The story I read was called 'Last Line of Defence' and was written by my number 2 son.
One sentence leapt out at me - a crying child was told 'shut up or I'll set the clowns on you'
Now clowns have always been scary things for me but I thought I had managed to keep it to myself. When I was about 11 years old my parents took me to the circus which arrived on a mass of spare ground near our home. This was in the days when a man with a whip would enter a cage of lions and tigers, a bear was lead with a chain around his neck and a person walked on a wire high above our heads with no safety net in place. This was the first show I had ever been to and I was running a gambit of emotions - excitement, anticipation, thrills and certainly fear but nothing compared with the actual terror I felt when the clowns came running on. I was simply petrified into silence.
They were to me frightening and unknowable just like the criminals whom we see today with head and faces covered so that they are totally unrecognisable as people.
I can't believe that I might have passed my fear of clowns on to my children.
My mother passed an irrational fear of cats to my sisters and me and eventually as an adult I had to face the fear head on and get a kitten to grow up in my own family with us.
Perhaps I am going to have to go out and buy a clown.
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