posted
When I was younger I used to anticipate the arrival of the ice cream van, track its rounds. Ears straining for the sound of the chimes, taut with anxiety if they came too late. And the dreadful disappointment of autumn when he didn't come at all, the long wait of winter and the thrill of the last notes of spring, the first notes tinkling from the speakers, spilling into the still air. I would run to the man with my money hot in my moist palm, thrust them upwards, away.
This was before boys, of course, when the ice cream van became the focus of our gang, By the bus stop between the Bentalls and John Lewis in Kingston town centre. We flirted with the ice cream boys, swapping 99s for kisses behind the van, thusting ice down backs, squealing, swirling between the pedestrians in our too-short uniform skirts, blue jumpers looped round waists. They were benign, then, fun. That van was static and didn't send out the tinkling siren song, boys and girls come out to play, hooking in children and perspiring parents from their homes, luring them into the street.
It was part of summer, as familiar as the smell of suntan lotion, the hot car trips to the beach, picnics in the park. But the other night I was sitting with my housemates in the garden, chatering happily, when the off-key notes came tumbling through the still air. And we shifted uneasily as the van trundled up and day the neighnouring streets, blaring the tune out of the crackly speaker. It was sinister, we decided. Strange, other. The merest hint of threat.
How had our minds, tangled up in happiness and bright memories, twisted this up? Why do the trappings of childhood fancy inspire this unease? Clowns, fairgrounds, dolls, twins. Perhaps the images have been appropriated by horror writers: certainly they become emblems of evil, of the uncanny. The glint in the eye of a porcelain doll, the smooth cold curve of white cheek. The leeering grin of the clumsy clown, fumbling in greasepaint and oversized costumes and glinting, exposed teeth. It's not real fear: not the same terror inspired by thoughts of darkness and blindness and death. But there's a grating between the memories and the present. Something unsettling.
Is this peculiar to me (loll, ego)? Have I been reading too much cheap horror or have these emblems of childhood been picked up because there's a universal vein of discomfort threading through them, and through our psyche?
Anyhow, this has become a bit insular. To open it up to discussion (obvious questions to follow): Does anything from your childhood make you uneasy today? Why do you think this is? Alternatively, go off on a tangent and talk about childhood memories of summer. That could work just as well, if not better.
-------------------- the more brilliant her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster Posts: 1057
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posted
Popular culture often uses childhood toys and symbols out of their usual context in order to frighten the viewer. How many horror films have you seen which use nursery-rhyme tinkling as an horrific act encroaches on the screen?
Also, it reminds you that you've changed since the childhood days of ice-cream and Care Bears. You're older. You have responsibilities. You can't just have fun anymore. You're closer to death!
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turbo
Gold..... What is it good for? You can't eat it, you can't smoke it, yet everybody wants it.
posted
Yesterday I heard the plinkety-plonk of 'our' ice cream van and ran out to meet him, Turbo Man's wallet clutched in my sweaty palm, just as enthusiastically as 25 years ago. When the man clambered into the back of the van and opened the window, I almost screamed. Talk about the stuff horror movies are made of - long, pointy brown finger nails, sweaty fat rolls, beady little eyes glinting behind thick spectacles. *shudder* The ice cream was nice though...
-------------------- Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. Posts: 1189
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
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Childhood memories, for most people, tend to be pleasant things. A baking bowl of nostalgia into which a sticky finger can be dipped, and the sweet contents licked for a momentary high of dappled sunlight and sandy legs and twinkling streams next to makeshift mud dens. For most people, their childhood will, initially, recall warm car seats and the promise of the mysterious sea or slapdash picnics eaten from collections of tupperware on a drizzling Devon heath. People think of the subtle light falling on the last kerby game of the summer or the security blanket safety of being called home for tea.
