Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies

I shrieked with terror. Seconds later, I was lying on the rug, panicked out of my wits.

‘John, for God’s sake, will you calm down?’ demanded my mother. ‘’Tis just an old fillum.’

‘Ahhhhhhhrrrrggghhh,’ I shouted, my face pressed against the ticklish carpet.

‘The children shouldn’t be stayin’ up watchin’ this awful stuff,’ my father muttered, to no one in particular.

‘Blimey,’ said my sister, coolly, ‘that made me jump.’

I groaned, tears squeezing through my tight-shut eyes.

‘John, come here and sit on my lap,’ said my mother, ‘and stop that awful noise. Look, the horrible man has gone away.’

I couldn’t look. Nothing would make me look at the television ever again. I was some way beyond any dispassionate connection with the narrative on the 20-inch Pandora’s box in the corner of the room. I keened, banshee-like, unstoppably.

‘It’s not a real ghost,’ said Madelyn diplomatically. ‘Just some bloke out in the garden looking through the window. Don’t make such a silly fuss.’

‘I saw a ghost once,’ said my father, stubbing out his cigarette in his marble ashtray. ‘In a big old hotel, over in Galway. It was an old feller from another century, gliding about in a long grey cloak. And believe me, John, ’twas nothing like that feller at all.’

‘Uhhhhhhhhgggg …’

‘Martin,’ said my mother sharply. ‘I don’t really think that’s helping.’

My mother picked me up in a quivering heap and hugged me. ‘Where’s your dressing-gown?’ she said. ‘You’re going to bed right this minute.’

‘No!’ I shouted. ‘I’m not going upstairs. Don’t make me go upstairs.’

‘It’s your bedtime,’ said my mother, ‘and you’re not staying here a minute longer.’

So I was led weeping off to bed. I could hardly get up the stairs, where there were doorways and shadows and too much dark to be borne. All the cosiness of home – the warmth and comfort inside the drawn curtains of the living-room – was obliterated now, because of the man with the horrible eyes outside the windows.

I made it to my room at the top of the house and was tucked up in bed and kissed goodnight, but I couldn’t sleep. I looked at the wall on my right, where giant shadows from the traffic outside the curtains sent bars of light marching up the flocked wallpaper. They were like demons, cunningly abseiling upwards to the ceiling to hang over me all night. I twisted round in the bed. To my left was a glooming darkness, irradiated by a clock with greenly phosphorescent hands that ticked the seconds away, loudly, relentlessly, tockingly-torturously, like the grandfather clock in Dombey and Son that I’d tried to read earlier that year, the one which tocks out the words ‘How. Is. My. Lit-tle. Friend?’ while Dombey Junior is gradually dying. The face of the devilish Peter Quint – the former gardener, I later discovered, who used to bully and sexually abuse Miss Jessel, the poor former governess, and who had now come back, in the person of the innocent Miles, to brutalise the poor Miss Giddens – kept looming towards me.

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My mother came up later, to find me whimpering uncontrollably.

‘John,’ she said, ‘you mustn’t upset yourself about a stupid thing on the telly. It’s only a story.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about the horrible man,’ I said into the pillow. ‘He won’t go away.’

‘You mustn’t get so upset about things in stories,’ she said, sitting down on the bed. ‘The people who make these silly fillums are just playing on your fears. You have to learn not to take them seriously, like learning not to be scared of the dark. You’ll find that goodness always wins out at the end. Everything turns out all right, in these silly movies, provided you stick it out for long enough.’

‘I can’t sleep,’ I moaned. ‘He’s there all the time, outside the window.’

‘For heaven’s sake,’ said my mother. ‘The thing is almost over now. Any minute, the police or somebody will arrive and the man’ll be carted off to prison, and the children will be all happy and playful again.’

I ceased whimpering. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Why wouldn’t I? I’ve seen a hundred of these stupid ghost stories.’

‘So, can I come down and watch them being all right again?’

‘Well …’

So somehow we decided I should come back downstairs and watch the end of the film sitting on her lap in front of the fire.

