The Balloon Man
Growing up, our house was in a rural hamlet, the old heart of a larger, more distant, village of farms and 60s housing on the edge of a Sussex estuary. The house, two up, two down, was built in the 1930s, in Sussex style, on the shelly ogin of old oyster processing land, and always felt more remote than it was, both in space and time. At its front was an old porch, wooden, flat-rooved, with small, worn, white-painted shelves for pot-plants and herbs, the floor of uneven red brick, and a door that never quite closed in the winter. It was a dumping ground for spades, and boots that rapidly filled with fat white orb spiders. It was not a space that attracted attention, except for two days in 1977 and 1978, when The Balloon Man came.
I still have no idea, these years later, why The Balloon Man visited: what anniversary was never discussed, and under what conjunction it interlaced with our family history. Nevertheless, one morning, I think in June, my parents, apparently surprised, invited my brother and I to open the front door, where we found the porch filled to the very roof with a wall of balloons.
This event was not greeted, as perhaps my parents had hoped, with joy, but with confusion. It was of such rum strangeness that neither myself nor my brother could understand how it had happened, and on terrified questioning our parents could only explain that The Balloon Man had come to our lane in the night, crept along the houses, and inflated his rainbow-coloured treats just outside our easily unlocked front door.
Now this might have been recorded as an ill-executed parental entertainment, compounded by their panicked refusal to admit their part. We might by now have forgotten it, or laughed it over with them as a failed amusement, now a source of wry sympathy between generations of parents; excepting this: that a full twelve months later, we came down on a cold early summer morning, before the day had warmed, and opened the door to find it impenetrably crammed to the roof with balloons, and again our parents refusing knowledge of how or why they were there.
And therefore there is little more I can do than lay these two peculiar events at the hob-nailed feet of that strange nightmare from the 70s1, who crept along rural lanes at night, pushing the air from liminal household spaces, and filling them with an array of colours to the un-joy of terrified local pre-school children2. I can but hope he is still active out there, somewhere, somewhen, labouring under his unknowable and strange personal curse, perhaps misunderstood, and yet, perhaps, forever, not.
11 June 1977 / 11 June 1978
Notes:
1 In some way, for me, The Balloon Man was the sinister mirror of the other visitors to our lane, the fizzy-pop delivering milkman, the coal-man, and the rag-and-bone man, both the latter of whom still visited on their old flat-bed horse-drawn carts, and were much-anticipated visitors. In this, he joined The Tramp, a rarely seen figure who lived in the old smithy at the bottom of the lane, our Boo Radley across the wheelwright's stone, and a dark mirror of the much friendlier blacksmith who lived directly opposite us, but, like The Tramp, had never left the lane in all his ancient years. These hobnailed and sack-clothed men wrought around us a structuralist spell of the local and alien, friendly and terrifying, which allowed us to see the world as both nuanced and filled with unlikely possibility.
2 I have one more tale of this porch, which will, if it adds anything, only add a disturbing taint to this story. Which is that many years later, when I was perhaps 10 or 11, I woke in the early night to hear a scratching at the window of our shared bedroom, which was directly above it. Confused by this, for there were no nearby trees, I went to my parent's room, but found it empty. I then tried our lounge, with the same result, and the kitchen, wherein I found my parents were clearly missing, and the back door ajar. Now, surely it was my half-awake state, not lunatic levels of bravery that accounts for it, but I wandered out of the house and round to the front along the narrow paving-stone path that linked the two, and, turning the corner I found our ladder propped up against the porch, and my two parents, squatting under our window like two nightmarish nosferati, raking it with their fingernails and giggling. I said 'hello'. and took myself back off to bed, by which time they had re-entered the house. To this day, I could not tell you if this was real, or some strange nightmare, but it perhaps says something of my parents, who I otherwise love very much, that I would not put it beyond them.