem to prevent her leaving, tears on my cheeks. I simply didn't understand. A patient mother with me, her only response was to kindly turn around and say, "oh, I'm sorry to hear that Benjamin, don't be upset, I'll be home before you know it." Having said this, looking pushed for time, and a little flustered, my mother headed out the door, and down the five front steps to her car.
Quickly, I reached out for her, hoping to grasp her leg and cling on, desperate that my small weight could keep her with me, that my act of will could have prevented the growing absence, and the uncomfortable wait. As I stretched out, my other hand holding the crane truck, I lost control of myself on the carpet, and the little vehicle shunted forwards in my hand, the boom attached to the operator's cab pushing right into the decorative reeded float glass encased in the centre of the thin wooden front door, shattering it into big, sharp shards, falling all over the doorstep with a high-pitched cracking sound.
My mother stood on the steps aghast. "Oh God" I heard her exclaim, "Oh God, what have you done, Benjamin?!" I was still crying at this point, but more in shock and surprise now, upset at having broken the door, and caused a dangerous mess. Dad rushed into the hall. He stopped, and stared at the shattered door, his face fallen, echoing Mum's sentiment, and adding, "you naughty boy! Why did you do that?!" Swiftly, angrily, he pulled me to him, still crying, and put me over his knee and slapped me hard on my right thigh, leaving my skin sore and red. I screamed, unused to the sensation, and fearing him then, and continued to cry. All I could say was, "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
Something changed in him then, and my father became soft. Swift as the anger had arrived in him, it evaporated, and his face lost its sternness. What he had mistaken for insolent defiance in my costly breakage appeared now as it had been, merely the accident of an over-excited, clumsy, fraught little boy. He set me back on the sofa, under the warm yellow glimmer of the electric chandelier lights, turned up to full brightness, and he put his arm around my shoulders, and rubbed me better. My mother came back into the house briefly, and embraced me, as I continued to sob, and I told her I was very sorry. "That's okay, Benjamin. We're not upset at you. We just didn't want you to hurt yourself. There's no need to cry. Here, come on now..." and she passed my Little Sheet over to me, and said "well, I have to really go out now, but don't worry, I will be back before you know it" and with that left the house again.
Distracted by my sheet and my father's voice, and feeling exhausted and slightly distant, I slowly ceased sobbing, and was soon watching a videotape with him, The Bison Forest, my favourite program, a beautiful nature documentary talking about the history and wildlife of Białowieża, a huge primeval forest at the Eastern border of Poland. After a little while, I didn't even notice if my leg was still stinging. That same day, within a half hour, Dad patched up the broken door with temporary masking and had cleaned up all the shards with a dustpan and brush, and by the morning after, the glass panel had been replaced, good as new.
It hadn't been the physical pain that upset me. It was the disappointment and the shock, that I had hurt my parents’ feelings, and angered them, to the point of unpleasant physical punishment, mixed with the shock of having damaged a tangible part of our house. From that point onwards I was always more careful in my play, but sadder also. It was like a sweet melody playing on the breeze had been extinguished, or like the beam of a torchlight switched off, and the unalterable specialness of the long 'moment' before it was over, along with my confidence. Summer had ended, and now I had to be on guard. I think some of me also resented them a little, though I couldn't say quite why.
When everything begins to tarnish, and the veil is pulled aside perhaps it runs both ways. Perhaps no one likes the idea of physical threat over them from those they love the most, now aware of what my wise, kind, generous, wonderful parents could do, if ever I was to fail again, and to upset them.
My parents never again resorted to hitting me, bar once the same year when my mother slapped me down from her as I was getting irritable in my high-chair one day when Dad was at work, an irritability never present in my personality. Maybe it was age, and the difficult years common to all small boys, or maybe it was the first innocuous sparks of a future rage in me, at having been blamed, and punished, unfairly a little, for loving them too much. I will never know. That time, I was less forthright at apologising on the spot and did not come back softly to her and her side to make amends for almost five minutes.
