The Ramblings of Guise Dugal

One of the fun things that I like to do is find out and explore people’s fears, usually to take them to a twisting and turning degree of surreality. From fears of scorpions and squirrels that led to the creation of the Squirpion to old men with cigarettes that led to Old Man Stubbyfingers. It’s an amusing diversion at times and the chimerical nature of the creatures opens up worlds beyond this where mental images just leap around wanting to be picked out like the hyperactive child on the playground hoping to be picked for a game of football, leaving the tiresome reality left clutching his half-eaten Mars bar like the fat kid.

I’ve mentioned before some of the things that bothered me as a child, and even into adulthood, that although not fears were enough to act as nightmare fuel over the years. Common fears are little to speak about, I’m not scared of spiders, but I find them creepy and don’t want them near me; in a similar vein, I’ve been stung before and therefore hate wasps, bees and flying ants. To the same token, I’d say I have common fears towards most creatures, including and actual to higher percentages, people.

Rational fears are tedious, I used to suffer from a fear of heights, which lowered to a fear of ‘unsupported heights’ and ‘falling’ and finally changed to just cases of vertigo. For this, I should be thankful to the practical aversion therapy I had when I lived in a fifth floor flat with no internal stairway and a broken down elevator that meant I had to use a rusting metal external fire escape each day to get in and out.

But there were things that bothered me growing up. I never really liked clowns, it isn’t really a fear, but they ‘bother’ me, and I can’t really give any reason why. I was also terrified of Freddy Krueger growing up, down to my loving, caring, nurturing older brothers sitting me down with them at the tender, innocent age of seven or eight to watch Nightmare on Elm Street Part 3: Dream Warriors – as an aside the puppet patient scene is jointly one of my favourite and most hated movie scenes of all time.

…and then, there are scarecrows. For scarecrows, I feel I can, if not justify, at least rationalise to some degree.

I grew up in a small village on the outskirts of a small town in an area that is bordered all around by some of the most steretypical farming counties in the whole of the UK, the counties of Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and the Bristol area. It was an area where the next village over had a leading cider (and I mean real cider) manufacturer and every school morning, apple trucks rolled by wafting fermenting fruit odours intoxicatingly into the air. It was a village where they still had Morris Dancers attend the summer carnival. It was a village where the walk to school was often delayed by cows on the main roads. It was a village with it’s own tractor retailer. It was a village with real fields.

Some of these fields grew crops, usually very little in the way of crops as they served more as an allortment to the more common live stock grazing, but even when the crop was a bunch of dandelions that sprouted out of a cowpat, it warranted a scarecrow. At this young age, in this fairly rural village, I lived in a small bungalow with my parents, two older brothers and a changing cast of animals, and this small bungalow had a large back garden that neighboured a huge grazing field.

Occasionally in this huge grazing field, with its tall grasses that often hid rabbits, hares, foxes and, I’m sure, the occasional gremlin or land shark, you would find propped up a scarecrow somewhere. England’s weather is that when it is not raining, you can pretty much guarantee it is ‘blustery’. Wind would blow, waving the tall grasses and leading the scarecrows to sway.

There were other local scarecrows too, some even bordering on having a mythology to them had we, as children, been bothered to formulate a story for them to the same degree we had for ‘the deputy headteachers child stuck in stone pillars on the playground’ or the ‘bunkers under the playground that were both for storing PE equipment and locking away children’.

One key scarecrow resided on the hill far above the school playground, but still visible to us as we stood in the corner square of different coloured concrete that marked where the bunker was. The scarecrow was placed in an allotment on the hill, amongst rows of crops that from a distance never seemed to crow. Every now and then though, we’d look up to the hill and the scarecrow would be in a different position, and occasionally we would swear we say him moving around.

Now, rationality kicked in lated that there was a very small chance that the allotment owner took the scarecrow down while attending his crops, and then put him back up with little regard for continuity – or indeed picked him back up after cider louts knocked the bastard over.

Rationality is over-rated though, because in my mind and probably the mind of others, the thing that clicked in place was Worzel Gummidge. Worzel ‘Evil Incarnate’ Gummidge. A scarecrow who came to life, walked around and had plenty of adventurers for terrified children to watch because parents mistakenly believed that the silence of Post Traumatic Stress was the same as the awe we had when watching He-Man.

I’m sure I don’t need to explain how a scarecrow that comes to life on a weekly basis and scarecrows in your own neighbourhood that move in bad weather can disturb a child. I’d now like you to take a moment to picture the following in your head, a rainy night, then flashes of lightning illuminating in short bursts as wind blows everything around, including scarecrow limbs in the distance.

These days, scarecrows themselves don’t always bother me, for example a bonfire Guy before November 5th does little to me except make me critical of the level of attention and quality in the manufacture of said effigy, and indeed some scarecrows are amusing in their campy and retro nature, assuming the sort of ironic statement that most hipsters would give their right ipod earphone to achieve.

There are scarecrows that are creepy though, for these I don’t feel dread but a sort of morbid fascination that is just enough to send a shudder at times.

