Month: October 2024

Risk

~ Paula Harmon ~ 1 Comment

My first introduction to the horror which was Public Information Films was when I was aged between five and six.

One day, the police brought an Alsatian police dog to school. I was (and still am to some extent) scared of dogs, but this one was beautiful. The policemen seemed huge. They told us to be good and not to be afraid of the police. Then they said they’d show us what happened to criminals.

We went to the school fields and someone dressed in a stripy top and balaclava appeared from nowhere, snatched a bag and ran off. The policemen blew their whistles and shouted ‘Stop thief!’ to no avail. The beautiful Alsatian tensed and was released. It sped towards the ‘criminal’ who dodged and dived but was eventually brought down to the ground, his (well-padded) arm clasped in the jaws of the tail-wagging dog.

It was pretty impressive, though we weren’t sure whether we were being told that the police would protect us, or that crime would be a bad career choice.

Afterwards in the classroom we were shown a film about strangers. It featured a little girl accepting a lift with a strange man in a brown car and ending up locked in the cupboard under the stairs with his shadow getting closer. It was absolutely terrifying.

I hope that no child in that classroom had any idea what threat that little girl faced other than death, but we all sensed it was very bad. Then, as if we weren’t traumatised enough, the teacher said that when she’d been six, a friend and the friend’s brother disappeared and were eventually found buried in a sandpit.

I can honestly say that I’ve never felt the same about sandpits nor brown cars since.

If the point of this exercise was to make us wary of strangers, it certainly worked for me. A year or so later I got lost and walked for miles before eventually deciding I had to ask for help. As a perfectly nice man drove me home to hand over to my frantic mother, I was engulfed not only in fear but also in guilt. I had disobeyed the ‘not talking to strangers’ rule.

But as for other Public Information Films? Mmm.

Children’s television was awash with warnings about what lurked in the world to kill or maim us.

Perhaps this was because we were one of the last generations of children in the UK to roam fairly freely – often chucked out on a summer morning to play and not expected home till tea-time (with maybe a brief lunch in the middle). Well before the age of twelve, we went without parents to Saturday morning cinema, sweet and comic shopping, or to play in whatever our environment offered us.

Tufty the Squirrel warned us about road safety.  Charley the Cat warned us about other dangers. I was fond of Tufty, even if he had some very stupid friends. Charley sort of annoyed me, possibly because I was older by then and less inclined to want to be bossed about by a cartoon animal.

The animated ones were quite mild really except perhaps for one about playing in old fridges. I never saw a fridge that wasn’t in a kitchen doing its normal job, but after seeing that short film I was vaguely terrified that if I came across one which had been dumped I might suddenly be overwhelmed with temptation, climb inside and get suffocated.

Live action public information films were much scarier. In the same vein as the one about the little girl and the stranger with the brown car, The Spirit of the Water told you what awaited any unwary child who fell into a river or lake. Then there were the risks of playing frisbee near electricity pylons or mucking about on a railway which really were just plain common sense.

I’m not entirely sure any of those films would be made for children under twelve nowadays. They’re three minutes of horror.

Did they really make a difference to us? I’m not sure they did.

Despite playing in woodland, ‘caves’, a river and for a while an unsecured building site, and despite taking all sorts of very stupid risks (though not with the railway) my generation of children in my particular village survived. I’m sure that playing unsupervised helped us learn to assess risk in a way that can’t be learned any other way. Just because none of the children in my village were badly hurt (though one got close) doesn’t mean that others weren’t. Of course they were and we all knew it.

But deep down, that film I watched about the little girl has never gone away, and I think it has always been the fear of abduction which weighed heaviest with me as with many people.

For the record, that’s not because I think it’s more likely now than it was in the past. Any quick piece of research will reveal child abductions going back centuries.

So why does it remain a fear when the risk is much lower than injury from playing by a road or river?

Is that because injury from play or normal activities is a natural and acceptable risk, but abduction as an offence against nature: an abnormal, unpredictable evil event that should never happen?

I think it is.

Did I allow my children to play unsupervised like I did? Not really. Roads are busier and the local river runs faster. And I also know that some of the greatest risks they faced and still face are online. My daughter and a friend played in the brook of a nearby hamlet a few times but otherwise my children’s outside play without parents was via Cub and Scout Camps.

Do I regret that for them? I’m really torn between yes and no. What do you think?

Words Copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. Image credit: ID 13589617 | Playing Rope Swing © Dan Otten | Dreamstime.com

Gears Looking at You

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

This blog is dedicated to my great friend Val Portelli who, for reasons beyond her control, has sadly had to relinquish her faithful car. In sympathy, I’m looking back to some of the more memorable vehicles in my life and hoping to raise a smile on her face.

