Nigel Green – Blood and Porridge

October 6, 2026October 13, 2026

Things that terrified the young me

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros Entertainment

We’ve entered October, the month that ends with the spooky and supernatural-tinged festival of Halloween. I usually mark this time of year by posting some entries related to the macabre – well, I am a published writer of horror stories. So, here is a piece listing the various things, in real life, in print, on TV or in the cinema, that terrified me as a kid and, possibly, affected my development and made me the person I am today.

The Tom and Jerry cartoon Heavenly Puss (1949)

When I was five or six years old, popular children’s cartoons that suddenly and without warning turned creepy were like booby traps for my delicate psyche. For example, I remember watching an episode of The Inspector, which was part of The Pink Panther Show (1969-78), where the Inspector’s sleepy sidekick Sergeant Deux-Deux accidently drinks a mad scientist’s potion and turns into a hulking Mr Hyde-like monster. This horrified me.

But my all-time cartoon nightmare came when I watched a Tom and Jerry short called Heavenly Puss, in which Tom is terrorised by a horned, red-pelted, green-eyed devil-dog – basically a satanic version of Spike the Bulldog – who keeps appearing and threatening to boil him alive in a cauldron. I was living in Northern Ireland at the time, and was already having my head filled with warnings about the devil by the multiple religious personages who populated the place. Seeing a similar, infernal figure intrude on something as innocuous as Tom and Jerry was deeply upsetting.

Incidentally, the 1942 Tom and Jerry short Fraidy Cat freaked me out too, though not quite as much as Heavenly Puss did.

Mij gets it in Ring of Bright Water (1969)

With this one I was less terrified than traumatised. Many people my age go on about how they were reduced to quivering wrecks when they watched the animated, leporine bloodbath Watership Down (1978). But a far worse experience for me was the movie Ring of Bright Water, based on the 1960 book of the same name by Gavin Maxwell, in which Bill Travers plays a hapless Londoner who rescues a rambunctious otter called Mij from a pet shop and ends up moving with him to the more otter-friendly environment of Scotland’s remote west coast. Not only Mij thrives there – Travers does too, especially when he makes the acquaintance of the fanciable local doctor (Virginia McKenna).

© Palomar Pictures International / Rank Film Distributors

I saw Ring of Bright Water on TV in the early 1970s. For most of its running time, it’s an amiable comedy in which Travers and Mij get up to amusing high-jinks. Nothing prepares you for the ending. McKenna is taking Mij for a walk when he gets his head flattened in a random act of violence by a shovel-wielding ditch-digger who regards otters as vermin. It’s made even worse by the fact that Travers is in London at the time. In the next scene he returns, cheerfully believing all is well, and McKenna has to interrupt his garrulous blather with the bald statement, “Mij is dead.”

It’s a sobering reminder of the fact that, no matter how much we sentimentalise animals, they frequently live or die – more often die – by the whims of humans beings. But sneaking that reminder into what’d been, for the most part, a fun, good-natured family film seemed a bit rotten.

Playing the ditch-digger was the Glaswegian actor Archie Duncan, who passed away in 1976. I wonder if that’s inscribed on his headstone: ‘HE KILLED MIJ.’

The Northern Irish satanic panic in 1973

According to the 2014 book Black Magic and Bogeymen by Richard Jenkins, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, a “wave of rumours about black magic, Satanism, animal sacrifice and child abduction… swept across the north of Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.” Jenkins notes that “(b)etween 5^th August and mid-December 1973, sixty-five items about witchcraft and black magic appeared in the mainstream press north and south of the Irish border: news reports, features, editorials, letters to the editor, church reports, and what appeared to be religious announcements… The reports peaked between mid-October and the third week in November, clustering around Hallowe’en.”

© Cork University Press

This was a classic example of what today we’d call a ‘satanic panic’ though, with the Northern Irish Troubles in progress at the time, Jenkins offers intriguing evidence that the British Army was stirring the pot with ‘black propaganda’ operations – i.e., trying to convince superstitious Northern Irish parents that the province was overrun with devil-worshippers so they wouldn’t let their kids outdoors at night. Keeping them indoors meant there was less chance of them getting into genuine bother with the paramilitaries or the security forces.

