The Jazz Devil

Tallulah had a nightmare last night.  This is quite unusual.  Tallulah is not a great one for such things as she is a very upfront kind of person.  She likes to let her feelings roil across her face like clouds over the sun.  She tells it like it is.  She shoots from the hip.  She does other proverbial things that mean that she doesn’t often have nightmares.

When she does however, they are real doozies.  They are also about unimaginably bizarre things.  I have given up worrying about vetting her intake of scary material.  It doesn’t make any difference.  She will have nightmares about a Knorr Cupasoup and sit calmly through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre laughing like a loon (she hasn’t seen this by the way. I am not that much of an irresponsible parent, yet).

She is, as we know, obsessed by Doctor Who and rarely, if ever finds the episodes frightening.  There is a particular episode in the first of the new series’ where Christopher Ecclestone as the superbly dour and damaged Doctor goes to London during the Blitz with Rose.  Once there they notice that some hideous alien being is lurking around in gas masks and sucking people’s faces off.  It all comes to a head in the vision of a small boy wandering down a foggy street in his dressing gown and slippers.  Where his face should be is a gas mask and out of this item comes a little reedy voice which can only say: ‘Are you my mummy?’ in chilling tones.  He walks towards you and puts his hand out, and it is at this point that I disappear behind the sofa in a puddle of wee.  I find this terrifying.

This is one of Tallulah’s favourite episodes, along with the one about the stone angels that creep up behind you when you blink and suck you into another dimension.  Also pants wettingly eerie.  The only things she has ever found a bit scary were the clockwork mannequins in the Marie Antoinette episode and the witches in the Shakespeare episode, neither of which I found particularly horrible.

The last time she had a hideous nightmare was at my mum’s house on a sleepover when granny let her listen to a Secret Seven tape before bed.  She woke up screaming convinced that the Secret Seven were going to leap out of the shrubbery and push her into a shed or something bizarre.  Apparently it took a good hour to calm her down and she still refuses to face the Secret Seven and conquer her fears.  Not that I blame her. 

I find this fascinating.  The only thing the Secret Seven ever did for me was send me into a total stupor of boredom.  They were rubbish.

Last night’s dream was also terrifying and odd.  As you may know, her father has been letting her watch The Mighty Boosh when she and Tilly go round to his house, despite the fact that I was asked and said that I thought it was a little too old for them.  I was roundly ignored and they are now immersed in series three.  I specifically said that I thought that series three should be avoided because it is quite dark.  He glibly nodded and carried on regardless.

Last night when I was prizing her fingernails out of the ceiling as she screamed, I tried asking her what she was frightened of.  She kept shouting ‘Jazz! Jazz!’ at the top of her voice.  I have to admit to being slightly puzzled.  I mean I am no great fan of jazz myself.  I find Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth quite troubling, and apart from opera it has to be my least favourite art form.  As a result of this however, we do not ritually immerse the children in afternoons of forced recreation involving Chet Atkins, although I could live with Miles Davies if pushed.

I was trying to make sense of where all this jazz phobia had come from, whilst mopping her fevered brow and picking bits of plaster out of her hair when Tilly, who has the misfortune to share a bedroom with her, leaned blearily over the side of her bed and said: ‘The Spirit of Jazz, mummy,’ in a very world weary way, and flopped back on the pillow, exhausted by all this effort at two thirty in the morning.

Ah!  This is the Spirit of Jazz:

which goes some way to explaining her nightmare.

The Mighty Boosh revolves around two characters, Vince Noir and Howard Moon.  Howard is a ‘jazz maverick’, and in several episodes he gets possessed by ‘The Spirit of Jazz’, who is trying to steal his soul in a Doctor Faustus type way. As you do.

I explained to Tallulah that the Spirit of Jazz hardly ever visits Glenfield and that he was unlikely to be trying to steal her soul at this time in the morning as he was probably hanging out with Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth indulging in a bit of random scatting and some good old ‘deebe deee aaah Woohhh’ and simply didn’t have time to terrorise her.  Add to that the fact that he is a fictional character and Cleo is not in fact your tante.  Bon.

She was assuaged by this and then finally agreed to let go of the ceiling and go to sleep.

This morning she came downstairs as bright as a button and announced that she was no longer scared of The Spirit of Jazz because Tilly had explained to her that it was just Vince:

In a costume.

Well. That’s alright then.