Читать книгу Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies - John Walsh - Страница 8

It was a Saturday night in 1963 and it was bathtime. It was one of the worst nights of my life.

I was nine and my sister, Madelyn, was ten, and we did what we always did on Saturday nights. We accompanied our parents to the knobbly-Gothic church of St Mary’s, Clapham Common, for a service called the Novena. It was a form of Catholic insurance policy. You were supposed to attend this downbeat vaudeville show of hymns and prayers for nine weeks in a row (hence novena), in order to rack up moral credits that would, in theory, reduce your final sentence in Purgatory. It was not unlike accumulating supermarket air-miles over several years in the hope of eventually claiming a flight to Rome; but it lacked any sense of collector’s achievement, since we just did it week after week without claiming any reward or enjoying any respite.

The only excitement the trip offered was the place where my father parked the family Renault in St Alfonsus Road, SW4, round the corner from the church. He always took the same spot, under a streetlamp beside a shop. On the wall to the right of the shop window was a film hoarding. It was a matter of vivid excitement to me, each Saturday, to see what new film was being advertised. I had no idea which cinema was displaying its wares; I still don’t know its exact location; I never went there. But the hoarding had a magic of its own, like an endlessly-shifting art gallery of startling images. It never advertised children’s movies, cartoons, musicals or comedies. It was always a horror movie. The Kiss of the Vampire, The Evil of Frankenstein, The Gorgon, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors … The titles, in the early 1960s, became interchangeable: The Curse of This, The Tomb of That, The Masque of The Other, The Black What-Have-You. Hammer film studios seemed to have a grip, as determined as Peter Cushing’s thin, professorial lips, on the imagination of Clapham Common audiences.

Sometimes, in a sinister variant, the movie on offer would depart from the Gothic hysteria – the haunted houses and screaming faces, the blood dripping off the title – and deal in something worse, something modern. I gazed at the picture of Devil Doll, with its hideous smiley-faced, ventriloquist’s dummy mask, a midget killer in a sensible black suit with a gingham tie and a hankie peeping from its breast pocket, and had to avert my eyes because its promise of playroom homicide was too close to home to be borne. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? also featured a doll’s head with its forehead bashed in, and sickly pictures of two old ladies with huge staring eyes. One was stern and vindictive (Bette Davis), clearly Snow White’s wicked stepmother grown old and mad; the other (Joan Crawford) was fretful, nail-chewing and demented in a different way, but I couldn’t then register the iconography of paranoia. I just knew they both spelt trouble.^*

I would pause every Saturday evening and explore every corner of the new frights on display, like a connoisseur inspecting the brushwork at a Monet exhibition. I took in the disarrayed limbs, the torn clothing, the suggestion of devoured flesh, the craggy lettering, the open mouths, the torrid reds and decadent greens of the colour palette, even the subtle placing of the ‘X’ to indicate that this was an adults-only treat, until I was ordered back to reality by a parental shout, and dragged away to the church, there to kneel in silent contemplation of a naked man on a cross, with a gaping spear-wound in his side, dying slowly of asphyxiation, and an audience of middle-aged loners and crumbling old ladies with whiskery chins and parchment cheeks.

The images on the film posters became my weekly dose of fright, a bracing insight into a world of cruelty and dementia, a nasty newsreel bringing fresh information about terrible goings-on in Gothic castles and gloomy mansions. They would stay with me during the Novena service, bound up with the gloomy shadows of the Lady chapel and the imagery of religion. So many movies featured crucifixes, Satanic faces and sacrificial victims that it was easy to confuse the church-stuff and the cinema-stuff. They were both alarmingly keen on death and darkness. For ages I was convinced that horror films were shot in the dark, and that the whole movie would be swathed in blackness from start to finish. It seemed an odd form of enjoyment, to sit in a dark cinema watching mad people with staring eyes making each other bleed in dark rooms and spooky exteriors, but no odder than to kneel for half a hour in a crepuscular church, listening to tales of crucifixion with a moaning organ accompaniment.