Jenkins also observes that children were among the worst culprits for spreading the rumours. I can testify to that. I remember a girl in my class gleefully assuring me there was a family in nearby Enniskillen who drew their curtains as soon as it got dark and then spent all night performing ghastly black-magic rituals. She also told me about goat-carcasses being found beside the river in Enniskillen with their hearts cut out and, worst of all, a child being abducted there, sacrificed and chopped into pieces. Needless to say, gullible me swallowed every word of this and, for the next few months, the prospect of visiting Enniskillen petrified me.

The trailer for Penda’s Fen (1974)

Today, Penda’s Fen is regarded as a visionary piece of TV drama. Time Out magazine has described it, rather pompously, as a “multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines…” that fuses “Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with a heightened socialism of vibrantly localist empathy, and pagan belief systems with pre-Norman histories and a seriously committed – and prescient – ecological awareness.” Written by David Rudkin and directed by Alan Clarke, it was, however, seriously offbeat even by the standards of Play for Today (1970-84), the anthology series whose fourth season contained it as an episode. Maybe that’s why I remember the trailer the BBC showed prior to its broadcast being so scary – the channel couldn’t make head nor tail of it and decided to market it as a folk-horror film.

© BBC

Two creepy moments of Penda’s Fen were included in that trailer. Firstly, there was a sequence where the young hero (Spencer Banks) sits by the edge of a pool and sees reflected in it a statue of an angel – the statue stands behind him, but when he looks around it suddenly isn’t there anymore. I wonder if the TV writer Steven Moffat saw this as a kid and, three decades later, it inspired him to create the Weeping Angels for the 21^st-century reboot of Doctor Who (2005-25). Even worse for my tender sensibilities was a sequence where Banks cowers in his bed while a devilish face hovers over him. Living in super-religious Northern Ireland, I had no doubt at the time that devils and demons were real. I didn’t want to wake up in the middle of the night and be confronted by a face like that.

Haunted by the images in its trailer, I didn’t watch Penda’s Fen when it was broadcast a few evenings later. In fact, I didn’t see it in its entirety until several years ago and, of course, it was nothing like what my eight-year-old self had been led to believe.

Talos comes to life in Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

In my childhood I loved the movie Jason and the Argonauts, based on the Greek myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece. I especially loved the mythical creatures in it like the hydra and harpies, which were animated by stop-motion-animation / special effects genius Ray Harryhausen. One scene absolutely creeped me out, however, and has stuck in my memory ever since. That’s when Jason and co. arrive on an island populated by gigantic bronze statues and Hercules (Nigel Green) and Hylas (John Cairney) not very smartly steal a giant broach from a treasure chamber inside the plinth of the statue of Talos. They’re discombobulated, to say the least, when the head of the titanic statue slowly turns and its bronze face gazes down at them, impassively but accusingly.

© Morningside Productions / Columbia Pictures

I think it’s the creaking noise that accompanies the twisting of Talos’s neck that gets me – every time I watch it.

The first half of Dracula, Prince of Darkness (1966)

The horror movies made by the famous British studio Hammer Films aren’t regarded today as being particularly frightening. At their best, they have a wonderful gothic flamboyance. At their worst, they’re endearingly tacky. But genuinely frightening? Not really. However, when I was a kid, some of them turned up on TV for the first time and, to me then, they did seem scary. For instance, Quatermass and the Pit (1968) left me shaken. But it was the first half of Hammer’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness that truly gave me the willies. I say ‘first half’ because when I initially saw it on TV, that was all of it I could take. At its midpoint, I threw in the towel and retreated to bed.

In part, the film’s impact on me was due to misleading expectations. I knew Dracula was villainous but didn’t think he could be frightening. I’d already seen a couple of old black-and-white films featuring the character, made by Universal Studios, where he was played in a raffish fashion, by John Carradine in House of Dracula (1945), or in an urbane and slightly camp one, by Bela Lugosi in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). So I wasn’t ready for Christopher Lee’s portrayal of him in Dracula, Prince of Darkness, where he alternates between being chillingly imperious – he unsettlingly doesn’t utter a word of dialogue during the whole film – and being a hissing, spitting hell-fiend.

In fact, Dracula is hardly in the movie’s first half. It begins with a prologue showing him being reduced to ashes, by Peter Cushing, at the climax of the previous instalment in Hammer’s Dracula series. What follows is a grim tale in which four naïve English travellers (Francis Matthews, Suzan Farmer, Barbara Shelley and Charles Tingwell) end up spending the night at Castle Dracula and an acolyte (Philip Latham) slaughters one of them and uses his blood to revive his dead master. The sight and sound of copious blood splattering down onto the Count’s powdery remains inflicted another scar on my already heavily-scarred young psyche.

