 Childhood horrors Childhood. Such innocent times. Long, hot summer nights during holidays that seemed to last three years. Evenings spent playing in the park on swings, or mass games of British Bulldog that usually stopped when, and only when, someone broke something. The build up to Christmas where your mum makes you write Christmas cards to everyone in your class – even the Jehovah Witness kid because you have no clue what that actually means. Winters with amazing snow – three, four-foot drifts bigger than me that looked like you would disappear if you jumped into it. Feet swelling up when you got back indoors. Frost on the inside of your window on cold days. Easter holidays spent eating your body weight in chocolate. These are all good childhood memories. Less good: getting changed for PE, big lads picking on you because you happened to be clever (not that clever, but cleverer than them – and they knew it), teachers telling you off and hitting you (usually with a shoe or a stick) because they could. I was once hit by my art teacher because I was chewing in his lesson. He knew my class had PE that day, so he made everyone get their trainers out and tried them all on the table until he found the one with the hardest sole to beat me with. Over thirty-five years later, I can still remember the pain and shame of that. But are these childhood fears? Not really – everyone my age has a similar story and I hated my art teacher, but I wasn’t scared of him. Even when he hit me halfway through an exam, I still wasn’t scared of him, but man, I really, really hated him like I’ve never hated anyone before, or since. I have a vague memory of being scared of Thatcher: Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher and thinking that she might come and personally, physically take my milk away. A quick fact-check says she let milk be for 5-7-year olds until about 1980, so I think I’m probably making that memory up. I saw one of the Christopher Lee/Peter Cushing Dracula films when I was young and slept with a scarf on for a while. I’m almost certainly misremembering that too, but it’s a funnier image than me being beaten by a sadistic 60-year-old art teacher. Recently, my entire family went away to the Cotswolds for a weekend – something we don’t get to do very often anymore. It was entirely lovely and also the opportunity for some research: I asked them all what they thought I was afraid of when I was young. Every single one of them said the same thing, without hesitation. Spiders. There’s some decent work being done on the rehabilitation of spiders in the public eye: they’ll eat the flies, earwigs, moths and other creepy crawlies in your house. They’re even being used in parts of China to control insects in rice fields. Leave them be. I don’t buy this at all. Look at them closely and then say you’re good with the things. Watch the way they crawl across the floor, with those sudden changes of pace and direction. Look at the way their legs move, especially when they’re travelling at pace. Look at the big lumpy stuff of nightmares sack things that hold all their young. Imagine them running over your body at night. Because they do. Lying in bed, think of those legs skittering across your body, looking for warm places to hunker down for the night. Think of them crawling into your mouth as you are fast asleep as I believed. There is a story that says we swallow eight spiders each, on average, in our lifetimes. Well there’s a good few people who can’t have eaten any due to the sheer number I thought I managed when I was a kid. Of course, I probably didn’t eat any at all as they allegedly don’t come near us at night as we’re too loud and our mouths too wet, but I never once believed that as a child. As a paperboy, I would often have to walk down narrow paths between houses on estates and spiders would have spun their webs across the path. I would always be late, so would have to run my round and would jog head first into these morning webs, usually with my mouth open. I would brush the strands from my face, but never manage to clear it fully and would spend the rest of the day imaging spiders crawling in my hair or across my back. Now, as a father, I try to hide my fears from my kids. We live in the country, so we get some goliaths as spiders (not actual goliath spiders –whatever you do, don’t look them up). Every time I get the glass, trap the spider and take it outside, hopefully hiding how much I’m shaking from my kids. This is not some macho thing: I’m fine with my children knowing that I’m not so tough but more because it’s so totally irrational. It’s like being scared of flies. When I started to write my first novel, The Original’s Return, I needed something to get the reader to realise that what was happening was not natural without stating that explicitly. Spiders seemed the obvious fit to me, even if I did need several showers after writing that sequence. As we drove back from the Cotswolds, we had a few hours in the car, and I brought up that I was writing this article. My youngest son said, “Are you going to write about spiders?”. He hadn’t heard any of the conversations I’d had with my parents and siblings. Guess I’m not that good at hiding my feelings. Childhood fears: who am I trying to kid? This one is very clear and present today. about david watkins David Watkins lives in Devon in the UK with his wife, two sons, dog, cat and two turtles. He is unsure of his place in the pecking order: probably somewhere between the cat and the turtles. There are two novels in The Originals' series: The Original's Return concerns an ordinary family man becoming the God of Werewolves and the follow up, The Original's Retribution, covers the immediate aftermath and consequences of Jack's actions in the first book. Both novels are highly rated on Amazon. David's latest novel is The Devil's Inn: a chilling tale set on Dartmoor during a fierce snowstorm. Has the Devil really come to Devon? He is now working on a new stand-alone novel, set in Exeter. He hates referring to himself in the third person, but no-one else is going to write this for him. David can be found on Twitter so please drop by and say hello @joshfishkins, where you'll find him ranting about horror, the British education system and Welsh rugby, but not usually at the same time. The Devil's Inn by David Watkins “I don’t want to die in a pub in Devon…” There is a pub in the heart of Dartmoor where a fire has burned every day for over one hundred and fifty years. It is said the fire never goes out. It is said that if it does, the Devil will appear and claim the souls of all inside. Tonight, seven strangers are stranded there during a fierce snowstorm. Tonight, the fire will go out… Praise for David Watkins "David Watkins writes very well: he has the ability to draw you in to his characters’ lives, which at the beginning are quite normal, and then of course you can't let go.” AMAZON "Great horror! I couldn't put the book down" 4.5*, Pamela Kinney, Ismellsheep.com read our review of The Devil's Inn here   Comments are closed.
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