Some nights, the advertisement featured double-bills, an extra-strength dose of horror. One night it was Maniac, Michael Carreras’s psychological chiller about an oxyacetylene-torch killer on the loose in France, and The Damned, Joseph Losey’s early classic about leathery bike-boys and radioactive children. Maniac and The Damned. Two in one evening! The poster for Maniac urged interested punters, ‘Don’t go alone – take a brave, nerveless friend with you!’ Its imagery was simple and effective: two eyes looking at you, wide and deranged, with spooky concentric rings around them, to indicate they were the eyes of an Unbalanced Person.

I had some experience of the type. I’d seen patients in my father’s surgery at our home in Battersea with a similar stare, as I came through the waiting room to tell him, sotto voce, that his supper was ready. I’d watched Dad, one Saturday morning, negotiating with a very disturbed man who was dressed in his pyjamas under his shabby macintosh, and who talked a stream of gibberish and brandished a portfolio of medical records as thick as a phone book, while my father encouraged him to calm down, sit down and ‘wait, like a good man’ for the ambulance to arrive. I hung around in fascination, as the man’s long face twisted this way and that, like someone looking for a wasp buzzing in the air, and his disturbed eyes occasionally locked in panic on mine.

Another morning, while the surgery was in full swing, someone had an epileptic fit on the No. 37 bus, and was carried off at the stop across the road from our front door. He was brought into the house and lain, twitching horribly, on the carpet, with his head rolling on the Welcome mat. My mother, a former nursing sister, had taken charge and was kneeling on top of him, pinning down his shoulders, when I arrived to see what the commotion was. It looked like the aftermath of a one-sided wrestling match. Flecks of white spit lined the corners of his mouth. There was a noise of grinding teeth. The man’s legs pounded on the swirly, heavy-duty Berber carpet. My mother grunted with the exertion of keeping the spasming patient from writhing across the hall. I stood watching it all, transfixed.

Finally she looked up. ‘John,’ she panted, ‘run up to the bathroom and grab a toothbrush and bring it down here.’

‘But you can’t clean his teeth now,’ I wailed. ‘He’s having a fit.’

She explained that the toothbrush was to stop the guy biting his own tongue off and I fled to retrieve a dental scour, mentally noting that, whichever one I chose, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be mine.

I had, in other words, seen apparitions, victims, nutters, every class of Gothic weirdo staring and twitching before me, right there on the home turf. I was used to it. Just as I’d seen emblems of torture and death nailed to the wall of the murky church every Saturday. The combination of a medical father and mother, and an enforced regimen of Catholic iconography, had made me an early connoisseur of the grotesque.

And in the early Sixties there seemed to be a lot of dark around. The drive to church was dark, the Clapham streets were dark, people moved around swathed in uniformly grey overcoats, and the shadows of St Mary’s church found a domestic echo in the gloomy upstairs rooms of our new house, to which we’d moved in 1962, when I was eight.

We lived, it seemed, in a 40-watt zone. Nobody ever left a room without turning off the light, so the house stayed in semi-total darkness, except for the first-floor living-room, where we gathered on Saturday evenings, like well-off refugees. The Clean Air Act was yet to be introduced to London, and smog could still descend in a grey blanket on the streets of Battersea and make the outside world through the windows seem clouded and sinister, as if seen through gauze or tissue paper. My mother drew the heavy brocade curtains firmly shut at 7.45 every Saturday evening, on returning from church, and switched on the tiny lamps on the mantelpiece and the big standard-lamp in the corner. We didn’t have an open fire, but a newly-trendy, coal-effect, three-bar heater threw unconvincing wiggly shadows over the white rug where Madelyn and I always sat to watch television. My parents ranged themselves on cushioned thrones on either side of the fire, Dad nursing a gin and orange, Mother a newspaper or a copy of The Lady. We were a family group straight out of Norman Rockwell, cosy and warm, the long red curtains keeping out the cold night, the fog, the heaving swell of the big lorries on the road, the drunken shouts from sloshed revellers stamping homeward from the Northcote pub down by the market.

I was allowed to stay up till 9 p.m. but was expected to put myself in the bath when I was told, get soaped and rinsed, towel myself dry and emerge, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, to warm up by the fire before bedtime.