© Warner Pathé / Hammer Films

I’ll post about more things that terrified my juvenile self shortly.

March 19, 2026

Spying economy class

© Gardner VI Books AMS006

So it’s farewell to Len Deighton, the author, military historian, screenwriter, illustrator and gastronomist who passed away on March 15^th at the venerable age of 97. As a tribute, here’s something I wrote a few years ago after I’d finally got around to reading The IPCRESS File (1962), the spy thriller that made Deighton’s name and supposedly provided an antidote to the more romanticised spy novels popular at the time featuring a certain James Bond.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a James Bond buff. Because of this, I’d wanted for a long time was get my hands on a copy of Len Deighton’s 1962 spy novel The IPCRESS File – my interest in it being that it’s often touted as the anti-Bond.

Whereas 007 is a posh ex-public schoolboy with oodles of money and charm at his disposal, Harry Palmer, spy hero of The IPCRESS File, is an unprivileged and ordinary-seeming bloke with only his working-class wits to help him negotiate the hazardous, occasionally dangerous world of espionage. Whereas Bond swans around in glamorous international locations enjoying the finest in cuisine, liquor and cars, Palmer trudges the lugubrious streets of London peering at the rain and pigeons through an oversized pair of glasses. Whereas Bond wins ladies’ hearts with his unflappable insouciance, Palmer gets dumped on by his superiors for his insolence, which to them signifies that he’s a troublesome oik who doesn’t know his place.

But hold on. That’s the impression I always had of Deighton’s character thanks to seeing in my youth the 1965 film version of The IPCRESS File, which featured in its lead role that impeccably deadpan man of the people Michael Caine. (At least, he was a man of the people until the 1970s, when he started moaning about having to pay tax.) It was a surprise, then, to finally open the original novel recently and discover that it wasn’t what the film version had led me to believe. It wasn’t quite as different from the Bond novels as I’d expected.

I should qualify that by saying I’m talking in terms of characterisation, not in terms of plot. For unlike the straightforward, action-adventure plot dynamics of the average Bond novel, the narrative of The IPCRESS File is a twisty, at times head-scratching thing that produces plenty of surprises about who’s working for, and spying on, whom.

Anyway, firstly, forget about Harry Palmer. The hero of Deighton’s novel goes through its 250-odd pages without ever revealing his name. Early on, somebody calls him ‘Harry’, but he immediately muses: “Now my name isn’t Harry, but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever has been.” All we have is an anonymous narrator recounting events with a laconic turn of phrase whilst giving few clues about his personality and background. In other words, the main character in The IPCRESS File is a cypher, an empty space into which readers can project their own personalities and so imagine themselves at the centre of the intrigue.

A cypher was pretty much what James Bond was too – not so much a properly-rounded character as a device for drawing in the reader. His creator Ian Fleming was careful not to give him too much individuality. This policy extended from his bland name (famously borrowed from the ornithologist who wrote the book Birds of the West Indies) to his lack of a life-history – it was only in You Only Live Twice (1964), the last novel published in Fleming’s lifetime, that we learn much about it and even then it turns out that Bond was orphaned at an early age, i.e. denied anything as character-forming as a family background.

Being a blank canvas isn’t the only thing that Deighton’s protagonist has in common with Bond. Both their jobs involve some globe-trotting. Now this came as a shock to me after seeing the film The Ipcress File – unlike the book, ‘Ipcress’ isn’t capitalised in its title – which determinedly confines its action to the British capital. However, the book sees him pursue a kidnapped scientist to Lebanon – resulting in a deadly blunder that the film has happening in a London car-park – and later being posted to a Pacific atoll that the American military have commandeered in order to observe and measure the explosion of a neutron bomb. The Pacific episode, set in a remote and inhospitable fragment of the tropics that the Americans have converted into a base containing “two athletic fields, two movie theatres, a chapel, a clothing store, beach clubs for officers and enlisted men, a library, hobby shops, vast quarters for the Commanding General, a maintenance hangar, personnel landing pier, mess hall, dispensary, a PX, post office, a wonderful modern laundry and a power plant”, is at times so odd and surreal it doesn’t so much resemble a spy story as something by J.G. Ballard.

