A sobering discovery in the dark

By Julie Myerson, Financial Times

Published: Nov 10, 2007 

Katy's house was in the same village as ours, a 10-minute walk down Main Street, past the pub and the field with the brown horses, before the road narrowed and you walked for another few minutes, and there it was, a large grey stone house set well back from the road, with a porch, a big front garden and a bright blue climbing frame - Katy's house.

Katy's mum was a French teacher and her dad was an alcoholic and Katy was an only child. At Christmas they always had parties with pineapple and cheese on sticks and tiny wrinkled sausages and Twiglets. They had a huge purple tinsel Christmas tree and their Christmas cards were pegged to a long sparkly string that went all the way up the stairs. They must have had a lot of friends because it was a very long flight of stairs and the cards stretched all the way up to the dark and creaky landing.

Because Katy was an only child, she was allowed to have other children round to play whenever she liked - to make up for it. She was younger than me and older than my middle sister; I don't know whose friend she was really. Anyway, she had friends of all ages. There was just something about her house that drew people in.

Sometimes we went the normal way along Main Street and other times we took the short-cut across the fields and shouted out to Katy to come and play. Sometimes we were all spies or secret agents and sometimes we were ballerinas who just happened to be spies as well. At Katy's house I watched Laurel and Hardy, tasted my first chives and experienced real fear for the very first time.

Our favourite game - a game we played at everyone's house including our own - was to turn out all the lights and just see what happened. You could only really play the game in winter, when it was dark by 4pm and parents might need to pop out for an hour or so.

The moment Katy's mum's car disappeared down the drive, we'd turn out the lights. All of our houses were different - some old, some modern, some big like Katy's and others quite tiny. But the one thing they had in common was that they all felt totally different when you turned the lights out. However normal and friendly and happy a person's house might seem in the daylight, the thick black gloom that descended with darkness changed everything.

Sometimes we'd all separate from each other and creep around in the dark - feeling for walls, doors, beds, window ledges. Other times it was just too frightening to do that and we'd stick together, creeping up the stairs, gripping each other's knees and fingers, clutching at each other's clothes. If we saw a shape or heard a noise, everyone would stop and stare into the darkness until it morphed into tiny pin pricks of coloured light clustering before our eyes.

It was just before Christmas and we were doing the game at Katy's. Her parents were out with everyone else's parents at a party down the road. Quick! Katy rushed around flicking out the lights. She was wearing a tutu and a sheepskin coat because we often dressed up to do the game. I had on some kind of pyjama bottoms and a slave girl's top. As even the twinkly lights on the Christmas tree were extinguished, darkness fell and infinity loomed.

I don't know why this time I ended up going off on my own but I did. All I remember was I was on the upstairs landing, hand on the bannister, Christmas cards and sparkly string quivering beneath my fingers, and I could hear the others screaming downstairs and suddenly I heard a low growly breath, a stumble and a groan. Then I felt the grab of a hand at my shoulder - a heavy male hand.

My heart was banging. I wanted to scream but it was like my breath was all shut off. I wanted to move but I couldn't do that either. I felt the Christmas card string start to break and the roots of my hair go hot and tight. And part of me was there in my body feeling the fear but another part was just hovering above, looking down and thinking that in a minute every single Christmas card was going to be on the floor.

The thing about turning lights off is you can also turn them back on. As I blinked into Katy's father's face and smelled the boozy-sweetness of his breath and heard him mutter a swear word I had never heard before and - sure enough - saw Christmas cards all over the landing and flapping down the stairs, all I could think was: "We are going to be in such trouble for this."

But in fact we never were. In fact, Katy's parents split up soon after that night and so did ours, closely followed by everyone else's parents, apart from one couple where the dad was killed in a car crash. All the same, it took a few more years for me to realise that this had been the very last time of playing in darkness. After that, even if we wanted to scare ourselves, we always played with the lights on.