On this hellish night, before bathtime, I was eating cheese and onion crisps and reading one of the Molesworth books, How to Be Topp – a favourite, full of spidery drawings of oikish schoolboys and hopeless elderly masters – when the Saturday-night film came on at 8 p.m. I was engrossed in the fictional cricket match at St Custard’s, but the dark spidery fingers of the film’s credit sequence gradually stole my attention away.

‘I did it for the children,’ a woman kept saying in a tight, guilty whisper. The whisper gradually crawled inside me while I was reading. I would look up now and again, see that this was grown-up stuff, go back to the book, look up again … On screen, the lady was twisting her hands. You could see only her hands and a dark side-view of her troubled, whispering face, as she said it over and over: ‘I did it for the children.’ On the screen I read the words superimposed over her hands: ‘Screenplay: William Archibald, Truman Capote’, ‘Based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James’, ‘Produced and directed by Jack Clayton’. The words came and melted away like a series of threats. I tried to continue with my book, but couldn’t. The tiny TV set in the corner contained something intriguing with which even a favourite funny book couldn’t compete: an early inkling of how fascinating the human heart finds things that will scare it to death.

The movie got under way. A Victorian governess called Miss Giddens, played by the buttoned-up Deborah Kerr, was being interviewed by a business-like character in an old-fashioned coat (Michael Redgrave) who was talking about his children. Ms Kerr was pretty but formal, a very correct sort of schoolmistress in a black dress, her fair hair drawn back from her forehead and clamped in a matronly helmet over her tiny ears. The man was brisk and slightly bullying, but he hired Miss Giddens anyway, and she was soon riding in a horse-drawn trap on a sunny morning towards a country house to take up her new position.

The children, Miles and Flora, were cute but rather stiff, unlike any children I’d ever met. The housekeeper (Megs Jenkins) wore a starched white head-dress and a pleated apron and was obviously a pushover, keen to be liked by the new arrival.

Everybody was getting on fine. Nice house, nice children, nice servant, all of them glad to see the nice nanny. My crisps were a nice treat, the fire was warming, the room breathed family togetherness. Maybe I’d been wrong to be worried by the credit sequence. The Saturday-evening world inside the curtained windows was as nice as could be, and so was the posh-kids drama on the television screen.

Then it started to go wrong. There was a scene in which Deborah Kerr was talking to Megs Jenkins and Flora, the little girl, out in the garden – and the governess suddenly saw, on the battlements of the house, a man looking down at them. She gazed up at the figure, trying to make out who it could be, but was blinded by sunlight, as the music emphasised her sudden panic. Tiny hairs prickled on my arm. Assuming the man to be an intruder, Deborah Kerr rushed inside the house, up the stairs, up to the flat roof – and discovered only the brilliantined Miles, sitting there playing with some pigeons. The governess asked if anyone else has been standing there. No, said Miles, there’d been nobody around but himself. But the scene intimated some evil and dread about to take over the ordinary world.^*

‘This is awful boring grown-up stuff for you to be watching,’ said my mother. ‘I think it’s time you had your bath and got in your pyjamas.’ How shrewd of her to sense that the film wasn’t going to be a joyful experience for a highly-strung kid.

I looked at Madelyn. She was eating a Kit-Kat, unconcerned, her eyes fixed on the TV. ‘Tell me what happens, Mad, OK?’ I said.

‘Sure, yeah. Don’t take too long or you’ll miss the plot.’

Outside, on the landing, the bathroom door yawned open on the right. It seemed like a dark cave, the invitation to some frightful ambush. I looked up at the 40-watt bulb. The figure of the man in the film, standing in blinding sunlight, seemed to lurk there. On the wall outside my parents’ bedroom, the pictured face of Christ the Saviour regarded me calmly, his opened-up heart (that classic piece of bad-taste Catholic iconography) streaming light.