(Just for the record before I continue, in case you’re a phisher of any kind, the following is of no use whatsoever for getting at any of my passwords.)

The first vehicle in my life was a small fiat. My parents drove to Scotland in it when I was a baby to introduce me to my Scottish great-aunts (numerous and mostly scary). In those days before child restraints I travelled in my carry-cot on the back seat. My father always said that I’d eaten the carry-cot by the time we arrived. My mother, slightly more prosaically says that I chewed the straps a bit. I have no recollection of the car, her name, that particular journey or munching on plastic, so I can’t tell you what’s true. I like Dad’s version, but suspect Mum’s is true.

The first vehicle I recall was a motorcaravan. I called her ‘Daddy Car’. I have many happy memories of New Forest holidays in her. In my head, the sun always shone, but then I was a small child. It’s the opposite of being a teenager when memories of time spent with parents tend to be under a permanent cloud of gloom. My mother has since said that those glorious balmy holidays were spent in October, and photos show us playing ball wrapped up in winter coats, but to me they’ll always be golden.

After that, there was a Skoda. Whether she had a name or not, I can’t recall. In fact the only reason I remember her at all was that I was just about old enough to understand the news on the radio. Or at least, I understood that there was violent trouble in all sorts of places around the world. (My father did not comprehend the concept of shielding small children from that sort of thing.) One of the places in turmoil was Czechoslovakia and I was a little concerned that it was around the corner. Dad reassured me, saying it was a long way away but was where the car was from. I sort of imagined she’d escaped the trouble to live safely with us and was very glad for her.

Following the Skoda was a series of Rovers, my father going through a flush period at the time. This coincided with me being vaguely Viking obsessed and I loved the logo of the longship on the steering wheel. The Rovers (whose names I can’t recall either) pulled caravans to take us on holidays. This was a brief period of luxury, although it coincided with a period of wearing short skirts and short shorts. There’s nothing quite like a long car journey from Berkshire to Cornwall with your legs sticking to leather seats. And at the time, the road network wasn’t quite what it is now, the journey being via narrow country roads, singing songs and trying to make a monarch from pub signs: King’s Head, King’s Arms, King’s Seat. There were never any legs and not enough queens, but it kept us occupied.

Cars were mostly driven by dads where I lived. Only a few mums could drive at all, and those who could rarely had a car of their own. But during this brief period of flushness, Dad bought one for Mum. It was small, black, very old, seatbelt-less, musty and somewhat reminiscent of an Edwardian maiden aunt. An Austin perhaps?

Her indicators were little orange bakelite ‘ears’ that popped out of the side of the car if Mum wanted to tell anyone she was turning. The only time I recall her driving it was when she collected me from junior school after a fainting episode. Perhaps she was too embarrassed.

When the flush period came to an abrupt end, the next car was a Triumph. She was named Weena by my sister after a character in the film ‘The Time Machine’ (equally too scary for little girls, but that was Dad for you).

Weena had no concept of running for more than a few miles without breaking down. Her exhaust pipe would drop off at regular intervals (three times crossing the English/Scots border), her head gasket would blow, the back windows would partially drop whenever it was raining and/or cold and periodically her windscreen wipers would stop working. This was problematic as we did a lot of travelling but we always felt Weena wasn’t doing it on purpose, she was just absent-minded.

One particularly horrible journey going home from Reading to South Wales in an unexpected snowstorm Dad followed the barrier on the central reservation as the only thing he could see and Mum periodically wound down her window, leaning out and prodding the wipers into action. My sister and I huddled in the back, freezing from the draught coming from our windows and now and again, hers.

After Weena, Dad bought his one and only brand-new car. She and every subsequent vehicle was efficient and economical and hardly ever broke down. Somehow they were never named. And with one exception, I never named my own afterwards either.

In the intervening years I thought that maybe naming cars was an out-of-date thing, until I met a friend who still does it, and then my daughter had her first car and named it immediately. And all of those cars are/were perfectly efficient and economical.

So perhaps it boils down to personality. And maybe that’s a lesson in life: don’t worry about being perfect, concentrate on making memories and being your own unique self.

I don’t know what happened some of the old girls Dad or Mum drove when they were sold, but I like to think that Val’s car is now trundling towards a sunset she never needs to reach on a beautiful highway along with Mum’s ancient Austin, Weena the ditzy Triumph and Daddy Car the motor caravan, being unique, making adventures, having fun, being herself.