These years remained overall a positive experience to me, but the unsettling edge was now ever-present, like a switch waiting to be flicked, and my mind was tainted by doubt and uncertainty. Never a very confident child by nature, having realised early on from my father's fascinating extended monologues that I knew so very little, and was in more powerful, prudent hands, lectures taken as he accompanied me down to the village pond to throw crumbs of white bread to the gathering ducks, or as he pushed me on my plastic cart up to the swings in the recreational ground play-park by the allotments at the junction of Chequers Road and Ongar Road, or out further as the track dispersed into the open fields beside Victoria Road leading up and down across the arable countryside to the boundary of Cow Watering Lane that marked the edge of the village of Writtle, stopping to watch the herd of dairy cows in the meadow, or to laugh as a grey squirrel hopped across the path.
Sometimes, on a late afternoon we would visit Hylands Park, and I would accompany him along the moist overgrown paths through the woods beside the stately home gardens, jumping in and out of trickling streams under a thick, full canopy of dark green horse chestnut leaves, by sycamores, and hornbeams, and along the winding uphill path to the weathered stone lion statue, lichen gripping to his faded heraldry, and by the old flint lodge, flanked by bluebells, and playing with found sticks, called to observe the bracket fungus clinging to a wet limb, or to giggle in delight as a rabbit darted across the wide grass behind a massive fallen trunk. He talked about the plants, and the pollinating insects, and any animal species we saw along our way, and then about the world at large, and how it worked, and I listened, silent, enthralled, knowing better than to try to interject and risk his frustration, knowing he felt my interruptions keenly, and did not wish to be derailed, or disrupted by the many questions of a small, overexcited child, much as this frustrated me after a while more than anything, knowing he didn't need to hear anything I could raise myself. Nonetheless, despite my gathering physical confidence in the enticing natural world, at home I was prone to anxious worry, doubting myself and my environment, and otherwise unassuming, preoccupied with my reading, quiet as a mouse, as if I did not want to call any attention to myself and bring on undue harm.
Nighttime was always a problem for me. The delineated clearness and cleanness of day held so much potential for me, in a large, light house, or out in the breeze and the radiating sun, absorbed in my endless green wonderment, but as the sun set, and I was required to head to bed, a consternation set over me, and soon I was experiencing bad dreams. Quick to respond to my morning tears, and to my small voice recounting tales of sharp-toothed hairy beasts, or of the dark scowling eyes and crackling talons of a horde of scuttling insects, my parents decided on a night light for me, and soon as I lay in bed at night, accompanied up the stairs by my smiling father with his favourite rhyming slang phrase, "up the apples and pears to your uncle Ned!", and tucked in by my mother with a kiss on my forehead, buried under the thick comforting heat of my many bears, clutching my Little Sheet tight to me, I could get to rest more readily, a smiling Thomas the Tank Engine nightlight glowing full and cheerful from a plug socket on the right wall opposite the right hand side of the sheets where I lay, sending a soft pale blue glow across the varnished pine of the bedposts.
The bad dreams still came to me at times, but in general, I slept more soundly, and the impenetrable gloom and silence of the night-time house no longer felt like the fall of a flickering blaze of discomfort, even with the faint groaning and tapping of pipes and now and again a creak in the floorboards, and then with the same piercing echoes of a hunting barn owl hooting from outside, the grunts of hedgehogs, the shrill barking scream of mating foxes distant over the fields, and the crackling patter of tiny green lacewings on the window, but protected for now from that always malevolent dark, the very fullness of it the real horrifying factor, a murky sheet of black fire that hid monsters, and a huge, implacable terror, all that could readily harm and engulf and devour.
