But I’d be kidding if I were to deny the legacy of spine-igniting frights and traumas she bequeathed to the sensitive among us. Garping like a lizard, wilfully rattling, falling monumentally from casually-opened cupboards — these were the ways Nanny Jack made it known that she loved us. ‘I wouldn’t like to bump into her while stumbling drunk in a cat cemetery,’ said Uncle Snapper on one occasion, unaware that Nanny Jack was standing behind him. That evening shrill screams echoed from the treehouse and in the morning a pasty Snapper denied unbidden that he had been ‘dreaming of a thousand spiders’.
Nanny Jack said nothing at this or any other time — though on one occasion she gripped my arm, leant in close and made a sound like the hollow hiss in a conch shell. When Mother told bedtime tales of a bogeyman which gathered boys to heaven by means of a hatchet I merely yawned. ‘Well whatever it is,’ I said, stretching, ‘it can’t be any more scary than Nan.’ Mother tried to be angry but in truth Nanny Jack inspired in us all a kind of elemental terror. When she stood on the top stair, the shadow thrown on the landing wall was the spitting image of a praying mantis.
When Professor Leap the lodger laid eyes on this, he locked himself away and finally emerged with a disturbing theory. ‘Insects can camouflage themselves to look like leaves, branches and so forth,’ he whispered urgently in the kitchen. ‘Why not as an elderly relative?’
And seeing Nanny Jack’s beaked face at the window, he shrieked hoarsely and ran.
‘Has anyone ever seen her walk from place to place?’ muttered Snapper at another time, having called a conference behind the locked cellar door. He stood pop-eyed, breathing through his mouth. ‘Doesn’t she just seem to be in one place or another?’
Professor Leap leaned in under the bare lightbulb and expressed the view that she could flit about incredibly fast like a trapdoor spider. ‘Does she ever eat?’
I spoke of the time I interrupted her eating coal out of the grate and how she had merely turned and snickered.
‘She’s dead,’ said Professor Leap, ‘petrified like a log. Including her behaviour.’
‘You’re talking about my mother-in-law,’ said Father, nodding thoughtfully.
‘Someone should ask her point-blank about it,’ stated Adrienne, and we all felt a cloying fear.
‘All she needs,’ said Snapper quietly, ‘is a priest to lock the grass over her head.’
Before we could harpoon him to a stop, Snapper was leaning on a spade in the light of an electrical storm and admiring a gravestone surmounted by a winged skull. ‘If that doesn’t provoke a reaction,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a happy man.’
But Nanny Jack did react. By morning there was a clean hole in the gravetop and Snapper could not be coaxed from his tree — a trail of roots and earth had been trodden through the Hall. Professor Leap was jubilant. ‘Tracks!’ He pointed like a vindicated explorer. ‘Unbroken! From here’ — the back door — ‘to here.’ The door of her room. Barely breathing, I put my ear to the oak panel and heard a rasping as of papery wings.
‘Dead indeed,’ said Father, uncertain and embarrassed.
‘We have proved that she doesn’t dart like a spider,’ said Leap, aglow. ‘And that’s a start.’
I almost spoke of the sound I had heard through Nan’s door but was prevented by the sudden entry of Uncle Snap with the keys to an industrial earthmover.
From then on we attempted to bury Nan pretty regularly — it was a family tradition. Needless to say we were unsuccessful and contracted a strange respect for our dormant elder. She would be gone the minute the hole was dug and be tracked down to the boisterous centre of a smoky saloon bar, or would begin to mime at the last moment, scaring us all. We could not conceal our admiration when a doctor who had called to sedate Snapper happened to seek a pulse in Nan’s wrist and declared her dead, only to collapse of a seizure when she started to cackle. Our warmest moments of togetherness were those of Nan’s return, when the entire household would gather nightshirted at the top of the stairs, watching the mantis shadow draw across the lower hall.
After one of these occasions, I listened again at her door and heard the scratchy flurring of paper. The following day, entering the room for the first time, I felt a paralysing anxiety. The furniture looked as if it could sting. What if I was discovered? Everything took on a demonic aspect. A giant book lay open on a table like a brooding moth. There was an inkwell and a quill. I frilled the pages — each bore the same, elegantly written words. ‘Terror and dread, the claws of the soul — hang on for dear life.’
VIOLENT ACTING OUT
‘Coming to the circus, laughing boy?’
‘Not while I live.’
Why was I so surly as a child? On this occasion I was in the hothouse watering the brain tumours. The moment Snapper said ‘circus’ I was propelled like a crash dummy to an earlier year when I had run away to that establishment like the kid I was. Always of a serious disposition, I was also possessed of a resentment at having to grow while the world was losing its flavour. What little I’d surmised of it from a bedroom full of meathooks had led me to believe the last bastion of colour and integrity was sheltered by the big top. So before anyone noticed my absence I was sat in the audience watching a parade of cages circle the ring.
Bernard the Living Merchant. Old Scaly Gorgon. Terry the Human Constable. These are the sights I saw. I didn’t know what other circuses were like but this one was teeming with psychotics. Gabbling men in makeup riding round and round on bicycles which were evidently too small for them. Git in a leotard, biffing along a high-tension wire. Bloke dressed as the Joker, telling us everything was dangerous and real. As if I of all people didn’t know. One fool struggled into a giant cannon — it was clear he had a deathwish and wasn’t waiting for the gods to deliver. Nevertheless he gave a yell of surprise as he flew through the air. Meanwhile someone stepped into a cage with a lion. For me a lion is like any other situation — if you’re going to whip it and push it away with a chair, why get involved in the first place? In my opinion the bloke was just doing it for show.
The true horrors, however, were the clowns. Ashen and demented, they shambled out of the wings like victims of an over-zealous bloodbank. Only the coldest of souls could watch their exploits without screaming. Car crashes, drownings, fires — you name it. Even the laughter was exaggerated. Some of them were carried off on stretchers which collapsed. The entire affair was meaningless, the stuff of nightmares. I had to get out.
So I was recovering outside when the tent sheet flapped like the blowing gown of an overworked surgeon and a strange, dilated clown lumbered out, hollering with laughter. It appeared that the fiend’s trousers were filled with liquid. ‘Hello, spuddling,’ he roared. I remember I sank my teeth into his belly and a damburst of water flooded out, shrivelling the clown as he tried to staunch the flow. And to think I had considered joining these people.
Within minutes I was legging it through a maze of trailers and cages, pursued by a caterwauling bedlam of circus freaks. A clown on stilts told the rest where I was. I opened a trailer door, bursting in on a naked clown and a seal. Backing out, I overturned a trunk which vomited an avalanche of Masonic regalia. I set off through the animal boxes, panting steam and flipping catches as I went, and hearing screams behind me. If I hadn’t the presence of mind to shove a juggler from a unicycle, would I be here today? Several clowns were injured by lions, a fact I have spent my life trying to regret. And arriving home, I found I had not been missed. I dismissed the episode as I would a slave.