Words (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used without the author’s express permission. Image credit: ID 140885884 © Mpagina | Dreamstime.com

Wandering in Ink

~ Paula Harmon ~ 2 Comments

This month I’m taking part in Inktober again, and the prompts all relate to travelling. My brain is going off piste as usual, but even so, it’s brought back many forgotten memories, only one of which, so far, has got into a sketch.

Before they had children, my parents were keen hikers. They marched out of London carting whopping metal-framed rucksacks and wearing heavy boots into the wilds of North Wales, Scotland, Cumbria and Northern Ireland, camping in the middle of nowhere.

They told us tales of a friend’s beard frozen to the zip on their sleeping bag; Dad standing on a broken bottle as he bathed in a chilly river and having to limp several miles to get it stitched up; the joy of finding a town with public bathing facilities (as in bath-tubs and the facility being public not the bath-tubs) where they could finally wash luxuriously in hot water.

Once my sister and I were old enough to walk for any distance, we were bought walking boots and went hiking too. (Note the faded polaroid of me, Mum and sister looking glamorous in Scotland below.)

One summer, when there was very little money in the holiday fund, we spent a week hiking about the Gower coast ‘Jasper Hunting’. That is, looking for seams of jasper in the rocks. We found a lot of fossils, which was fascinating in itself and the fact that we never found any jasper didn’t matter at all.

As a child, Dad loved horse-riding. I’m not sure whose horse he rode, because he definitely didn’t have one of his own. As an adult, he was keen that my sister and I learned to ride. I was keen too, having the typical little girl fascination with horses (albeit that I wanted mine to be winged unicorns) but I only ever had a few lessons during which my lack of natural authority became apparent. I was very good at getting on and off in the approved manner. What happened in the interim was entirely up to the horse who knew exactly who was in control. It wasn’t me.

We went on a couple of pony treks as a family and once the pony I was riding lost interest in plodding after its companions quite quickly and let them disappear into the mountains while it munched grass and contemplated what it had done to deserve such a dull life.

No amount of rein-pulling, prodding and encouragement made the pony move until… a bunch of kids from the local pony club galloped past. My pony raised its head, clearly thought ‘That looks like fun!’ and galloped after them.

During the terrifying minutes before the pony realised it couldn’t keep up and decided to wheel about and join its trundling stablemates, I lost hold of the reins and lay forward gripping its mane for dear life with my hands and its flank with my knees. I have no idea how I didn’t fall off. My unrequited love for horses abated after that.

A few years later, Dad and Mum joined a group setting up a visitor centre on a Welsh mountain. We’d spend our Saturdays there, helping with displays but mostly going for long walks high above the South Welsh valleys. No one who met me later really believed this, as Dad remained plump despite all the exercise and latterly spent most of his spare time sitting down writing. But back then, that’s what he did and consequently what we did.

I was twelve by then and wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone at school that I spent my Saturdays in hiking boots and kagoule, clambering up mountainsides while they were going to town with friends to buy records and make-up.

When you’re that age of course, all parents are embarrassing but mine seemed worse than most. A sister who was nearly three and a half years younger wasn’t much better. So I did my best to pretend I wasn’t with them.

We’d walk up hummocky, heathery, gorsey slopes under cloudy skies and I’d fall behind, forming descriptions in my head of a lone girl pacing herself as she seeks shelter in an inhospitable landscape, uncertain how long it’ll take to find it, or indeed if she ever will, longing for the lush, fertile country she comes from, escaping across wild, desolate, bare slopes without any certainty as to whether she’ll survive.

Then of course, I’d be dragged back into reality by someone yelling at me to stop lagging behind, or shout that it was time for a picnic of cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea.

I’d pause before catching up and look about, as the real world replaced my imagined one.

Greenish, greyish, purplish slopes climbed above me. Below was the pine forest we’d descend through later, crushing scented needles underfoot until we reached the visitor centre. Below that were rows of grey roofed terraced houses in a mining town. Further below was the motorway, the oil refinery… then dunes and the sea.

I recall those walks as always taken under overcast skies, rain imminent, but there must have been sunny days too. Perhaps the remembered weather is a reflection of that adolescent mood.

Now I live in chalk and cheese country: chalky ridges surrounding lush meadows. To my shame, I’m more likely to be indoors writing rather than outdoors hiking. My walking boots are who knows where, doubtless inhabited by spiders.

But that lonely figure whose journey I used to imagine in those Welsh hills is still trekking. She became a character in a novel that I started but never finished and is under the spare bed waiting for me to chivvy her up.

Perhaps it’s time to climb those slopes again and help her reach the end of her journey.

(Though I’m determined she’ll have something more appealing than cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea awaiting when she arrives. I certainly will.)

Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used or reproduced without the author’s express permission.

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