Memory Lane No. 2: The dark

Another memory from our days in Germany, in the little village of Ober Eschbach, where we lived. This memory is circa 1971.

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It was a sunny Saturday morning, but I dragged my feet walking home from school (a quaint German thing that, school on a Saturday morning), because I knew that I was walking towards an empty home. A house gaping with rooms with no one in them to greet me.

Quite unusually, my parents were off on a shopping expedition in Frankfurt and wouldn’t return until early afternoon. My siblings were at friends'. I was on my own. Alone in the house. And I was fearful of entering it. My imagination was fertile with goblins and monsters and generally bad people coming from the shadows of the laundry room to get me.

My mother, knowing of my trepidation at being home alone, was clever: She planned ahead with me and we arranged that I would enter the house through the basement back door and then would need only to go to the play room at the end of the hall, where she would leave me a snack. All I had to endure was a few hours alone in that room, with the TV as company.

I arrived. I steeled myself to walk down the concrete steps, surrounded by incongruously cheerful nasturtiums, and into the house through the basement door. I walked purposefully down the hall and into the playroom. And shut the door. There. At least if a monster arrived, it would have to open the door and I would be warned by the noise.

I remember so clearly the conflicting feelings of fear at the untold number of awful things that might happen to me alone in the house and the knowledge that there was simply no avoiding being alone in that room in the house.

I stayed in that room, sitting on the bed with my back against the wall, eating the snack and watching the TV, until Mum and Dad returned. And everything was safe again.

#innocentfearofchildhood