Waking in the night, I would head downstairs as my parents slept, and pace quietly around the ground floor rooms, my first bouts of reflective thinking, mulling over the details of the disturbing dreams I had just experienced. A squat low energy table lamp was always within easy reach in the adjacent kitchen but to reach it I was obliged to cross the full dark of the living room, and soon I found I could not, lingering in the hall, reliant on streetlamps and the natural moonlight for my illumination. The small red lights of the extension cord boxes on the floor of my parent's living room used to scare me too though, in that still silent darkness of the early hours, a cluster of scarlet lights in the corner, just to the right of the expansive patio doors that acted as a great, thin barrier lens to focus the sense of prey-like exposure before the deeper, wilder darkness of the garden, untapped, deadly, and closing back in. Their soft, bloody tones and the muted corona they cast up the wall, like dying embers against the primal stones of a sealed burial mound never failed to repel me, stimulating a blanketing mantle of invasive perceptive weirdness if peered at for too long, never quite able to place what I was fearful of and without tools to distil the tangible essence of the consistent alien pain these steady, opaque experiences stimulated. Presently, that consternation waning somewhat and dissolving into my tiredness, I would re-climb the stairs with soft, nimble footsteps, and return to the reassuring panacea of my nightlight lit, teddy-heaped bed, my tormenting burdens temporarily reconciled and mitigated until the grim onset of another ferocious dusk.
Always tall for my age, I bathed alone from around my 7th year, looking forward to heading upstairs to the short, square bathroom at the outside end of the landing to the left of my bedroom door. My mother would help me run the taps at first, but soon I knew how to decide on my own temperature, adding Matey bubble bath from tall bottles painted to resemble idiosyncratic smiling figures with the lid as their hat, and water toys for the Early Learning Centre on Chelmsford High Street, thin pipes and spouts and plastic hydro-systems with a water wheel that could propel a small counter up and down, water pouring from various platforms and holes in a self-sustained flow cycle. Always bathing now after dark, I could lie back after playing for a little, and close my eyes, relaxing in the steamy chamber, regularly for over an hour, the only sound being the ripples across the bath as I jostled or moved my hands, the full yellow light of the blub above and the steaming, foamy warmth of the water suitable defence from the horrid night.
One evening, late on, just before my bedtime, I was in the bath. Relaxed, my eyes closed as usual, my head inclined backwards and resting slightly on the square white wall tiles, running the fingers of my right hand along the grout and across the smooth plastic-like filler plugging the corners of the bath, with my face pointing up at the pale-yellow paintwork of the ceiling. Suddenly, I heard a tapping behind me, like a sharp object rapping against the transom window above the bathroom door, a thin wood frame, and darkness there behind, the landing lights turned off that night. I had always disliked that window being there, feeling exposed in the water, and glad that the placement of the bath obliged me to be faced away from it. More so, I disliked the dark behind when the lights were off, this long rectangular portal into the abyss of my fears, the glass clear, and thus impotent, never enough to compensate for that inky pit, the landing tall above the stairs, and big enough to hold anything.
My eyes shooting open, I murmured, in audible discomfort, fixating on the gap above the door, itself only thin decorative pinewood, unbolted, reliant now only on the mechanisms of the catch behind the long brass handle. As I stared up, my eyes spiralling into the centre of the glass, the silence gathered, an invisible quilt of smog, and tension in the air, that terrible anti-silence when the walls themselves are ready to strike, raising the hairs on my arms and neck. And there at the window it appeared. A horrible, brown-furred snarling face, dark pits for eyes, huge sharp yellow canines and grasping incisors, and the thick rolls of a pulled back muzzle, an evil sight, a werewolf face, my father's simulated grunts and growls, then a low baying howl, Dad up on a stepladder, the mask pushed back and forth, and hands scrabbling at the window.
I screamed in fear and leapt up out of the water. Then I began to cry, still terrified, my body shaking, coursing with cortisol and adrenaline. “Daddy, why did you do that! Daddy, why! Daddy!” I called to him, as soon as I had regained a little sanity, still eerily scared, but angry too. My first experience of true anger. Terrified of fantastical dark wolves, but aware of the natural world as it is, he had fooled me for no longer than a second, but still, I did not appreciate having been made terrified, especially given my very genuine fear of the darkness, and this from my own father! It wasn't Halloween, and the knowledge that he had purchased the mask in advance with me some weeks back, not knowing it was to be put to a purpose like this upset me.
