A day off today and we went for a walk this afternoon, out into the Hertfordshire countryside. Out of town, up a hill, there is a little complex of one storey houses (maybe even trailers). It's quite an isolated spot just by a little wood. One of the properties is for sale, though I am not sure anyone will ever buy it as the house nearest the gate is a little bit creepy.
The first thing I spotted was that in the front window there is a doll. Not just any doll, but a seemingly hand-knitted representation of a boy which is "actual size" and dressed in real child's clothes. he is smiling in a slightly demonic fashion and has both arms raised up as if he is banging on the windows, which are barred. If he was waving it might possibly seem like a silly bit of fun, but the fact that he seems to be trying to escape or attract attention to his plight and (unless he comes to life when no one is looking) that someone has placed him like this is slightly disturbing. What the Hell is going on?
At the back of the house there is a tall gate and a small unpaved driveway. On the gate is a sign saying "Don't even THINK of parking here" which again seems to be unnecessarily aggressive and not only because the space is small and in the middle of nowhere and it's difficult to imagine that anyone would even think of parking there, unless told by a sign not to think about doing so, thus of course being forced to think about it. It's a sign that you are bound to disobey the minute you have read it. "No parking" would do the job quite adequately, though I suspect if there was no sign then it wouldn't really increase the number of people parking there. It didn't even look like there was room for a car behind the fence. The person living here, who thinks it's fun to knit life-size boys out of wool, dress them and then place them behind bars, just hates humanity that much that they want to stop people parking in a place they would never park anywhere for no reason. It quite spooked me out.
We walked in the woods behind the house and a massive black dog appeared out of nowhere, seemingly on its own. It walked towards us, but was fairly placid. A man appeared out of the trees behind it. He didn't acknowledge us or smile at us. Was he the man who didn't want people parking near his house? Had he knitted the boy? Was there an entire family of life-size woolen people inside the dwelling, all dreaming of escape, with only the boy brave enough to try. Did they have a woolen car out the back which they hoped to drive away one day? Had they put the sign up?
The man stopped still the minute we had passed and was looking through his pocket. Were we about to be captured by him? Would he kill us? Did he knit woolen versions of all his victims, capturing their last seconds alive? If so, for whatever reason he decided to let us go.
The solitude of the country can be a bit scary at times. Weirdly we walked up over the field where a few months back
we'd seen a haystack that looked like a castle. There was just a small pile of the hay left now and it was smouldering on fire. Strange that we should be there on the day it burned. Were the people of Harpenden planning to burn the tramp man and his wife in a giant wicker man?
I'd experienced the tantalising oddness of the eccentric isolated home before. When I was at school we went away on a poetry writing weekend in Devon and went on a walk through the woods. There was a farmhouse there that had a similar feel and also had dolls looking out of the windows. This time they were the shop bought, plastic kind and if memory serves me right two or three of them were looking out from the bedroom windows, still in their sun-faded boxes. There was also an unusual and unfriendly sign on that house which said. "Beware of the very viscous Alsatian". We had some fun laughing at the idea of a dog that was viscous, rather than vicious, gloopy and moving around in a syrupy mess, but I ended up writing a poem which tried to guess the story of the person who lived in this place. Whatever the case both that person and whoever lives in the house I saw today seemed to be aware of the power of putting a doll in a window, facing outwards. Maybe we could revive "Through The Keyhole" and rather than having celebrities houses we get to meet the people who choose to create these eccentric and terrifying mausoleums for the living.
The countryside is a much more frightening place than the city.
