Richard Herring: Don’t go down to the woods today
Wednesday 14 May 2014
My wife and I were walking in a wood in Hertfordshire. The air was fresh, the birds were singing and we were away from the danger of the city. But I was about to learn that the countryside can be more threatening than town. We saw a house nestled among the trees that made my blood run cold.
Staring out from the front window was a doll. Not an ordinary doll but a hand-knitted, ‘actual size’ representation of a boy of about eight, dressed in a real child’s clothes. The woollen effigy had a demonic smile stitched across his pink face and both arms raised above his head as if he was banging on the window.
The windows were barred. Was that to keep burglars out or the flaxen child in? Was the boy the prisoner of a deranged soft-toy abductor or was he locked away for our protection? If he escaped, might he run amok, strangling us all with his own loose threads?
My imagination was running wild but unless Woolboy comes to life when no one is looking (which I am not discounting) then someone had deliberately placed him in this odd pose. What the flip?
At the back of the house there was a narrow unpaved driveway with a sign reading: ‘Don’t even THINK of parking here!’ This seemed unnecessarily aggressive. We were in the middle of nowhere and I can’t imagine that anyone would think of parking there. Unless there was a sign telling them not to think about it, thus making them think about it. It’s a sign that forces anyone reading it to disobey it.
Slightly spooked, we continued our walk. A massive black dog appeared out of nowhere. We froze. Finally its owner emerged from the shadows but didn’t acknowledge us. He passed us and then immediately stopped, fishing for something in his pocket. Did he live in the house? Had he knitted the boy? Were we about to be captured by him? Or murdered? Perhaps he knitted woollen versions of all his victims, capturing their last seconds alive? Was he reaching for his needles and a ball of yarn?
I would have given anything to be back in Shepherd’s Bush at this moment. Yeah, there’s knife crime, feral child pavement cyclists and crazy people threatening to urinate in the Post Office queue, but there are no wool children battering on window panes and there are lots of people around to hear me if I scream.
For whatever reason, the man in the wood let us live that day.
I was reminded of a house in a wood in Devon that I had discovered when I was about 12. That also had dolls looking out of the windows. This time, they were plastic and had been placed in the bedroom windows, still in their sun-faded boxes.
A Christmas tree was up in the lounge even though it was summer. A sign on the door read ‘Beware of the very viscous Alsatian’. Was that a misspelling or was there a viscous dog inside? It’d jump to attack you and then dissolve harmlessly in a gloopy, syrupy puddle. I wondered then, as I did now, who would live in a house like that.
Maybe the next series of Through The Keyhole should eschew celebrities and instead let us go inside these odd mausoleums of the living, to meet the eccentric owners and find out what’s going on in their heads. And if Keith Lemon is murdered or made into some kind of terrifying porcelain effigy in the process, let’s take that as a bonus
