Monsters - Hallowe'en

 

They arrived in small groups or just pairs. We heard the giggles and the shuffling before the knock on the door sent us hurrying into the hall. We were ready. I was, as always once a year, the witchiest witch and this time I had the pale faced Wednesday Addams helping for a little while until it was time for her to join the others outside.  Our first visitors, Harry Potter with his friend, Hermione, had escaped Hogwarts to come scavenging and helped themselves from my cauldron of appealing sweets and chocolate.  Scary monsters and super-creeps (sing) turned up in day-glo and luminescent colours, all looking wonderful – some people have amazing artistic skills and come into their own at Hallowe’en. I always do my best to get into the swing of it. Years ago I worked at our local infant school and all the children and some parents knew me. I didn’t recognise them as ghosts, vampires and spooks, but they knew me well and laughed at my witch alter-ego. Now they bring their own children to knock on my door. I’m obviously older than I thought. Not all of our visitors looked like monsters. A group of very well dressed young men, aged around nine or ten hoped I was having a pleasant evening as they took items from the cauldron. Their grown-ups waited at the end of the drive. The boys were amused at me being dressed up.

“I’m a witch, you should be scared!”

“Nothing scares us, we’re Peaky Blinders.”

Well, that was me told. Fighting to keep my face straight, I returned to my witch duties indoors. They surely weren’t old enough to watch Peaky Blinders? They certainly looked the part, though, and no, they didn’t scare me. I would have turned them into frogs, or something.  The grandchildren came back with their tubs nearly overflowing. I tried to cadge a few bits, but no-one was sharing – poor Nanna. Before they went home I had my usual moan about lollipops being dangerous things - I bin them out of sweets multipacks - and I made my usual speech about brushing teeth properly to keep their mouths healthy and Peggy, the tooth fairy happy. Hallowe’en is done for another year. By eight o’clock my cauldron was empty so the pumpkin fairy lights were switched off and removed from the front window, real pumpkins rescued from the rain and I swapped my witch clothes for comfy pyjamas.

The scariest monsters are the demons that live within us. Actual people who caused trouble, problems or any form of upset that we can’t shake off. The monster isn’t there all the time, perhaps, but lurking in the background ready to pounce when spirits are low, we feel tired, or it’s the middle of the night when our worries are magnified. They might bite now and again, but don’t let them win.

Let’s stay upbeat with  Roger McGough and Dr JCC,

First Day at School

A millionbillionwillion miles from home
Waiting for the bell to go. (To go where?)
Why are they all so big, other children?
So noisy? So much at home they
Must have been born in uniform
Lived all their lives in playgrounds
Spent the years inventing games
That don't let me in. Games
That are rough, that swallow you up.

And the railings.
All around, the railings.
Are they to keep out wolves and monsters?
Things that carry off and eat children?
Things you don't take sweets from?
Perhaps they're to stop us getting out
Running away from the lessins. Lessin.
What does a lessin look like?
Sounds small and slimy.
They keep them in the glassrooms.
Whole rooms made out of glass. Imagine.

I wish I could remember my name
Mummy said it would come in useful.
Like wellies. When there's puddles.
Yellowwellies. I wish she was here.
I think my name is sewn on somewhere
Perhaps the teacher will read it for me.
Tea-cher. The one who makes the tea.

Roger McGough


I Married a Monster from Outer Space

The milky way she walks around
All feet firmly off the ground
Two worlds collide, two worlds collide
Here comes the future bride
Gimme a lift to the lunar base
I wanna marry a monster from outer space

I fell in love with an alien being
Whose skin was jelly – whose teeth were green
She had the big bug eyes and the death-ray glare
Feet like water wings – purple hair
I was over the moon – I asked her back to my place
Then I married the monster – from outer space

The days were numbered – the nights were spent
In a rent free furnished oxygen tent
When a cyborg chef served up moon beams
Done super rapid on a laser beam
I needed nutrition to keep up the pace
When I married the monster from outer space

We walked out – tentacle in hand
You could sense that the earthlings would not understand
They’d go.. nudge nudge …when we got off the bus
Saying it’s extra-terrestial – not like us
And it’s bad enough with another race
But fuck me… a monster …from outer space

In a cybernetic fit of rage
She pissed off to another age
She lives in 1999
With her new boyfriend – a blob of slime
Each time I see her translucent face
I remember the monster from outer space

Dr John Cooper Clarke


Thanks for reading, Pam x

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The Sweets on Grandma's Sideboard

Sideboard - it’s a funny old word, isn’t it? Hardly used these days.  Apparently, the definition of a sideboard is 'a flat-topped piece of furniture with cupboards and drawers, used for storing crockery, glasses, and table linen.'  Do people still have sideboards?  Or are they just cupboards with drawers these days? I wouldn’t know. I’m not well up with the world of modern furniture, and never have been.  