Quite often these are the scarecrows that will do the least to scare away crows – in fact they are often more sinister because of perched black birds. Sometimes, these are the scarecrows who aren’t propped up fully on the crucifix erected behind them to give them the traditional tortured pose, but have instead found some way to lop or collapse slightly, highlighting even more how they are bound in place.

Of course, the most successful sinister scarecrow is the one that makes you pause for just a second or two as you consider the possibility that inside the potato sack hood and straw stuffed rags, there might just be some helpless soul or disobeying child who has had to ‘have the devil taken from them’ by locals who find the height of technology to be pitchforks and flaming torches and have a subscription to “Witch Burning and Beastiality” magazine.

This may seem extreme, but in this area it would come as no surprise to find some people believe the events of The Wicker Man to be as useful gardening advice as any episode of Gardener’s Question Time. The fact that on the route further down south of this town there is a giant wicker statue in the shape of a man, with a torso you could fit people in, should perhaps set the tone of the area. The villages around here have ‘local pubs for local people’. I dare go back to some of the villages since I moved out of mine, in fear that I might be considered a ‘cityboy’ and chased from town under a chorus of baying hounds.

Scarecrows have achieved a place in popular culture though because of their nature, no doubt down to the phenomenom of Uncanny Valley, wherein they trigger some reaction in us because they look like humans but if we put across any human traits – in particular locomotion – then they are immediately ‘wrong’ to us. In some regards I wonder whether we chose more to use scarecrows as they bother us, more than the crows, with the thought of “well, it creeps me out, so those crows should be shitting bricks”.

The Scarecrow, for example, of Batman fame is a notorious example of the combination of fear and scarecrow imagery. Professor Jonathan Crane, a gangly-limbed fellow and psychology boffin, dresses up as a strawman and uses a gas to cause hallucinations of peoples fears. His long, spindly limbs stretches him out in the same disproportionate way as a lot of common scarecrows, and his clothes, commonly depicted as burlap hood and rags that could easily come from generations before, are close enough to any stereotypical effigy.

One feature that I feel I should call upon is from the recent Arkham Asylum game, where he has been given a very Freddy Krueger-esque glove with hypodermic needle fingers.

The Creeper from the Jeepers Creepers franchise, and in particular I refer to the very opening of Jeepers Creepers 2, plays greatly in to the horror of the notion of something that one assumes to be inanimate and innocent turning out to be rather sinister. Even if from the moment that it made it’s appearance, looking even more ragged and ghoulish than the others, it seemed inevitable what was going to happen and so early on. Its choice of victim makes it more sinister, reaffirming the feelings towards it, and the choice of surrounding, both familiarly rural, bright and open whilst also being desolute, isolated and lonesome.

I choose to disbelieve that I’m the only one who found the Oz denizens Jack, the pumpkin headed character from Return to Oz, and Scarecrow, from the Wizard of Oz, to be sinister creatures. A lot of people may agree on Jack, but not see the evil in Scarecrow, but consider for a moment any other instance where a lifeless figure has risen up and taken on a hunt for ‘brains’ and then contemplate how endearing this creature is. If he had indeed had strong enough jaws it would nat have surprised me if he had attempted to split young Doroth Gale’s head open like a cherry tomato and suck out the grey matter from inside.

And of course, I have to mention again Worzel Gummidge, the nightmare fuel of a fair portion of my childhood. Like all scarecrows in the world, Worzel had the ability to come to life, though most scarecrows preferred to keep this secret to themselves and to avoid attention, Worzel was mischievious. In fact, Worzel went beyond mischievious, he was arrogant, amoral and often malicious and petty. He could show some degrees of cruelty and almost stalker-like obsession to a living mannequin, Aunt Sally, who herself was rather spiteful.

Worzel was portrayed on TV by the Third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, who affected a rather disturbing voice for the role that often featured strange inflections and a language known as Worzel-ese. The make-up for the character was muddy, warty and had straw sticking out from all over. Frequent visual gags involved body parts detaching, and Worzels ability to utilise his ‘spare heads’. This was viewed as good old fashioned fun for children and was regular morning television as I grew up.

And so, that brings us to the present day, or more to the point the past weekend. Those of you who have followed my vlogs might have seen the upload I did late yesterday, but for those that haven’t seen my YouTube channel, I went to the village that directly neighbours this town, in that way it would be considered the suburbs and my own home village the far outskirts, but the village was celebrating its annual Scarecrow Festival.

Scattered around the village households had put up homemade scarecrows in their front gardens or attached to their property. As I wasn’t local, I didn’t get the booklet advising of the numbers of households taking part, but I overheard people comparing figures in the twenties and thirties, and I spent about two hours wandering around the village so I’m sure there were more tucked away in the recesses that I dared not tread.

Some of the figures were small and not overly lifelike, but there were a few that were very artistic and wonderfully crafted. The Houdini scarecrow, which you’ll see in the vlog, definately lead to a pause as I considered a statement I’d made on camera literaly five minutes before about people hidden inside. The John Lennon/Yoko Ono fell into the artistic category, being very much more along the sculpture/mannequin look, than anything designed to protect crops, though the ’60s colour outfit was probably enough to frighten way even rabid wolves.