“Benjamin, calm down. It's OK. Can I come in son? Can I come in?” he was calling to me through the door. “Yes” I said, and my father, without switching on the landing land, pushed open the bathroom door, letting in a chill breeze of air, and him silhouetted against the pouring dark behind, the wolf mask mercifully out of sight, and just his familiar red jumper, coming to comfort me. “Benjamin, it's OK. I was only joking. There, don't be upset. I was only joking, see? There's nothing to be afraid of.”
And this from the man who had just scared the wits out of me. I was not satisfied with his response at first, and still angry, my voice breaking as I screamed at him, “Why did you do that Daddy?! Don't do that! Please don't do that again!” and in return he told me, again, a slight scold to his voice beneath the shock and the exasperation, “Here, look now, I was only joking. You have to have a sense of humour. Come on now. You're OK.” and went to fetch a towel and rub my shoulders and I moved to him, and began to cry on his arm, making sure I had covered myself properly with my legs so that he couldn't see anything indecent. I got out of the bath shortly afterwards, and dried off, and went downstairs to sit with him for an extra hour after my usual bedtime. He made me a cup of weak black coffee and opened a packet of Rich Tea 'dippy biscuits' (as I started to call them) for me to dip in my drink. Despite my rational understanding, there was still fear in my limbs, and at the back of my thoughts, and I did not want to sleep. But sleep I did in the end, although I cannot remember if I had any dreams. Time flies for a while after this recollection, and I have difficulty enough piecing a chronology together from the few scattered visual remnants of these years, my memory evaporated over this period, only a second or two here or there, and not much use. I am aware my bad dreams continued though, into the long term.
A final memory from this point is that one late afternoon I had gone to bed early, to read my dinosaur classification books, followed by the Usborne Book of Greek and Norse Legends, illustrated by the British fantasy and science fiction artist Rodney Matthews, with a cover piece depicting the golden fleece of the ram sired by Poseidon on Theophane the granddaughter of the Sun-god Helios, hanging from a gnarled oak tree on the Black Sea shores of Colchis with the huge serpent head of the dragon guarding the grove of Ares extending into the foreground in sharp, stylised protuberances and sinuous crimson scales, ready for Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, to put it to sleep with the potion of Medea. An unrealistic art direction for that myth, but one I found very appealing at the time. Simultaneously, I was playing with the orange crocodile toy I had then migrated on to, made from jointed foam, on a wire lead that could be twitched to move at the jerk of a hand, and led around the room like a puppy, pretending it was the gigantic dragon roving back and forth ever-alert over the bed, ready to devour the army of He-Men and Thundercats warriors I had arrayed fighting across the bottom of my sheets.
I was so excited in my game, inspired by my reading, that, seeing that it was still light, I pulled out my Thomas the Tank Engine nightlight from the wall plug and brought it into the game also, moving the little face back and forth between the spartoi warriors and the 'dragon', an honorary character, like a god, or a smiling cupid, observing the action below.
Soon enough though, I became tired, and putting down my books I got into bed, and become so comfortable that I was too drowsy to rise again to plug in my nightlight. The white light switch by the wall was set to on though, and the main ceiling light beaming down on me, and so I was content enough to drift off. I don't remember my mother coming in to kiss me goodnight, but when I woke up once later in the early evening the light was still on, and so again I settled into sleep, under my bears.
Then, suddenly, I was awake, in pitch darkness. There was noise by my bedroom door. Shouts, and roars, and an adult imitating the sounds of ghosts, a wailing “woo” vocalization, and rattling of the door handle. I screamed out as I awoke, and became to scramble, clenching the sheets to myself and tossing left and right, the dark all around me, unable even to see the ceiling, the curtains shut, and that awful noise from Dad by the door. I am ashamed to say, in my panic, I urinated the bed slightly. I shouted at my father this time, “Daddy, what are you doing?! Don't do that! Don't turn my light off! Why did you turn my light off!” but he was deep in his own game, and giggling now, coming into the room and reaching over me, still making grotesque noises and booing sounds, and didn't seem to care. I struggled and shrugged unhappily, and pushed him off me, and only then did he seem startled, as if a little put out. “Daddy, I'm scared of the dark! Why did you put me in the dark!” without waiting to hear his answer, I called out loudly, “Mu...mmy!!” and my mother, coming up the stairs herself, rushed into the room saying, “What is it? What is it, Benjamin? What's happened?” I told her what had occurred, and how scared I had been, and that I had wet myself, and she nodded, and, without a word, told me to get up whilst she changed the sheets for me. I was relieved not to have to sleep in wetness any longer.