I rushed into the bathroom, closed the door and locked it firmly. There’s nothing wrong, I told myself, it’s only a silly film from a hundred years ago. The long bathroom window had a venetian blind which threw slatted shadows from the streetlamp onto the vinyl floor. I switched on the light over the sink and peered out the window while the bath was running. Nobody was around on Battersea Rise. No walkers, no dogs, no drunks. Maybe they were all indoors, watching two Victorian children explaining away their ghostly visitations.

Ten minutes later, bathed, towelled, pyjamaed, tooth-brushed and ready for bed, I stood in the bathroom doorway. The living-room door was three steps away, but it seemed like half a mile through a graveyard. A nagging alarm was dinging in my head, because I had to turn out the bathroom light, and I couldn’t bear to. I wanted the whole house to be lit up like a pantomime stage. I wanted to be un-frightened. Eventually I took a deep breath, yanked the light switch, crossed the big hallway and opened the living-room door.

My family’s eyes were fixed on the TV screen. I reclaimed my position on the white rug.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked, as airily as I could.

‘Shhhh,’ they all said, in chorus.

‘Mad? What’s happening now?’

‘It’s nothing,’ said my sister. ‘They’re just playing Hide and Seek.’

That sounded OK. How frightening could that be? Back beside the fire, I saw that Miss Giddens was looking for her young charges in the dark upstairs rooms of the old house. As she moved along a spooky corridor, the wraith-like figure of a young woman suddenly glided across it and disappeared into the wall.

‘Who was that?’ I said. There was no answer.

‘Who was that lady?’ I asked, more loudly.

‘It’s obviously a ghost,’ said my sister. ‘She’s haunting the little girl.’

Icicles prickled up my back. My mother looked at my father, possibly imploring him to send me to bed before something awful happened, but he was engrossed in the TV. Minutes later, Miss Giddens found both Flora and the little boy, Miles. The children leapt upon her with jolly shouts and playful embraces. I breathed more easily. Then Miles, shouting with glee, put his arm around the governess’s neck and started playfully to strangle her. ‘Miles,’ she said. ‘I can’t breathe …’

I didn’t like this film one bit. I picked up my funny book again and tried to read, but the words wouldn’t connect. My eyes seemed magnetised by the television screen. I couldn’t stop myself watching. Soon it was Deborah Kerr’s turn to hide in this horrible game. She found a hiding-place behind one of the curtains in the old house’s dining-room, and stood in the moonlit darkness, looking worried and awfully vulnerable.

And when I next trusted myself to look, something terrible was happening. We were looking more and more closely at Miss Giddens’s worried, handsome face and – Oh no, oh no! – just behind her, and through the window, a man suddenly appeared, out in the garden. He was gliding towards the window, was creeping up on her with frightening intent as she stood there, in hiding, oblivious to the danger. His face was looming up out of the darkness, coming to see, coming to look in, coming to get her, coming to …

I froze, as if I’d been immersed in icy water. Sensing some awful presence behind her, Miss Giddens turned round – and there, filling the screen, was the face of the awful man glaring at her. He was swarthy, black-haired, and he looked at her with eyes of pure hatred. His face was dark, his eyes the eyes of the Maniac in the film hoarding beside St Mary’s church, as mad as the patient I’d seen in my father’s waiting-room. He was the worst person in the world – the embodiment of everything evil – and only the glass in the window separated him from the innocent governess.

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.^*

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.^*

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.

The only drawback was G Ward.

The hospital was famous across the nation for two things: burns and plastics. At a time (1971) when plastic surgery was still considered a wayward course of action for the terminally rich and achingly vain, Queen Mary’s specialised in it. Actresses came for face-lifts, little girls like Natasha came to have tiny disfigurements adjusted or concealed, a whole department specialised in prosthetic limbs for amputees. It was known as the Spare Parts Unit. (A sign outside the main door read, a little insensitively, ‘Out-Patients Must Assemble Before 10 a.m.’) And it also did burns. If a particularly bad motorway car crash or domestic fire was reported on the News, Queen Mary’s was where the burns victims would be taken. They had all the top technology of skin-grafts and maxillo-facial surgery. They could do anything – except stop some people looking absolutely terrible.

