(Usborne, 1977/2019)
Childhood is a kind of half-world, where real-life often blurs into the imaginary and fantastic. I can't remember a time when I was young when I didn't believe that everything read or seen in books was true: witches, demons, Norse mythologies, the gods and monsters of Ancient Greece and Egypt were all just as plausible as the everyday-ness of pencils, toothpaste and cornflakes - I just hadn't seen any such supernatural beings. But, boy, that never stopped me from being totally in awe of them or from believing in them.
I was about ten years old when I first came across the book that helped to shape a huge part of my life. It was a dark Tuesday evening, autumn- or winter-time. I'd had my fishfingers, spaghetti hoops and Angel Delight (child of the 80s!) and I was ready for that regular, glorious trip to the local library, pleasurably searching for something to read at bedtime. As I arrived, the fluorescent lights of the library and the gentle murmur of other bibliophiles going about their bookish business lulled me into the usual happy sense of security. Tonight, however, that feeling was to prove false.
Wandering through to the children's section, I found myself gazing up at a book face-out on a high shelf.
Ooooh! That looks rather good:
'Ghosts'.
I like spooky things.
It looks quite 'safe' too -
colourful,
a picture book...
actually an information book:
it's good that it's an information book -
FACTS don't mess
with the imagination so much.
Let's borrow it!
Let's look inside!
No...I'm not sure I'm liking this.
A freaky dog with one eye
that looks very weird...
a picture of a hanging man...
those skulls they've drawn
look like they are watching me...
The pictures, as I turned the pages, started increasingly to alarm me: more than that, actually - they were deeply, viscerally frightening. I felt real fear and something very much out of my control: I could not stop looking at the book. The greatest horror appeared near the end - a photograph of a monk, three metres tall, stretched out in some inhuman way, with a sheet over its face and two dents marked in the cloth, baleful eye-sockets glaring. Even now I look at it and think there's something very wrong about it.
I don't think I ever took the book out of the library: in all honesty, I believed it was cursed. I did however, manage to read (and enjoyed reading!) the whole thing a number of times over the following few years, until I had moved on in my head, when I'd finally discovered mundane reality was more obviously 'real'.
That book, 'Ghosts' by Christopher Maynard, still scares me. Why? I'm now a 'grown up', not a terrified child. It's not like I live in Borley Rectory or in a remote marshland - my home is a warm, modern semi- on a new estate. Yet that house is filled with volumes and volumes of spook stories, folktales, mythology and the like that I have collected over the many years since that ten-year-old boy found that original book of ghosts. By being terrified of their ilk as a child, I now give them shelter and physically live alongside my fear. They are talismanic; their horrors comfort me.
There are only a very few supernatural stories which manage to scare me nowadays. But addicted to this search for that rare feeling - and why on Earth do I want to experience it anyway?! - I go on looking for another source of that intense literary fear I first experienced in 'Ghosts'. If you were a reader as a child, a book will almost certainly have frightened you too. For some, it is Grimm who manages it, or maybe it's the death of Aslan, or Dahl's Grand High Witch. None of those scared me (although the moon-like, staring eyes of Sendak's Wild Things come high in my list of literary horror) - no, for me it was that monk. And I wish I knew why...maybe if I could pinpoint that, then I'd learn something about myself.
Does growing up ever diminish the power that childhood reading has on us in the long-term? I'm not sure it does, and certainly not if we embrace the fact that those things we read as a child form indelible and intricate, vital mechanisms of our 'grown up' minds and senses. And of those senses, fear is a potent and very necessary animal instinct.
I'm not going to say that books are a safe way to experience that fear and work through it - because they aren't. Books aren't safe and nor should they ever be. For the child me, what I read in books was perfectly real: if there was horror in it, it was danger; if there was danger, it was a warning; if there was a warning, I should heed it. It was that simple: books helped teach me to be afraid.
And I'll be forever grateful to the one book in particular that - for me - did it first.
I'm finding it difficult trying to imagine what books scared me most as a child. It was more the patterned wallpaper which suggested staring eyes or facial profiles that disconcerted me and kept me awake at night in my darkened bedroom. I suppose they might have been the equivalent of your monk's visage. Other than that all that immediately comes to mind as disturbing me in a book was the journey through the caves in Tom Sawyer. Time for a reread, I think, to see if that book helped teach me be afraid!
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