By now, the light was back on in my room. Dad was standing there, a little grin on his face, looking down at me bemusedly, as if he couldn't interpret my face, and couldn't see that I was visibly shaken. “Come on, I'm just playing a game with you Benjamin. There's no need to be upset. You left your light on tonight, and I was just pretending to be a ghost. There's nothing serious to be scared about. See?” His tone was that of a rational scientist. “But Daddy, I don't like the dark, it's bad, and it gives me bad dreams...”
At this point my mother turned to Dad and said “Why did you do that? He doesn't like the dark. Don't scare him.” and, on hearing that, my father became exasperated, and could only reply, “Oh don't be silly Mary, lighten up, there's nothing to worry about in here. He's safe.” and then, addressing me again, with my mother listening, “There's no need to be worried about anything in here. Come on now, see. Nothing to be worried about. We'll get your bed sorted out again after your accident and you can go back to sleep.” “Remember his nightlight!” my mother added. “Yes, see, as your Mummy says, here's your nightlight, it's been unplugged for some reason...”
I was quiet again now, angry, but hurt, hurt more than anything, and passive on account of it. Some wretched part of me again gave my father the benefit of the doubt, and I began to question myself. Perhaps I should have been more careful with my nightlight. He was only joking after all. He didn't mean any harm. Maybe it didn't make a difference after all as to whether my dreams were haunted. Most of all, why did my body disobey me? Why did I humiliate myself?! And then, conflicting me, why did Mum not do more to fight my case, why did she not tell him off properly, like she had begun to tell me off, like when I wouldn't quieten down in WH Smiths and was charging up and down the toy aisles, or when I slipped her hand in the shopping centre and almost wandered off.
As my parents left to let me sleep, I heard Dad say to my Mum, “what is it with you people? Can you not take a joke!” and heard her say back, “well Billy, he's a sensitive boy, he just didn't like it for some reason, alright?”, but they were getting out of earshot by then, and I did not hear any further reply from her after that. From then on, my nightmares grew steadily worse. Always dark shadows, and red eyes, and huge gleaming wolf teeth snapping out of the night, and horrible worms and insects and slimy leech-like faces flitting back and forth in my vision, and, for the first time, redness, like a dragon, or like blood. However, by then of course there was enough bizarre and misery-inducing horror arriving daily in the real world to render my terrible nocturnal pains only one nagging facet of a very unhappy experience, and yet somehow paradoxically, an invasive facet I acclimatised to in due course, in sombre fatalism. My laughter had become a thing of the past.
Behind my bed there was a tall set of double doors, painted a thick white emulsion, leading to my clothes storage rack, an airing cupboard about 2m x 1m in area, unlit, and packed with the outfits my mother had purchased for me, arrayed on a low wooden rail of thin metal coat hangers. Outgrown baby clothes, and cotton shirts, and French children’s fashion ware from an expensive boutique on Chelmsford’s Moulsham Street, and then more of my larger bears, and a substantial supply of spare duvets, sheets, and pillowcases. My mother would enter my room each morning and help me pick my clothes for the day, deciding, with my help, what she thought would look best on me, and correcting me if I put together a combination she did not think suited and thus required me to change, something I acquiesced to, having no fashion knowledge of my own, and, as with much else of my existence, assuming her superior in knowledge and wisdom, a foolish decision on my part later on as my mother's choices led to much embarrassment and ridicule once I had commenced my public schooling.