Sometimes, burns patients recovering from long-term treatments would find their way back to one of the ordinary-patient wards, which I visited with my porter’s trolley every day. Sometimes a screen would go back in C Ward, revealing the wrecked features of a poor man who had poured paraffin onto a Guy Fawkes bonfire and had the whole can explode in his face. Months of treatment later, he still looked, above the neck, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. When he tried to arrange his ravaged complexion into a smile, you felt like your heart would break. When he moved his lips – which were no longer lips but white horizontal smears below his nose and above his chin – and tried to talk to me, I would grip the cool metal rail of my trolley, look away and tell myself sternly, ‘You. Must. Not. Faint. You must not faint. It will only upset the patient.’

I could be weepingly sensitive and casually heartless about these patients at the same time, but I couldn’t help the way I responded to extreme disfigurement. I found myself wondering: if this is the way the poor man looks now, after months of ameliorative surgery, what in God’s name did he look like on the day they brought him in?

But I didn’t know, because new arrivals with severe burns went to G Ward, and I never went there. It was the only ward from which ordinary porters like me were excused duty. It had a dedicated porter of its own, a guy called Geoff. He was something of a legend for his bovine insensitivity. He was allowed, or invited, to do the G Ward runs because he didn’t seem to mind the awful conditions. He didn’t notice, or worry about, people whose faces and limbs had melted in a furnace. Once, they said, Geoff had been present at an operation where a patient’s burnt skin was being removed with a metal device like a spokeshave. He was standing too close to the operating table and a lump of charred skin, accompanied by globules of pus and blood, came flying off the patient and whacked him in the face. Geoff (other porters told me in awestruck tones) had registered no emotion whatsoever. He had simply removed his now-opaque spectacles, wiped the greeny-red gunk off the lenses, replaced them equably on his splattered countenance and gone back to the operation. He was the G Ward man. He presided over its mysteries. It was a mysterious place. You heard things about it, unsettling things. That, for instance, it smelt really bad – the authentic smell of human flesh which, according to rumour, smelt uncommonly like roast pork. I heard that it was uncomfortably, tropically, freakishly warm in there because the thermostat had to be turned right up, or the patients’ burnt skin would contract in the cool air. I heard that patients lay on their backs all the time, with a thin cotton sheet suspended above their recumbent frames, because if their flesh touched the sheet it would stick to the fabric and would have to be yanked off in screaming agony. I learned that this was why Geoff’s trolleys had to be lined with antiseptic paper, for the lumps of charred human being….

Thank God for Geoff, we used to agree. He was welcome to the battlefield of burns victims. Rather him than me, everyone used to say. I’d as soon shoot myself in the head as go near the burns patients …

G Ward stood by itself, a whole corridor’s width of Burns Hell. The entrance was at the far end of a side-corridor, up a long incline. The letter ‘G’ stuck out from the wall, like the sign over a concentration camp. Walking past (no, accelerating past) when one of its doors was being opened, you would occasionally get a stray whiff of roasted meat. You imagined the nursing sisters inside the swing doors, speaking in urgent whispers, a sisterhood of suffering, girls who had seen terrible sights, who’d become inured to human torches and Roman candles and people set on fire by their neighbours or co-religionists because of a minor difference of opinion. You imagined all the staff in G Ward moving about in tropical darkness because it was more restful that way, just as I used to think that horror films must be conducted all the way through in Stygian gloom.

One evening in July I was on late shift. I wasn’t due to knock off until 10 p.m. Things were quiet and I was sitting in the Porters’ Room at 9 o’clock, reading Kafka and waiting for the last hour to while itself away.

The phone rang. ‘Is Geoff there?’ said a voice.

‘I think he’s gone to the canteen,’ I said.

‘Tell him to ring G Ward, would you?’ drawled the voice. ‘Emergency theatre, fifteen minutes. OK?’

I promised I’d tell him, and went back to The Castle.

Three minutes went by. An anxious woman, a junior houseman, put her head round the door. ‘Where’s the porter, what’s his name, Geoffrey? They’re yelling for a porter in G Ward right now. Some patient has to go for surgery, pronto.’

‘Geoff’s in the canteen,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’ll be back soon.’

