Scaffoldophobia

Back in the 70’s horror films were a great late-night pastime for kids like me .

Not officially, but nobody gave a shit what I was doing most of the time.

That didn’t stop half the kids in Britain watching them either tho, from behind the sofa while their parents were down the pub or arguing in the kitchen or, in our case, somewhere else entirely. By the mid-seventies there seemed to be horror films on television every other week. Grainy old black-and-white ones where women screamed continuously whilst men in dinner suits wandered about castles carrying candlesticks. Or lurid technicolour ones where someone’s face melted off because they’d upset Dracula or ignored a gypsy curse.

Me and my brother Nigel absolutely loved em.

Or more accurately, we loved watching em , terrified of what dad might night do if he caught us.

There’s a difference.

I can still remember the feeling now. The living room curtains pulled shut. Orange glow from the electric fire. One eye on the telly and one eye on the doorway in case something from the film somehow escaped into the hallway. Kids back then genuinely believed television could leak into real life after dark. We didn’t have enough understanding of special effects to know where reality ended and nonsense began.

One particular film got hold of us good and proper. I’m almost certain it was called Circus of Horrors, though memory’s a funny thing and has a habit of stitching bits of different decades together like one of Doctor Frankenstein’s projects. All I really remember is some poor woman whose face got horribly burned or disfigured somehow. At one point she was screaming “Rosita! Rosita!” in absolute agony while me and Nigel sat frozen solid, both pretending not to be scared whilst simultaneously preparing to die of fright.

That was the thing about kids in the seventies. You could watch the most psychologically damaging thing imaginable at half past eleven at night and then still be expected to walk upstairs to bed in the dark on your own.

No soft landing. No reassuring discussion afterwards.

Just:

Right then…bed .

The following couple of weeks our house was covered in scaffolding because some work was being done on the roof. To modern kids this would probably mean danger tape, fluorescent jackets and a safety briefing. To kids in 1974 it meant one thing only:

Adventure playground delivered directly to your home.

The scaffolders might as well have knocked on the door and said:

“There you are boys. Built you a climbing frame reaching three storeys above concrete. Try not to die.”

Every kid I knew climbed scaffolding back then. We climbed garages, walls, abandoned fridges, bomb sites, trees, fences and occasionally each other. Adults seemed to work on the principle that children were basically indestructible unless visibly on fire.

Mum was out most nights around then anyway. Looking back now I honestly don’t know how old I was supposed to have been before being left indoors all evening became acceptable, but apparently the answer in our house was:

“Old enough to reach the light switch.”

Sometimes she’d come home late. Sometimes very late. Occasionally not till morning. Me and Nigel had pretty much become little feral bastards by then..

Nobody monitored anything we did.

That sounds terrible written down nowadays, but at the time it felt like freedom. Dangerous freedom perhaps, but freedom all the same.

If we wanted to stay up till midnight watching horror films, we did.

If we wanted to eat a cat shit sandwich for dinner, we could, probably would have been the only thing in the house anyway.

If we wanted to climb three storeys up the side of a scaffold in slippers pretending to be commandos, nobody was stopping us.

One night Nigel decided he was going to climb up the outside of the scaffolding and get into his bedroom through the window instead of using the stairs like a normal human being. To be fair, this genuinely seemed like an excellent idea at the time. We’d probably watched some film where spies entered buildings that way. Or that “Because the lady loves Milk Tray” advert around the time.

I remember standing in his room waiting for him. The curtains were half open and the orange streetlight outside made everything look slightly unreal, like one of those seventies police dramas. I could hear the metallic clanking outside as he climbed higher and higher up the poles.

Now somewhere in my idiot little child brain a wonderful idea formed.

I was going to frighten him.

Not just jump out and shout “boo” either. No. I was going full psychological warfare. I was going to recreate the horror film voice.

“Rosita…”

I positioned myself just beside the window where he couldn’t see me and waited.

The climbing noises stopped for a moment.

Then his face appeared level with the windowsill.

And I exploded out of the darkness screaming:

“ROSITA!”

What happened next probably lasted no more than two seconds, but in my memory it takes about half an hour.

Nigel jerked backwards so violently he nearly went straight off the scaffold. His arms flew out like windmills trying desperately to find balance whilst his body leaned backwards over empty space. I can still picture his face now. Not angry. Not even shocked really.