An innocuous space, convenient and practical, but my mind still played tricks on me. As I lay in bed, I felt uneasy knowing of the gap behind the headboard, and then the darkness of the cupboard space inside the doors. It was not necessarily the direct feeling of a fearsome beast behind me so much as the knowledge of the space itself, a primal sensation of being watched, or of something in the shadows, perhaps the shadows themselves, essentialized to a malevolent will of their own. I found undressing difficult, loathe to disrobe and thus disarm myself in the presence of a manifest unnameable threat, and, upon stripping down to my white cotton Y-fronts each night (a choice of underwear decided on by my mother), I would move quickly, in jerky, panicked motions, on edge, slipping as soon as possible under the sheets, and immediately reaching for Gizmo and usually a second or third smaller soft toy, only satisfied that I could relax when I knew my head was under the covers, some small barrier to the ominous abstract gaze of the penumbral closet, the twin doors lodged like flimsy sticks, a first morsel in the gaping maw to nothingness, the strange aura of deep chthonic horror extruding across the carpet lying a metre or so to the rear of my anxious body, the bleak numinous, like a sharp electric fuzz of fear-inducing stillness, nothing moving, but the locked air of the room closing in, harrowing, and real, as if explicable.
I still kept my Little Sheet on the bed, for old time’s sake, but as my early years went on, I found it more and more unsatisfying for the lack of solid form, or warm fur and a comforting face, less effective as a soothing aid against terror, and the personalities I had invested in the bears gave me greater pleasure, buried in the supportive press of my appealing friends. only in the day would the bedroom be a safe enough location for me, even with my nightlight, as the power of light itself was counteracted by a new sensation that put me on edge, and, for these memories, rain pattering on the double-glazed glass, and the white walls murky, and suddenly barren. Without the sun, the room was not warm in temperature, and no amount of pale coloured paint could address the gathering gloom and unwholesomeness mingling with that drizzle, a soaking sadness, the ceiling itself overcast, and a rising damp, cloudy and grey, like loss. The closet was always there, that cold, predator gaze penetrating my back, the hairs on my neck risen, and the knowledge that I was, despite my father's world-wise amusement at my fanciful ideas, and all his exasperated words of science, not quite alone.
Downstairs, he continued to sit in his chair each evening, and throughout the day on weekends, when in the house at least, devouring his papers, then absorbed in difficult cryptic crosswords set by The Guardian (though if denied this mental training pleasure, he would accept the conventional general knowledge word puzzles of an American-style crossword as featured in The Times) and binary analysis for his tiring job, always a heavy workload, taking his materials home to mull over for the week, kept busy, and otherwise gripped by a love of popular science and of the great liberal order around him, as by a lifelong amateur naturalist’s enraptured fascination.
As he read in the corner, devoted to his materials, I would come down and sit perpendicular to him on the long crème sofa, and read gathered editions of The Funday Times, the amusingly named children’s supplement of the adult UK Sunday newspaper, briefly browsing the Beano comic antics of Dennis the Menace and his belligerent dog Gnasher, then Beryl the Peril and Scooby-Doo, and then swapping the thin papers for books I had brought from my bedroom, my favourite at the time being an illustrated Tolkien Bestiary compiled by David Day, pouring over the tight, black, gothic pen-and-ink wash work of the Orcs and Wraiths and Wights by the British fantasy illustrator Ian Miller, a jutting Expressionist style, all angular beams and spikes and macabre bestial faces, staring deeply into the background lore of Tolkien’s universe, and attempting many of the paragraphs.
More likely than not, my father would have a Gala apple in his hand, munching the moist white-yellow flesh down steadily as he read, a messy eater, sucking on the fruit, and dropping seeds and droplets of juice onto the upholstery of his chair, bite by bite until only the core remained in his hand, and then continuing to take little nips, round and round until the tiny, stringy, browning carpels broke on the stem, chewing the seeds as well, or spitting them into his hand and placing them on the table, and despite warning me at first that they contained a cyanide compound, before stuffing the entire soggy remnant into his mouth, and continuing to slurp on the grisly husk. Eventually, all that was left was the dark brown stem, twiddled between his thumb and forefinger as he read, or placed back in his mouth and sucked on, almost indefinitely. I found the entire process disgusting on his part, and did not like to be in the room as he was eating his apples, resenting the noises I would be subjected to, and somehow the feeling that the fruit should be enjoyed, as Nature intended, but should end long before he continued to exploit every last piece, the texture change at the fibres around the carpels providing enough warning to an eater to finish by their very nature. Watching him, I felt sickened, and soon refused to eat apples myself, which until then I would peel and cut into pieces with a knife, supervised by my mother, and eat them from a kitchen dessert bowl.