When I grew up in the fifties, sideboards were quite the thing.  I don’t think my parents or grandparents knew the true purpose of a sideboard.  We weren’t posh enough to have table linen - apart from the odd tablecloth, usually handed down from some Great Aunt, who had probably spent hours, under poor light, religiously embroidering the four corners, only for us kids to wipe our messy hands and faces across the delicate handiwork.  Most days we used raffia mats to protect the table. They were loosely woven and caught every last piece of spilt food. Squashed peas, grains of rice, custard, all nestled in the gaps - there was probably a whole meal in there somewhere. And, if not, some festering virus.

If I remember rightly, the sideboard in our house was a bit of a dumping ground. It did have a drawer with a miscellaneous collection of cutlery, and two more with random items such as sellotape, old birthday cards and pens that didn’t work.  But the top of the sideboard was the place where everything was abandoned.  Half eaten bars of chocolate, library books, crayons, odd dominoes, and any number of used cups and plates.  I don’t ever remember having a buffet spread out on the top, which, of course was the original purpose of the sideboard.  In those days a buffet was something you had at a wedding or a funeral and never in your own home. The nearest we came to it was a Jacob’s Join, but even that went straight to the table.

Christmas was the time the sideboard came into its own.  Each year we alternated between sets of grandparents, and I can remember the thrill at the first sight of the sideboard, laden with the sort of food any child of the ‘50s found magical: bowls of peanuts, tangerines and grapes, sweets in shiny wrappers, Liquorish Allsorts, Ritz crackers and, of course, the inevitable tin of Quality Street - which made secret eating a bit of a challenge: for most of my childhood the lid on the Quality Street was far too big for my little hands to open. 

Occasionally, I would go to stay with my maternal grandma, something I loved for three main  reasons: firstly, I got spoilt rotten; secondly she used to take me to jumble sales; thirdly she lived by a railway line, and I loved to lie in bed, listening to the trains rumbling by. Getting spoilt rotten was categorised by one thing in my young eyes.  The bowl of toffees that usually lived on the sideboard - and lasted for weeks - was ceremoniously placed in my lap as I sat and watched TV.  At the time, my pocket money was one old penny every other day - for sweets after school (four blackjacks/fruit salads or a sherbet dab if anybody’s interested), so to have a full bowl of toffees at my disposal was like a dream come true to my greedy little mind. Grandma went out to the kitchen to wash up and granddad disappeared into his shed.  I was left alone with the sweets.  I didn’t give a thought to making them last.  One after the other, I gobbled them down, leaving just a bowl full of wrappers.  In a panic, I put the bowl back on the sideboard, sat back down, and, as the door opened, pretended to be asleep.

My last encounter with a sideboard was about thirty five years ago, when we hadn’t long moved into our new house.  This house was twice the size of the old house with large rooms and high ceilings.  Our furniture looked lost.  One day I was doing the rounds of second hand furniture shops when I spotted the perfect piece.  It was huge, with a giant mirror, three drawers, two doors and lots of fancy wood carving.  I loved it.  I can’t remember now how much it was but I do remember wondering whether we could stretch to it.  Before telling the husband I decided to rope in an antique dealer friend to tell me whether it was worth it - or if I was being ripped off.  Martin arrived and promptly took me to one side to hiss that this was the bargain of the century, worth twice the price and to snap it up.  I bought the sideboard, Martin transported it in his van for me, we presented a united front to the husband who stood in the doorway looking bemused (his default expression whenever anything new appears at the door) and we installed it in its last resting place. 

So you see, from that day on, I’ve been a grown up with a sideboard.  It’s been a buffet area for thirty years of Christmas dinners, laden with mince pies, crackers and cheese, Christmas pudding and trifle.  It’s been a makeshift baby changing station when the grandchildren were tiny.  It’s been a display shelf for family photos, and now, finally, I’ve come of age and it’s become a dumping ground for dead candles, the plastic novelties out of crackers, old till receipts and children’s pictures that I can’t bear to throw away.  I daren’t even open the drawers, although I do know, in there somewhere amongst the playing cards, Mastermind and Monopoly, is a beautifully embroidered table cloth passed down from Great Aunt somebody, just crying out to be used.

Grandma’s sideboard by Jill Reidy

Amongst the bowls of fruit 

and photos of children 

Frozen in time

Is a small dish

Full to the brim 

Shiny Golden wrappers

reflecting orange light 

From the two barred fire

They wink at me, those toffees

Grandma bustles in

Picks up the bowl

Places it in my lap

and bustles out again

I hear her humming in the kitchen

As I take each toffee

Unwrap its golden casing 

And pop it in my mouth

Greedily chew and swallow

The humming stops

Silently I reach across 

And replace the bowl

There's a kind of sadness now

About those wrappers

The insides don’t glow

As the outsides did

I feel a little queasy

The door opens

I close my eyes and pretend to sleep

Thanks for reading........Jill 

 

 

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