And like Bond, the hero of the literary IPCRESS File has refined taste buds. We variously see him tucking into ‘Russian tea and apple strudel’, ‘Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice and cooked with celery)’, ‘totem poles of lamb, aubergine, onion and green pepper’, ‘iced Israeli melon’ and ‘fine lobster salad and carefully-made mayonnaise’. Even his sandwiches seem classy by 1962 standards, consisting of ‘cream cheese with pineapple, and ham with mango chutney… with rye bread’. Admittedly, this theme appears too in the film, which has a scene where Caine’s Harry Palmer bumps into a superior in a shop and is chided for paying “ten pence more for a fancy French label” of button mushrooms. The disdainful superior adds: “You’re quite a gourmet, aren’t you, Palmer?”

The character’s enthusiasm for a quality meal reflects a similar enthusiasm on his creator’s part. Indeed, when he was still working an illustrator, Deighton spent four years producing Cookstrips for the Observer newspaper. These were what nowadays we’d call ‘infographics’. Each presented a recipe for a particular dish, with pictures, arrows and a minimum of text making the preparation process as simple and clear as possible.

Where Deighton’s hero and Fleming’s hero part ways is in their relationships with their employers. While Bond seems at ease in the secret service, Deighton’s character lacks the wealthy and privileged background that most of his colleagues and superiors have. And he isn’t impressed by what that background has produced. He begins the novel working for Military Intelligence under a man called Ross, “a regular officer, that is to say he didn’t drink gin after 7.30 P.M. or hit ladies without first removing his hat.” Ross, we hear, has given him plenty of ‘toffee-nosed dressing downs’ and at one point he rambles at inordinate length about his huge and lavish garden. “Ross,” the perplexed narrator breaks in, “Mrs Laing and Dorothy Perkins are roses, aren’t they?”

Early in The IPCRESS File, though, he’s transferred from Ross’s unit to a civilian intelligence department of the Home Office called the WOOC(P). Not that he’s much happier with the person in charge there, a character called Dalby who’s “an elegant languid public-school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury.” When Dalby asks him if he “can handle a tricky little special assignment,” he retorts, “If it doesn’t demand a classical education I might be able to grope around it.”

Having to work with people from moneyed backgrounds presents him with another problem. His superiors don’t seem to appreciate the fact that he needs a steady income and regular payment of expenses to survive. When he switches from Ross’s outfit to Dalby’s, he wonders how long he “would have to make the remnants of this month’s pay last before the new scale began.” Later, he complains that he’s “still two months behind with pay and three with allowances” and that “a claim for £35 in overseas special pay” was “overdue by ten and a half months.”

This also surfaces in the film, with Ross and Dalby (played by Guy Doleman and Nigel Green) depicted as a pair of condescending bowler-hatted toffs who view Palmer as an irritant with ideas above his station. But the unflattering commentary about Britain’s class system is diluted slightly by the addition of a military theme. Ross and Dalby are both of upright army-officer stock while Palmer, we hear, had an inglorious time in uniform. (I assume that as an ordinary soldier he was caught up in illegal black-market activities in Germany, though I could be wrong.) Anyway, he’s spent time in a military prison and might be thrown into one again if he gets on the wrong side of his employers.

Thus, Palmer’s insolence isn’t just the result of a general social resentment – it comes too from a particular resentment against an institution, the army, that’s blighted his past and could potentially blight his future. Meanwhile, the film plays down his financial frustrations and shows him protesting instead against the needless bureaucracy of his work. Dalby, for instance, insists on a lengthy report being written after every excursion he makes ‘into the field’.

Incidentally, James Bond gets the best of both worlds. He’s well-bred enough to know his way around a flashy casino or expensive golf club, and is choosy about what he eats, drinks and drives, but he knows how to avoid coming across as an arse when mingling with ordinary working folk. Note how easily he gets into conversation with a pub landlord in Moonraker (1955), say, or with Tiffy, the bargirl at the bordello in The Man with the Golden Gun (1965). As Henry Chancellor puts it, he’s a ‘snob about things’ but not ‘about people’.

To sum up then, I found the hero of Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File rather more Bondian than I’d anticipated. But what distinguishes him from Ian Fleming’s super-spy is class. One has an ample supply of it. For the other, it’s the bane of his bloody life.