Clowning around...

Clowns, for many years they simply made me laugh. Our family outings to the circus didn’t seem horrific at all, the clowns just men with silly painted faces who did ridiculous things with buckets of water, buckets of paper, squirty flowers, big falling-over shoes, collapsible cars, and stupid amazed expressions when everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

No, I simply didn’t know I was meant to be scared of clowns until I began reading Stephen King and the rest of the ‘clowns are scary’ brigade. Suddenly every drain held a clown waiting to grab me by the legs, Chucky’s teeth were going to tear into my skin, and that floppy clown in Poltergeist was going to pull me kicking and screaming into God knows where through a wardrobe – “don’t go into the light”. Dolls had always been a slight problem thanks to M.R. James and his haunted dolls houses and any number of ‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination’ on TV hadn’t helped, but clowns thankfully were just men in silly clothes.

I remember Coco the clown coming to visit our junior school to teach us about road safety - painted face, checked suit, flower and all. Technically, Coco wasn’t a clown but an auguste, that fool of a character who is always on the receiving end of the buckets of water and the custard pies - he still looked like a clown to me though. Back in 1960 he’d been involved in a serious road accident and this prompted him to devote himself to the promotion of road safety awareness in children, hence his visit. I can’t remember much about it, just an old guy with a painted face and a strong European accent who talked to us kids about looking and listening, both ways of course, and never to run out from behind parked ice cream vans. I got a signed photo though.

Perhaps from behind that painted mask of a face he was really luring us onto the roads to be devoured by speeding lorries, maybe he was going to pedal past on his unicycle and push one of us in front of a car, maybe he would drive up to us in his collapsible car, rev the engine, and then the car would gobble us up - could it be that he was really a road demon from outer space sent to collect the souls of children for the ringmaster of the lost souls circus?

Noo, this was long before Pennywise, Krusty, and that most evil clown of all Ronald McDonald. Coco was just an old man doing his bit for society – nothing to be scared of.

No… clowns are fine, there really is nothing to be scared of… (careful, he’s behind you.)