Childhood fears - Grace

I just discovered this amazing little piece by my mother.  It certainly merits reposting here:

                                                            F E A R 

          As a kid of five, six, seven and thereabouts, I spent every waking hour negotiating a minefield of threats to life and limb.

            First terror of the day: the witch in the toilet.  Every morning she waits for her chance: once you’re seated, she could grab you – to pull you in – flush – and so long! A horrible way to go.

            Another menace: bootleggers.  What are bootleggers?  They are knee-high rubber or leather boots that walk around all by themselves.  If you don’t keep the closet shut, they will march out and come and get you.  (I knew all about them from my sister Nance, who couldn’t get to sleep at night unless Miss Venable shoved a heavy chair against the closet door.  – Incidentally, the toilet witch looked a little like Miss Venable, who was a sworn foe of constipation.)

            It goes without saying that there was Something under the bed.  Only a fool would just walk over to the bed and get in: you had to jump from a distance; otherwise the Thing would catch you by the ankle and drag you into its underworld lair.  This creature was so unspeakably horrid that it didn’t bear imagining: I couldn’t describe it – the brain shuts down and refuses to speculate about anything so ghastly.

            Once under the covers, are you safe?  Ordinarily, yes; but I can remember one whole night of frozen fear at the realization that I wasn’t alone in the bed.  There was a skeleton in there too.  I couldn’t dismiss this thought as a fantasy: there was a skeleton -   my own.  Think about it.

            The above is a fair sampling of the perils of existence inside the house.  But outdoors, of course, there was the great overriding menace: the possibility – the probability – the certainty – that there were kidnappers out there, and they were after me.

            Obviously, no one would sit down with a five-year-old child and provide her with bulletins about the Lindbergh kidnapping.  I would assume that, on the contrary, everyone in the household – our parents, the nurse Dorina, Miss Venable and the cook – must have tried to suppress the news from the little kids.  So how did we know about it?   We didn’t listen to the radio; I don’t remember that we had one.  Naturally, we weren’t reading the  papers.  We led a very insulated life in one of five houses, all occupied by close relatives, scattered off the drive leading to our grandfather’s big red brick house on the edge of the Sound.  We never saw anyone from outside “the Place,” and never ourselves ventured beyond its borders.  We were too young for school.  Our ten- and eleven-year-old brother and sister were staying that summer at the Big House with our grandparents; we hardly ever saw those two, and couldn’t have heard the news from them. 

But it was in the air.  We knew about the crime, and the words “Lindbergh baby” were on the surface of our consciousness all the time.  --  At some point our father, Bill Pierce, got wind of our fears, and he put in a rare appearance in the kitchen at our breakfast table and tried to explain to us what unlikely targets we were for kidnappers.  It wasn’t only that we were surrounded by people who would protect us from bad guys: these criminals were not interested in us.  They looked for prominent people; famous people; and, of course, for very, very rich people.  So we needn’t worry.

            But we knew our grandfather was famous: he was the world’s greatest lawyer, senior partner of the law firm Pierce and Greer; and as for rich – we’d never thought about it.  But we knew we weren’t poor, because Miss Venable had read us the story of the Little Match Girl: she was poor, so maybe we were rich.  Bill had a hard time explaining that although we were quite a bit better off than the Little Match Girl, we weren’t Rich People.  We had been, until a few years ago, but since the Crash – “Oh, hell, there’s no use trying to explain.  Just believe me: no one is going to try to kidnap you.”

Nance appeared to be reassured, and I pretended I was, too; but it was I who had seen the huge leaf-pile mounded up behind the house and had noted a strange motion of the leaves – bulges and pockets appearing here and there; sudden flights of individual leaves; every evidence that sinister figures were hidden inside, ready to jump out and abduct me.

            Childhood terrors! Aren’t they ridiculous?  Within a few years, of course, they abated, and I was even able to laugh about them.  You grow up, and they evaporate without leaving a trace.

            Well – hardly a trace!  Of course, a person should take sensible precautions; for example, you want to take a peek in the john before using it, just a quick check for bubbles or ripples.  Then you want your place to look neat, so all closet doors should be kept firmly shut.  And in the interests of efficient organization, you want to store enough books, papers and 78s under the bed so there’s absolutely no space left for anything else. 

            Finally, for excursions out and about, let’s say to restaurants or movies, wearing an old mail-order gray dress with phony pearls and a Timex watch reduces the risk of a snatch to just about zero.

            Sure, sure, I know these measures are a little peculiar – but you know what they say: better safe than sorry!

                                                                         Grace P. Forbes