Sometimes I simply asked my Dad to eat more quietly, and especially not to spend a half hour afterwards sucking audibly on the stems, then leaving them piled up on the coffee table. He brushed my complaint requests away though, telling me not to be silly, seeming put out, and adopting a defensive line of “nonsense, all I’m doing is eating!”, laughing slightly (dribbling more trickles of juice down his face), then taking the stems in his hand and reaching forward with them, to present the sticky strands to me, making moaning noises “Ooh! Ooh!”, the thin, sharp smell of apple juice drifting across the room from his open mouth.
I found this increasingly distasteful, and later, though I tried to distract myself and pretend he was not performing his messy ritual, I found due to his sheer apple consumption rate that I could not be in the room with him at all, heading instead back upstairs to my bedroom, reluctantly piling up my books and comics, my face fallen, and the airy expanse of the living room sacrificed for another day. I wondered if he had always eaten like this, and why he did so, confused by the vulgarity of it all, that visceral disgust, hurt that he did not understand what was upsetting me, and that regardless that he refused to stop eating in this manner, displaying a total lack of respect for my feelings, however much my disgust was idiosyncratic. After all, my mother sometimes ate apples herself, although in her case always ended her snack around the outer core, and would dispose of it promptly, albeit conditioned a little as I was by Dad’s behaviour, not quite promptly enough for my liking. I was developing a phobia of his fruit-eating habits, and a weird phobia of others’ apple eating in general.
Then Dad chose to respond to me in a different manner, a manner that that has haunted me for my entire life, and, as a teenager, stimulated many angry accusations, and much denial, as my father, and increasingly Mum too, either dismissed these events altogether, feigning shocked bemusement at their bizarre nature, or, on eventual acknowledgement, would downplay them so significantly that I was left in rage, shouting at them to tell the truth, aghast that they could not apologise, and then told off for raising my voice.
As I came into the living room, I saw my parents standing chatting by the long white radiator on the left wall leading up to the aperture of the kitchen, the door always open, and the crème-upholstered woollen sofa to the right. Above the radiator was hung a small rectangular tapestry, a recreation of a medieval design showing beautifully embroidered birds in a gleaming fruit tree, a faint nod to Celtic art in the uplifting design. My father was talking avidly to my mother, discussing an anecdote from his workplace about his amicable relationship with an Indian colleague, Shyamji, and about the latter’s close family relationships in the East of London. He would often tell anecdotes about Shyamji, amused by his wit, or perhaps by his own, and by his predilection for salted cashew nuts, taking half an hour (in Dad’s story) to consume a single nut despite Dad telling him flatly, laughing, “Shyamji, finish your nut!”
Though these handful of ‘water cooler anecdotes’ were popular with Dad over the years, an office banter and camaraderie like a Dilbert comic strip, one never learned much detail on his actual projects, beyond overview, or much on the long-term directives he was following, or for whom. I gathered later that this was because he had signed the Official Secrets Act. Indeed, in addition, Mum told me much later on that she found some of his friendship antics unlikely, considering Dad was known for his quick, sarcastic temper at work, and, though begrudgingly respected for his highly innovative programming skill, fierce intelligence, and hard-won experience on difficult tasks, he was also found by his team to be a challenging workmate, and a difficult friend, and they were on the whole relieved when he retired after 40 years in the career.
As I looked up at them chatting amicably, my mother nodding, and giving a little laugh now and again, I saw he had an apple stalk in his hand, twirling it between his fingers, the wet, pulled flesh of the tip particularly unappealing to me. “Daddy, please could you put that in the bin?” I said to him, “I don’t like it.”
