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,