(This story comes from a challenge to write 1000 words beginning with "I looked over the edge and gasped".)
I looked over the edge and gasped. Far below were jagged rocks and an angry sea – certain death were I to fall over. But what was the choice? Behind – chasing me to the edge – was a herd of cows that saw me as their enemy. My choice was to be trampled to death or take my chance with the rocks and the sea.
But it wasn’t the rocks that had prompted my gasp. It was the herd of fears that were climbing the cliff and coming in my direction. They were the fears I remembered from my past, that had terrified me at some stage in my life and which my subconscious mind had never allowed me to forget.
I could see my five-year-old self on my first day at Stanley Green Infants School. My mother had left me at the school gate, thinking that I would be in safe hands from that point on. What she didn’t know was that this was the gate that the older children used, and that younger kids who approached from this direction had to walk through a playground full of giants in order to reach their own assembly point. These monsters were six-year-old children who had been going to school for a whole year and were highly trained in the art of bullying five-year-olds – very scary!
A much more tangible fear then rushed up the cliff towards me. I was on my bike, aged about 13, and was cycling along the main road through Hamworthy heading for the Fire Station. I was in the Scouts and taking a course leading to the Firefighters Badge, so this was a regular Friday evening trip for a few weeks that year. However, I had just reached the junction with Lake Road when I realised that the guy on a motorbike turning out of Lake Road had not seen me and was not going to stop. Years before I had witnessed an accident when a cyclist had been badly injured after being hit by a motorbike, and now it was my turn to be left as a mangled heap in the middle of the road.
These fears were coming at me in no particular order. Next it was a moment at Oakdale Junior School, aged seven, when I had been caught talking in class and threw a complete wobbly because Mrs Moore had only seen me telling me Michael Burgess to shut up and Michael was the real culprit because he had started it. Our classroom was in a hut across the road from the main school and Mrs Moore used her phone to summon Mr Boyd, the head teacher, who everyone knew had a cane in his office that he used on very naughty children. When Mr Boyd arrived he grabbed hold of my arm and dragged me back to his office. I was literally kicking and screaming – I landed a pretty good kick on Mr Boyd’s shin. The worst was bound to happen now.
The next fear was a real life-threatener. I was driving along the A36 towards Salisbury, at the time when I was working at the Technical College and spent the weekends with my wife-to-be in Weston-Super-Mare. On this Monday morning I was running late and got stuck behind a slow-moving lorry. Surely there would be a chance to overtake at some point? At last the opportunity presented itself – I pulled out and made my move. However, round the next bend came an even larger lorry, heading straight for me, and I realised that I had made a wrong decision. My elderly VW Beetle simply did not have the acceleration to overtake in time and my only chance was for the drivers of both lorries to slam on their brakes and let me squeeze through the narrow gap that presented itself. Would they or wouldn’t they?
Throughout school and college I had performed in a number of plays and Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and a whole crop of fears revolved around forgetting my lines or falling over the furniture. Singing the Admiral’s patter song in HMS Pinafore was a particular fear – there were six verses and every possibility of getting them in the wrong order. However, the fear that came closest to me up the cliff was from a much earlier performance, when it was not my mistake but a fellow actor’s that nearly did for me. This was during my second year at Poole Grammar School and our English teacher wanted to present a translated medieval French play – the Farce of Master Pierre Pathelin – in front of the whole school. I somehow landed the part of the judge. During the trial scene, in which the plot elements come together and all is resolved, one of the other boys jumped about ten lines, leaving me with a real dilemma. Should I carry on with the line that followed the one he should have spoken or the one that followed the one he actually used? Either way the result could have been utter confusion but I had no time in which to decide the best course.
And then another fear popped its head over the cliff edge and I was again back to very early childhood and on a family picnic in a field somewhere in Dorset. During the picnic a herd of sheep had come into the field and were now ranged across the path leading to where we had parked the car. I was utterly terrified of those fierce white wooly beasts and had no recourse other than tantrum mode.
On that occasion the sheep, not surprisingly, fled in just as much panic as I was displaying, although their alarmed “baas” only added to my terror. However, those baas seemed to be coming from all round me – not only from the cliff but behind me. I looked round and saw that the angry cows had metamorphosed into sheep. There was no longer anything to fear.
None of those early fears had been fulfilled. I was not bullied by six-year-olds, Mr Boyd did not cane me, I escaped from the bike accident with only a few bruises and my stupid overtaking move taught me a useful lesson and made me a better driver. I never forgot my lines and nobody seemed to notice the Pierre Pathelin hiccup.
Nightmares are just that – transitory fears that have gone in the morning. However, you can learn from past fears and apply the lessons to the future - if you’ve got any sense.
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