Had I been familiar with The Turn of the Screw, I’d have known that things weren’t going to end happily. I sat on my mother’s matronly skirts to watch the final unfolding of the tragedy. It was pitiless. The death of Miles, the possessed and malevolent little boy, in the governess’s arms was pretty bad. The whirling camera that disclosed the appalling Quint, standing on a plinth like a statue presiding over the kid’s death, wasn’t a barrel of laughs either. But neither was as bad as the final shot of Miss Jessel. She was seen standing in the rain among the reeds beside a lake, a vision of utter misery in her black governess threads, her arms hanging dejectedly by her side, her long black hair drenched and clinging to her white face. Nobody in history ever looked so desolate. And to emphasise her lonesomeness, this poor, wretched, rained-on, loveless ghost was seen in the middle distance, far from any comfort that we or Miss Giddens might be able to offer. And she was seen through a window.

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God knows how I got to sleep at all that night, but it left me with a scar. For years, I had a fetish about windows. I learned not to look at them when approaching a friend’s house, especially when it was night-time, lest I should see something I’d rather not see. When I entered my bedroom each night, I used to play a foolish game of Scare Yourself. I’d stick out my left hand and, walking over the threshold, I’d sweep it down the wall to switch the light on. If my hand connected with the switch, the light would come on and all would be well, and I’d walk to the windows and draw the curtains without a care. But if, in that downward swipe, I missed the switch, and walked into the darkness, I somehow convinced myself that there, right before me, the worst person in the world would be staring in at me through the glass …

It was a masochistic little game, the kind of challenge you set yourself when you’re young, but it was a paradigm of the impulse that takes us to scary movies. We dare ourselves not to be scared by the demons lurking on screen. We test, in some perverse way, our capacity to become, voluntarily, gibbering wrecks when confronted by our own paranoia.

Windows, for me, became emblems of seeing the world all wrong. There is a long pedigree of minatory casements in English literature to legitimise my personal dread about the things. Poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth have presented windows as the eyes of houses, and, by extension, the eyes of the beloved figure within, who has turned her face away from the poet, leaving the house shuttered and forever blind to him.

Louis MacNeice in ‘Corner Seat’ identifies a moment of paranoia we’ve all felt on the 11.58 p.m. ride home from the fleshpots of the West End:

Windows between you and the world

Keep out the cold, keep out the fright –

So why does your reflection seem

So lonely in the moving night?

It may be a universal emotion to be upset by seeing your reflected face, not as a reflection in a mirror but as a face beyond the glass – as if some alter ego had come a-calling through the window from another world, full of worry and pain; the face of someone who is not the real you, but a subconscious stranger who surfaces only in dreams.

When I was older, and saw The Innocents again at fifteen, and was still petrified by it, I wondered about my neurotic dread of windows. It seemed there must have been some earlier image that lay deep inside me, a fundamental dread summoned back by the horrible face of Peter Wyngarde. Eventually, I worked out what it was: The Snow Queen, an animated version of the Charles Perrault fairy tale about a cold-hearted monarch who steals away a little boy and takes him to her kingdom, where he is eventually rescued by his sister.

I was about three or four, at my first home, in Balham, South London. We’d had a television only a short time (this would have been 1957 or 1958) and Madelyn and I watched it obsessively. She and I had a cunning strategy for the moments when anything scary or unpleasant appeared on screen. One of us would pretend to go to the loo, crying out ‘Tell me what happens next!’ as we fled upstairs, returning only when the frightening scene was safely out of the way. We never bothered asking each other about the intervening scariness. We knew it was just an excuse.

When a cartoon of The Snow Queen was broadcast one Sunday afternoon, Madelyn and I were by ourselves in the living-room. On the TV, a boy and a girl, slightly older than us, were playing in a Scandanavian homestead when, suddenly, the Snow Queen came whistling through the air and gazed in through the window at them. She envied their innocence, their purity. She wanted to make the boy her slave.…

Madelyn had seen what was coming and legged it upstairs, crying ‘Tell me what happens’ in time-honoured style. I was left behind. Because of our you-must-watch-it protocol, I had to see the story unfold. So when the Snow Queen inspected the children and stared in at the doomed little boy, I had to watch it alone. Her cartoon eyes were enormous, lit with a cruel, unearthly brightness. They stared through the glass, her great green pupils mad and comfortless. There was no escape for poor Hans, nor for me. She was out to get both of us. A missile of ice sprang from her eyes and hurtled through the glass and flew into the small boy’s spindly chest. He turned instantly into a zomboid slave of the frigid queen, unable to speak to his sister or anybody else, utterly in the power of a woman who lived in an awful cold white land impossibly far from the comfort of home …

It was appalling. I let out a four-year-old shriek that brought my parents running. I could not be consoled, even with hot milk and marshmallows. My parents were up half the night, reading me stories and trying to reassure me that the Snow Queen wasn’t lurking outside the windows of the nursery, ready to steal me away. Forty-odd years later, I still shudder at the mention of her name.