At first Dad was slow to respond, as if he was ignoring my comment, or could not see that I was being serious. I felt the nausea rising a little in me, staring as his juice-slicked hand, the tart smell of apple juice on his breath, trickles still gleaming on his wet lips. Then he grimaced and put on a forced exaggerated frown. Holding the apple stalk tight between thumb and forefinger, he leaned down and pushed it into my face, waving it back and forth in front of my nose, making grunting calls and moaning noises, “Grr! What’s this?”, “Ooh! Ooh!”, as if playacting with me that the stalk had come alive and was hissing, a living thing, some foul little beast ready to attack, taunting me with this routine, poking the chewed-down flesh at the tip of the curled black stem into my own mouth area, making strange animal grunting noises the while.
Naturally, I screamed in horror and fearful disgust, and hid behind my mother, pulling her right arm around me as a shield, and calling to him, “Stop Daddy! Stop! Please stop!” and then screaming incoherently, terrified, and starting to cry, a shiver of sick fearfulness rising in my body, stepping backwards, not wanting to be anywhere near the weapon he now had made of the stalk in his fingers, like a thin black leech dripping poison, or a velveteen worm, slithering at me from the unceasing malignity of his aggressive control, a hostile ‘pet’ under his pitiless command.
“Mummy! Mummmmy!!! Stop him, please! Please Mummy, stop him!” I screamed, forcefully, pleading with my mother to do something, as she stood by saying nothing, and Dad continued to drive the little stalk down into my face in callous pokes, but she continued to stand by idly, not saying a word, bar a brief mumble of “Come now Billy, I don’t think he likes you doing that” And Dad, always the more dominant of the pair, ignored her, and continued his game, until I fled the room, tears erupting down my cheeks and a horrified, torn expression, unable to express the sheer wretchedness of how I felt, and the devilishness of my father, my bully (long before I even knew that term), unrelenting, and unchecked, having humiliated me before my mother, and her impotent, or, more likely, unwilling to help me, rendered passive by long years in his company, buoyed along by his hands-up protestations of jest and simply stating to me, level and unaffected, as I rushed from the living room, tripping over myself to get away, “it’s OK, Benjamin, Daddy’s just playing a game with you. It’s his sense of humour. He doesn’t mean to cause any harm. Come on Billy, stop now.” And my father guffawing, and saying to her with a funny look, within my fading earshot, genuinely bemused, “what’s got into him?”
This strange ritual on my father’s part continued for them on. He would be somewhere in the room, and would come over if he had one, and drive the stalk down at me, always making the bestial noises and grunts and groans, and scowling his face to signify “what’s this?”, and I would continue to scream, hysterical, and to beg my Mother to stop him, and her to merely stand there, letting his arm brush past her, and to allow me to be horrified and hurt, and insulted to my core by him, absolutely aghast, and only later would she say to me, if I asked, “Daddy’s sense of humour is like that. If he notices someone doesn’t like something he’ll do it more. The best thing you can do is pretend you’re not bothered by it.” And, to my shock and anger, she put the blame onto me for the situation, for not dealing with it as she recommended, and as if me, a little child, unable totally to stop my father from his grisly routine, was squarely my own fault, and my own responsibility, and besides, it was only a game. These stalk-waving incidents – and they were many – effectively ended my childhood, leaving me traumatised, and unsure how to think about them at all, knowing the sheer bizarreness of the circumstances, and the ridiculousness, and embarrassed, not sure how to broach the subject with other adults, if at all, knowing I would be potentially given some very odd looks, or further ridiculed. And so, I did not share them with anyone else, and they continued to haunt me in the background, inexpressible, to this day.
Now, when I even see an apple core on a table, or a stalk, or the seeds in a stock photo of a cut apple half, preternaturally the nausea rises, and I have been known to vomit, or at least to retch, and usually avert my gaze or leave the area. I recognise this as ridiculous, and somehow silly. After all, of all reasonable things to be afraid of, who has a fear of cut apples? But then I remember (and how could I forget?!) these terrible childhood tortures on my father’s part and I weary understand in self-reflection, even if I am still embarrassed, feeling, despite it all, unjustified in my shock.
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