Fear

1.4.08
Even my dolls, sitting in an orderly row on the pink, brocade settee, assumed a rather sinister air in the half-light.
The very worst, was one night was when it had been raining, and my mother, without thinking anything about it, had hung her white mac up to dry on the upright handle of the carpet sweeper, which habitually stood just outside the dark, ominous cupboard. Never before or since, not even when charged by a rhino in South Africa, or had a cobra slung round my neck in Morocco, have I known what it feels like to have my hair stand on end. I did that night. I was too scared even to scream, not to mention get out of bed, and run through the dark passage way and the scullery to gain the safety of the kitchen. with sweat By the time they found me, hours later, I was still rigid with fear and my long flannelette nightie was quite damp with perspiration.
My vivid imagination was mostly my friend and my ally, indeed often the only source of entertainment and like-minded companionship that I had at my disposal. Through my imagination, my dolls and bears became alive. Each one not only had a name allotted to him or her, but a whole raft of personality traits as well. Most of them were not new. A largish bear and a rather politically incorrect doll called Topsy I inherited from my much older cousin. Topsy had little squiffs of black woollen hair poking out of three small holes in her dusky china skull, and Big Teddy had a rather more pointed face than is usual for bears of today. What remained of the fur on his tum, had to be brushed to the side on one side of his central seam, and straight down on the other. How is it that such trivial things are remembered for over half a century, whereas all sorts of much more important things are forgotten?
The linoleum, lino for short, in my grandmother’s bedroom cum general living room was of a blue colour with a vaguely ripply pattern on it. So I and my family of nine were able to take imaginary trips to the seaside whenever the fancy took us. I would adjust the clothing of all of them until I deemed it suitable for a bracing dip in the briny, and afterwards my grandmother would supply me with tea-towels to rub them all dry again. Then, with plastic dolls’ tea-set cups and teaspoons, we would dig in the sand. That probably did not do a great deal of good to the pile of the pinky-beige rug that was our improvised beach, but is was probably better than spilling a whole container of bubble liquid on to the big, sooty bedroom carpet.
It had been a pure accident, but I can see my mother and my aunt, even now, scrubbing away and remarking that they didn’t know where all the soap was coming from. The clean patch in that carpet was there for all to see, for months if not years afterwards. I could never look at it without at least a small twinge of guilt for giving everybody so much work and being the cause of my glamorous aunt getting down on her hands and knees and having a ladder in one of her new stockings. I wasn’t quite sure how she could have managed that. The ladders that I had seen leaning against the sides of houses would have been much too big. But they were all saying by this time, “Doesn’t that child ever stop asking questions?” So I had let the moment pass.
Two more points about that carpet, while we are on the subject. Firstly, that later on in life, eight or so, I found what an excellent way it was to shine up old pennies until they gleamed like new. I just had to rub them on the carpet until they were hot with friction. I used to love rubbing the Victorian pennies best, nearly as big as Ritz crackers, and worn quite flat from use. Yes, those were the days when there were 240 pennies in the pound, twelve in the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. There were half-penny coins with a ship in full sail on the back, and farthing coins with a rather plump robin on the reverse. The silver three pence coins had already gone out of circulation. But my grandmother had a hoard of them in one of the copper containers on the mantelpiece (the stone shelf above the fireplace, for the uninitiated) She always meant to make a necklace out of them for me, but somehow, they disappeared before that little plan was ever realised. Silver sixpences were very much in circulation however, slightly larger than the 5p coins of today, they represented untold riches to me as a child. And each one I received as my weekly pocket money was buffed up with vigour until it shone and gleamed. It was a pity that I was too young to know about this after the accident with the soap bubbles, for I would have been able to quickly blend that accusing patch of clean carpet into the rest, with the aid of a handful of old pennies.