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It’s a field day for bizarre science. Here’s another one today on the Beeb, ‘spontaneous human combustion’, which when it comes to dying is surely one of the most annoying ways requiring of the strongest of, “Aw, c’mon!”
It was a fear that haunted me since childhood, when I happened across a big folder of magazines by The Fortean Times, owned by my uncle. Inside was an article on spontaneous human combustion and to my eight year old brain the articles seemed packed full of carefully explained scientific fact and impeachable evidence. One photo stuck with me in particular; what appeared to be ashes and a leg next to a bathtub, with charred floorboards and exposed twisted piping. The entire notion terrified me, as did the photograph. When reading paranormal ‘non-fiction’ books I’d be sure to check for the section on SHC and avoid opening the pages on it.
Of course my other fear was of pylons, born of witnessing the opening scene of the BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s Tripod trilogy when I was about four. A strange, terrible electronic cry is heard in a village seemingly from Shakespeare’s time, a sound that has a mix of animal and hunting horn. And then, lumbering into view, strides a great three legged metal machine, pushing through the trees. A foot sails through the air and sinks into the village pond, and the head tilts down to gaze upon the villagers. Then, a tentacle descends from a glowing portal and snatches up a young man with a hairless head.
This combined many potent terrors for me, not least of which was a fear of male pattern baldness. Later you see the tripod scuttle away in the reflection of a window, behind which people are seen looking on in wonder – a shot directly copied as a homage in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds in the intersection sequence, immediately prior to the tripod firing its guns. This powerful lesson in visuals had me from behind the sofa, up the stairs and cowering under the sheets. But it wasn’t the episode alone… another ‘non-fiction’ book had a part to play.
This is where childhood memory blurs with the possibility of a half-remembered dream. I recall being up in the top bunk in my old hillside bedroom back in Arndale Grove, Holmfirth. I must have been six or seven. I had a book that summarised genre fiction in the shape of false newspaper articles, accompanied with lurid illustrations. One of the illustrations showed a Martian war machine towering over a church. It was a bright copper colour and the cowl was shaped like a door-knob with a single, large, black hole – devoid of light. It had in one tentacle a struggling villager. More were fleeing through burning streets around its legs. This book spoke of such an event happening – I never quite believed it directly, but I thought that surely something like this must have happened.
Cross-legged, in front of the television on a Saturday, cheese sandwiches in finger rolls and a packet of crisps. Three men approach a serpent like jointed tentacle that projects from a crater. They wave a flag. Discordant, reverberating electric sound and steam shoots up around the glowering great honeycombed orange eye of the machine. Flame and sparks shoot from it accompanied by a high-pitched, machine-gun whistle. The men disappear in a blossoming fire of destruction. I’m equally terrified and mesmerised.
There’s a street light outside my window. I can see it in the gap of the curtains. It glows orange. I imagine it rotating slowly, glaring at me through the window, and then striking me dead. I dream of a hillside on a moonless night, lit only by the countless flickering flames of heather and scrub burning – and then of the mighty machines that rise up over the crest, laying waste to buildings. Sometimes they approach over the moors, and we flee in our car to Huddersfield. Sometimes, they come from Huddersfield. Sometimes they are those great, towering metal machines – always uniform in design on the night, but each time different according to the most recently devoured artist’s rendering. Often, they are not tripods at all, but the equally sinister slick, green, hovering manta rays of George Pal’s pulp vision.
Mum takes me to see her best friend. I am very young – between five and six, the series still fresh in my mind. I begin to scream when we approach the house. Her friend lives beneath a pylon, only to my eye it is an alien machine. You’re not safe anywhere. Television proved this to me. I could see the pylons, possessed of malign intelligence, jerkily marching across the land and shooting electricity into people’s homes. No matter this was an advert for the National Grid, to my malleable mind it was a warning – no, a prophecy – of invasion. The streets were not safe; unblinking orange eyes, standing sentinel over all exit routes, waiting to fire if I ran down the street to get away. Pylons stood alongside motorways, ready to intercept my family if we fled by car. Other kids trembled at the thought of Daleks, or Darth Vader. Foolish fancies, didn’t they realise that the enemy were already here, all around us outside our very homes?
Not that our homes provided much security. Further nightmare fodder blended in from a typically high-powered, aggressive 80’s advert selling cassette tapes. A hillside – again the threat is always elevated – and a rich man’s bungalow in the Frank Lloyd Wright manner squats beneath a stormy midnight sky of lightning flashes and thunder. White light pours from its windows. The view switches to inside, curtains flap crazily as the wind pours through open windows. Your view pans along a largely empty room of dimly lit blank walls and floorboards towards a stern, gaunt yuppie with slick black hair, staring dead eyed off screen, his white-knuckled fingers gripping the armrests, seemingly fresh from the pages of American Psycho. To his side is a stereo. A tape winds slowly. Horrifyingly apocalyptic opera music plays. A voice informs us that it is the ultimate in audio fidelity.
White flashing light, open windows, crazily flapping curtains, fire, towering machines, humming and snaking probes, burning hillsides, people flashing into flame, reports of old invasions and why can’t my parents… why can’t they SEE what terrible danger we are all in as they wheel me towards that impassive steel monster?
These were all legitimate things to fear…
… so what scared you?
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"Peter you've lost the NEWS!"
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