Most horror films in the Sixties were dreadfully anticlimactic after The Innocents: all those tiresome bits of Hammer Guignol, with Peter Cushing playing his pinch-faced Man in the Library With a Skull On His Desk, and Christopher Lee sweeping about in a cloak, baring his ridiculous teeth in a blood-curdling Count Dracula leer that looked more like the smile on the Joker in the Batman comics. Even the old horror movie classics seemed pretty small beer. I watched the first Dracula and Frankenstein movies with interest but no great concern. I watched The Mummy and The Wolf Man and found them about as scary as a trigonometry exam. I sat through that bewildering expressionist farrago The Black Cat. without raising so much as a shiver. Nothing got to me as directly, as viscerally, as The Innocents and Peter Quint’s elderly, frozen, window-haunting predecessor from the Arctic wastes.

The windows stayed in my head because of that night in 1963, when I was nine. All the components of the night came together as random images that suddenly cohered: the movie posters, the dripping blood, the staring eyes, the Gothic church with its congregation of grotesque old folks, the great wooden crucifix with its hanging man, the mad patient in his pyjamas standing in our hallway glaring at me, the man having an epileptic fit on the Welcome mat, that business with the teeth – they all were part of being a God-fearing, church-visiting, cinema-loving doctor’s son. And among these troubling Saturday-night images I could now introduce the Dark Face at the Window as an emblem of fright.

This stream of images, spooling through my subconscious, got to me in the real world eventually. One episode demonstrated their hold over my imagination. It was the summer I worked, aged seventeen, as a ward porter in Queen Mary’s Hospital, Roehampton. It was a holiday job and I loved it. The other porters were impossibly worldly and blokish twenty-somethings who read the Sun during their tea-breaks, smoked roll-ups and talked about West Ham and Queen’s Park Rangers with a kind of sulky enthusiasm as though somebody was forcing them to support their favourite football teams. They ruthlessly itemised the charms of every single nurse they came into contact with, and bragged shamelessly about the ones they’d managed to sleep with.

The majority of the nurses were barely older than I was. I conceived a passion for the staff nurses, whose little tiaras of starched lace struck me as fantastically chic and sexy. A plump blonde radiographer called Linda ran the X-ray department. She was soon to be married but was obviously going off the whole idea. She would explain to me, in the brief moments of chat after I’d slid a patient off his trolley and on to an X-ray couch, how sick she was of everyone telling her it was normal to have ‘doubts’, that it was a natural response to your imminent nuptials, that her Bernard was a fine bloke and she didn’t want to let everyone down now, now did she? I murmured sympathetically. I told her that her friends seemed foolishly unsupportive, that her fiancé was shockingly insensitive. Each time, Linda said, ‘Oh, you understand, don’t you,’ and folded me in a wobbling embrace, thus ensuring I would treble my efforts to sympathise with her next time I had a patient on a trolley, whether he needed an X-ray or not.

I enjoyed the camaraderie of the porters, the romance of the nurses, the swishy ‘Don’t speak to me, I’m too important’ heroism of the doctors, the little brothers and sisters in the kids’ ward, the coolly insouciant technicians, the lovelorn not-quite-girlfriend among the X-rays. It was like living in a village, or more precisely, in a village-based TV soap opera. Everywhere you looked, there was gossip and romance. Roger Moore, the actor, had been spotted in F Ward, allegedly there to have the bags under his eyes removed. A little girl in J ward was due for surgery to have her bat-ears pinned back, and when I went to pick her up from the Recovery Room and said, ‘Come on, Natasha, time to get back to your friends in the ward,’ she leaned over, fast asleep, and plonked a big kiss on my cheek. There was just so much going on. For a newly socialised seventeen-year-old, it was Hog Heaven.