This is the selectivity of the human mind. For everything to be so bright, so challenging, so clear, so intense as it is when you are a child, there is the neat counterbalance of everything being so terrifying, so unknown, so huge, so bladder clenchingly wrong. There's unscalably heights of cruelty so effortlessly achieved by parents, as they firmly close the bedroom door, leaving you alone with impenetrable dark and the thing that lives in the mirror and only comes out at night[i]. The step counting fingers-on-the-edge-self-control that it took every ounce of childish will to sustain as you [i]made yourself pass number seven, with the slavering German Shepherd and the man who shouts at children. There are those single seconds, in the woods, armfuls of bluebells, when a harsh word from your sister suddenly makes the scene one of lurking threat and unimaginable horror. What could be behind the tree? More importantly, what's in the tree?Are those long, white, creeping fingers pulling from the stream or just the rills of water breaking over a stone.
Then, for me, there was the slurry. It existed, a 25 foot pool, nestled between slag heaps in the fields beyond the canal. It was an oleaginous mass of coal muck and mud, consistently kept in a state of sodden ferment by the generous feeding of some underground springs. The slurry held such fear because it terrified my Mother. Her voice went up an octave on those warnings, where it retained the monotony of overuse on the others; "Don't go in the farm unless Joanne's there, don't be nasty Gilly Hurst, don't lose sight of your sister, stay in twos or threes, be back for half past twelve, don't go near the slurry". I was probably about eight when I first heard the story of Aberfan, and the slurry that ate a whole school. All those little children , white limbs sullied by nasty, creeping, inexorable mud, Tiny mouths drowned in rocky, glinting coal chunks. The message was clear ; slurries are bad. The message was reinforced; there was a little girl put her finger in the slurry and it sucked her in and then she was gone because once the slurry has you you can't ever get out again. Then reinforced again: grown men can't get out of slurry, it weakens their legs. They sink slowly, even whilst they're being thrown line and rope and chain. Because not even chains and engines will get you out of a slurry once you're in.
The slurry was the backdrop to my childhood and each time that boundary was pushed, gently, with the index finger of rebellion, the slurry came nearer. My sister went to look at it once, whilst I stayed behind, paralysed with that level of searing fear peculiar to small children. My stomach was queasy and a tiny line of fine, blond hairs stood from goosebumps the size of gooseberries on my arms. My palms were frozen. My mind saw my sister in the black, slowly being eaten, from Clarks practical shoes up, by this hungry, hideous, silent thing.
Nothing is quite ever as frightening again as the things you meet in broad daylight as a child. This is why, occasionally, your spine will spasm with a childhood sound or smell, as your mind atavistically recalls the vestiges of that unutterable terror. Before your adult self shrugs it off gently, finds a Freudian word for the feeling, then elides, gently, into its adult place, and you laugh along with your friends at your own silliness.
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[ 09.08.2004, 18:43: Message edited by: My Name Is Joe ]
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Astromariner
Going the right way for a smacked bottom
posted
We used to go on secret missions to the quarry, which was a vast bowl hewn out of the landscape that seemed, to my young eyes, to have the approximate dimensions of the Grand Canyon.You could hear the warning siren for the demolition machines from our house all the way through the day. In the summer you could go up and sit on the springy grass and heather around the edges, and watch little men like ants scurrying around the floor, and machines smashing into the walls with massive metal weights swinging on chains.
We had an irish water spaniel who dad bought as a gun dog but who turned out to have a mortal terror of the sound of gunshot. Because he loved to swim we used to take him on walks to all the reservoirs around: Blackmoorfoot, Whitefields, Green Withens, Scammonden. Even the sounds of their names make me think immediately of clumping along in bright yellow wellingtons on damp afternoons, purple-mottled moors stretching out under bulging skies.
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posted
I wish I'd grown up in the same village as Astromariner. It'd have been great. She would have been this funky little kid in brown corduroys, an army jumper and with chocolate round her mouth - me in a pale orange Radio One Roadshow 1983 tee-shirt featuring Bruno Brookes and Peter Powell, shorts and sandals. We would have made dens and thrown stones at magpies and drawn comics and stuff.
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