I just have to close my eyes and I can see it, this tall blue box, not unlike Doctor Who’s, TARDIS, standing proudly at the top of the stairs of my Nana’s house. I must have been a bout five or six years old, but even today as I sit here typing, I can see that blue box very clearly.
Standing either side of the blue box are my Nana’s neighbours, Dot and Harry Scott, I cannot remember their features, but a memory recalls that they both looked lovely, smily people, straight out of a 1950’s advert. The two things I remember about Dot and Harry Scott is that Harry died young and Dot woke up one day to find her eyelashes had turned painfully inward.
But before that time, before they left to live somewhere else, they had given me this blue box, a wardrobe.
That night I dreamt about them standing on the top of the stairs, smiling. I was at the very bottom of the stairs, looking up, watching them open the wardrobe door, their smiles getting larger and larger. Then out of the wardrobe, this black mass came tumbling towards me. Before it got to the bottom step I woke up. I don’t remember telling anyone about my bad dream, or being fearful of opening the wardrobe the next morning. But that is one of my earliest nightmares, one of my most vivid memories of when I young.