Pure animal terror.

Below him was three storeys of nothing ending in concrete.

And in that instant the joke stopped being funny.

Kids don’t often meet real consequence head on. Not proper consequence. Usually there’s an adult nearby to catch things before disaster fully arrives. But every now and then you suddenly realise:

“Oh Christ. This could actually happen.”

I remember freezing solid. My stomach just dropped clean through the floorboards.

Even at that age I knew what a head hitting concrete meant.

For a horrible second I genuinely thought I’d killed my brother.

Then somehow, by blind luck more than skill, he regained balance. One foot slipped on the metal pole, his arms pinwheeled wildly and he sort of collapsed sideways through the window into the room, breathing hard and swearing at me with a level of fury I didn’t even know he possessed yet.

Then, because we were boys and because it was the seventies, we both started laughing.

Not immediately.

There was a pause first.

One of those silences where both people realise they’ve just brushed past something awful.

Then the adrenaline turned into hysterics.

Nowadays there’d probably be counselling afterwards. A safeguarding report. Maybe a specialist scaffold trauma unit arriving in a people carrier.

Back then Nigel just called me a little bastard and punched me in the arm.

Job done.

The thing is that moment wasn’t even unusual for that era. That’s what younger people sometimes struggle to understand. Childhood in the seventies could be astonishingly unsupervised. Not for everybody of course. Plenty had stable homes and organised lives. But there were also thousands of us roaming around London like miniature drunk survivalists.

Nobody knew where we were most of the time.

And if they did know, they usually weren’t that interested.

I once knocked myself unconscious falling off the roof of the outside toilet trying to jump onto a wall because somebody had convinced me it could be done “easy.” I woke up dazed in the morning in bed with my face stuck to my pillow with dried blood, and no idea of how I got there.

Another time me and Nigel raided the drinks cabinet whilst Mum was out. Not glamorous drinking either. We weren’t tiny gangsters swirling whisky around in crystal glasses. This was random seventies alcohol archaeology. Warm Babycham. Cherry brandy. Dubonnet. Little dusty bottles nobody had touched since the Queen’s Jubilee.

Nigel got absolutely paralytic.

I remember him slurring his words and laughing uncontrollably before suddenly turning pale and quiet. I must only have been about seven or eight but I knew enough to fetch a bowl in case he was sick. I sat there trying to look after him whilst he drifted in and out of consciousness like some miniature Oliver Reed.

Again, no adults.

No panic.

No ambulance.

Just two children in a house trying to work life out badly.

I don’t remember feeling neglected all the time.

Sometimes, yes.

Sometimes painfully so.

But mostly I remember feeling free.

That’s the contradiction people don’t always understand about childhood memory. You can look back and recognise dysfunction whilst also remembering excitement. Both things can be true at once.

There was danger everywhere in those years, but there was also adventure.

You learned independence early because nobody else was coming.

You learned consequences because there were actual consequences.

You learned how to read people’s moods, how to entertain yourself, how to survive boredom, fear and loneliness because there wasn’t a tablet arriving every six seconds to distract you from yourself.

Of course plenty of it was completely mad.

You only realise quite how mad when you get older and start saying things aloud.

“Oh yeah, we used to watch horror films alone at age seven whilst drinking stolen Babycham in a scaffold-covered house.”

Modern parents would be arrested halfway through that sentence.

Sometimes I hear stories of from other places. Risk assessments. Safety flooring. Carefully supervised climbing frames six inches off the ground. Parents contacted because little Jayden looked emotionally overwhelmed by a yoghurt.

Part of me smiles at that because it’s easy to mock modern overprotection.

But another part of me remembers Nigel balancing backwards over concrete with absolute terror in his eyes.

And maybe that’s why generations become different.

The people who grew up feral create safety.

The people who grow up safe long for freedom.

Then somewhere down the line the pendulum swings again.

Still, I’ll tell you this much.

If you grew up in Britain in the seventies and reached adulthood with all your limbs attached and no permanent brain damage, there’s a good chance you were protected by one thing and one thing only:

Luck.

Not parenting manuals.

Not safeguarding policies.

Not awareness campaigns.

Luck.

Blind, staggering, miraculous luck.

And occasionally a bit of scaffolding to catch hold of at the last possible second.