‘We need him now, for God’s sake,’ said the woman. ‘We can’t have the operating theatre staff waiting around for a porter to finish drinking his tea.’

‘But I’m sure –’ I began.

‘You’ll have to do it,’ she said. ‘You’ll need to wear a mask. Do you know where Geoffrey keeps the disinfectant masks?’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said, a panicky tremor entering my voice. ‘I’m not going to G Ward.’

‘What do you mean, not going?’ asked the woman. ‘This is an emergency. You will go up there right now, collect the patient and transfer him to the operating theatre on the first floor for immediate surgery. And you’ll need a disinfectant sheet on the trolley, I hope you realise.’

‘I’m not trained,’ I said, having a sudden brainwave. ‘I’m not a burns porter because I haven’t had any training. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I’m sure Geoff will be back any moment and –’

‘Oh, training,’ she said nastily. ‘Is that it? Oh, I see, you feel you need some kind of degree in – what? – Advanced Portering Skills and Trolley Management before you can do a simple thing and help to save somebody’s life. Is that it?’

She all but said, ‘You stupid boy,’ and smacked me round the head.

‘You have been to school, I take it,’ she continued. ‘And you have got half a brain? And I know you can walk and talk, because I’ve seen you do both. Now get a trolley up to G Ward this minute, before I lose my temper.’

So I found some sheets of special skin-soothing paper and put it all over the trolley. I couldn’t find a mask anywhere. And I set off with a heavy heart on the nastiest journey I’d ever known.

I was going to have to go inside G Ward, into the fuggy, tropical, pork-smelling hell of the burned and damned, and I knew that, as I walked through the ward, the burnt patients would lift up their Night of the Living Dead faces and their Souls in Purgatory blackened limbs and I knew the minute I saw the special, just-arrived Emergency Case for which my trolley was meant, I would pass out with the horror of it, and everyone would get really upset.

I came out of the lift, pushing my paper-coated trolley before me. My legs were like lead. Though I was supposed to be helping out at an emergency, my reluctance and cowardice (though I liked to think it was a stubborn refusal to be pushed around) meant that I was walking slower and slower. There was nobody around, just the blankness of the horrible, custard-yellow NHS walls and the glaring, recessed lights overhead. Here was the corner of the corridor. Up a long incline, perhaps sixty yards away, the big, black-on-green sign read ‘G WARD’ like a ghastly threat.

I pushed the trolley into the side corridor. Fifty yards ahead, the great black ‘G’ wiggled and danced about in front of my vision. I had become a cinema-verité, hand-held camera and all the shots were jiggled and out of focus, as I blinked back tears of alarm and struggled to see clearly. But my destination was all too clear. I was going to the worst place in the world.

And it was because of the blasted windows that I felt so appalled. The doors of G Ward were always shut because of the need to keep the air temperature consistent and unwavering. Every other ward had its door open to visitors and passing medics and droppers-by; but not the ward from hell. I’d noticed, when furtively passing the doors, there were two little porthole windows at which you were supposed to present your face, to be identified before you’d be allowed in.

In thirty seconds, I told myself, I will have to present my face at the window and wait to see what unspeakable apparition gazes out at me …

I can’t do this, I said silently.

I am walking, I told myself, into the biggest horror film I’ve ever seen, and it’s all going to be real.

Something had changed about my relationship with windows. At home when I was small, they’d been the glass shelter that kept the outside world at bay. Then they were the screen through which awful people could come and look in at you, like Quint and the Snow Queen, as though inspecting your tortured soul. Now there were these round porthole windows, where I was the outsider looking in, but the people on the inside would have gargoyle faces. Everything had got all topsy-turvy. A crucifix on the wall brought back memories of St Mary’s, and the staring-eyed Maniac, my father’s crackpot patient, the asphyxiating Christ, the blood-boltered posters, the red-rimmed eyes of Dracula just before he pounces – all my most dreaded images. The big G loomed nearer. It began to take on a three-dimensional quality, like those monumental slabs of brick wall that spelt out the letters of Ben-Hur. I was about to be engulfed in heat, and the smell of cooked people, and the noisy whimperings of the dying and the muted groans of the ones whose skin had only recently started to tighten up and blacken.

