Salems Lot ....

....Or why my father was happy when I left home.

This story goes back a few years, to when I was about 17.  I was still living at home in England, and I had started watching a popular TV series at the time called "Salem's Lot". Now for anyone that doesn't harken back to Jurassic  period, (as my dear son likes to describe my childhood), Salem's Lot was about vampires, and not the nicey nice kind from Twilight or The Vampire Diaries, but genuinely terrifying creatures, (at least they were to me) that gained entrance by tapping on a victim's window in the dead of night. Truly the objects nightmares were made of back then.

One night when my father was out, I watched one of the episodes. This was before the age of VCRs, so I didn't really have a choice, but it was probably not the best idea when I was alone in the house with only my 87 year old grandmother for company (my mother had passed away a year earlier).  It also happened to be a typical dark and stormy night, lots of rain and howling wind.

After I had scared myself silly watching the TV,  I bravely went around the house and made sure all the doors were locked, including, as it so happened the dead bolt on the front door. I checked on my grandmother and went to bed. Some time later I was awoken by an urgent tapping on my bedroom window. I lay there frozen in terror, convinced that a pane of glass was all that separated me from a member of the undead. Did I mention that I had a very active imagination ? 

The tapping continued, getting louder and more desperate. I had to act, but what could I do ? Fortunately I was somewhat prepared for such an emergency and didn't go to bed without the obligatory cross on my night table. I would have stashed a few cloves of garlic too, if I had been allowed. Trembling with fear, I got out of bed, grabbed up my cross and crept across the room to the window. I was absolutely petrified, but somehow I managed to fling open the curtain, and pressing the cross up against the glass I yelled "Begone fearsome creature" or something equally foolish, closed the curtains and dashed back to bed.

As my racing heart beat returned to normal, I thought about the chilling apparition that I had seen outside my window. I bet you thought  I was going to say it was a tree branch, but no, there was definitely someone there.  Suddenly it dawned on me, "Oh bloody hell", it was my father outside the window, at the top of a ladder and soaking wet to boot. The recognition process was also helped that by now that he was had lost any degree of subtlety, and was pounding on the glass yelling "Open the front door you stupid woman".

It turns out, that when I slipped the dead bolt, I had inadvertently locked him out. Growing up in a small town, we rarely even locked the doors, so I hadn't realised in my absence (I'd just returned from 6 months in Canada) my father had turned the house into Fort Knox.  So that night, when he returned home and discovered he couldn't get in, he had grabbed a ladder from the garden shed and had at first tried to wake my grandmother on the other side of the house. However ever since the doctor suggested she take a tot of whiskey before bed for "medicinal purposes", she took him at his word and usually ended up retiring for the night blind drunk. She was barely 5' tall and probably weighed no more than 80lb so it didn't take much to knock her out. Still, she lived to the age of 91 so she must have done something right.

Anyway back to my story. Unable to rouse my grandmother, my father shouldered the ladder and trekked over to my window. Apparently he had been tapping on it for some time before I awoke. It didn't help that he'd had to  stumble around in the dark, so he wasn't exactly in the best of moods when I raced downstairs and let him in.  I received a blistering lecture, something about "stupidity, brainless, asinine, imbecile, feeble minded" and the list went on.  I never once heard my father swear, but if he ever came close to it, I think it was that night.