Oh no, I kept whispering to myself. Please no. Let me not have to do this. I will be good and virtuous and behave myself for ever and ever (I seemed to be praying to some Higher Being, halfway between God and my mother). I could hear a foolish mewing noise, a pathetic whimpering, issuing from the corridor. Was it the noise of some unfortunate patient …? No, Goddammit, it was me. I was in the final throes of panic. ‘Eeeennnmmm,’ the little mewing noise went, ‘Eeeeeennnnnmmmmm …’

Suddenly I was there, G Ward. My Nemesis. My Golgotha. My Destination of No Return. The double doors were as firmly shut as if everybody inside were having a day off work. (If only.) The circular porthole windows lay before me, like two eyes looking at me.

I tapped on one of them. I waited, a palpitating wreck, for something resembling Quint’s saturnine visage or the Snow Queen’s glacial physiognomy to stare back at me. Then a curtain twitched and a senior orderly looked out, the lower half of his face covered with a green mask.

He opened the door and came out to where I was standing, gibbering with apprehension.

‘Ah, John,’ he said. ‘Good of you to do this. Geoff would normally have done it, but he’s in theatre at the moment, so I thought you wouldn’t mind …’

‘It’s OK,’ I said in a teeny-tiny voice, like Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh stories. ‘Where is the man with the terrible –’

‘No, no, the patient’s already been taken to theatre,’ he said, as though to a half-wit. ‘We rang down for another porter because we need to get a machine, a new respirator adapted for burns patients, to the operating theatre. It’s a bit heavy so we thought we’d send it by trolley, but you’ll have to take it along right now. Would you mind?’

‘I’d –’ I was almost incoherent with relief.

‘What?’ said the orderly.

‘I’d love to,’ I said with pathetic gratitude. ‘I’d absolutely love to.’

‘Well, it’s only a machine, old boy,’ said the orderly. ‘Of course we appreciate your enthusiasm for these, ah, menial tasks …’

‘Where is it?’ I asked, suddenly raring to go.

‘Just inside here on the floor in Sister’s office,’ he said, opening the door a couple of inches. ‘But I wouldn’t come too far into the ward itself, if I were you. It can seem a little, er, stifling if you’re not used to it.’

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ I said with airy confidence, and I pushed the trolley in through the awful doors of what was no longer necessarily Hell.

I picked up the machine, and plonked it on the trolley, and set off to the operating theatre with a spring in my step. Peter Quint and the Snow Queen never showed up at any point. They stayed somewhere at the back of the ward, having their macaroni cheese supper, apparently uninterested in ruining my life any more.

* Sex films occasionally featured in this weekly induction to the Real World, but they too hinted at bad times: Bitter Harvest, with its back view of the naked Janet Munn, seemed to promise that some poor girl would suffer undreamt-of agonies simply because she went around showing too much flesh. Love With the Proper Stranger had Natalie Wood lying in disarray, apparently in the street, in the arms of Steve McQueen – the victim, I innocently assumed, of some traffic accident.

* Children are famously conservative readers, but there was something positively neurotic about the way I preferred cosy set-ups to narrative complication. When reading Enid Blyton, I used to wish the Secret Seven could just stay having meetings and drinking ginger beer for ever, and not worry about the Mysterious Foreigner, the conveniently discovered Puzzling Clue, and the Light Out At Sea in Chapter 6 …

* Discovering, much later, that this ghastly revenant was played by Peter Wyngarde, the actor who was to play the insufferably camp crime-fighter Jason King in the ATV series Department S, and enjoyed his own spin-off show, Jason King, deploying his twin affectations of rolled-back jacket sleeves and long coffee-coloured cheroots, until his career was sunk by revelations of gay cottaging, did nothing to assuage the memory of this most-frightening-ever movie moment.

* Jack Clayton, the director, claimed he’d actually had a vision of this sorry image in his own garden, a few days before filming it. ‘Just the sadness of it was what I think I saw,’ he later remarked.