The Washing Machine

Yesterday, I attended the Dan Davin creative writing workshop provided through my high school. We had Helen Lowe, a fantasy and sci-fi author talk to us about writing, and take us through a few exercises to develop our skills. The first exercise was to remember back to a time when we were young and experienced fear, and to write about our experience. This is the earliest clear memory I have of being afraid, perhaps when I was three or four, and terrified of a washing machine. Also, she had us writing in stream of consciousness (where we just keep writing, do not take our pen off the page and do not edit it as we write, which is useful for getting emotions and ideas out) so I apologise for any errors or rambling.

   I don’t remember how old I was. Let’s just say, very young. I had some unusual fears- almost to the point of being ridiculously OCD about some things, like making sure I never ate the red M&Ms before any of the other colours, for instance. I wasn’t afraid of dogs or the older boys who lived down the street. I didn’t have many rational fears. However, as far as irrational fears went, well… I was deathly afraid of our washing machine.

   The thing was probably ancient, but I just remember it being gleaming and white, and when I sat my petite self at its base, it appeared to stretch up forever. Not that I’d sit anywhere near it if it was on. It was noisy and grumpy, and would thump thump thump as it cleaned our clothes.


I was 98% sure that the washing machine was put in our house with the sole purpose of murdering me. I hated it. I’d run outside and hide in my sandpit and hope that the damn thing never became capable of moving from place to place.


Its method of murder? I hadn’t really thought that far ahead, but I think I believed that it would somehow intentionally fall on me and crush me, and hours later my poor mother would come into the laundry and see the murderous machine on its side, with little evidence of me but for my tiny legs sticking out from underneath. It was not a pleasant thought.


   Later on, I began to have nightmares about the washing machine. These tied in with the other nightmares I’d been having- about the monkey bars at the Fernhill Road playground (my father had encouraged me to play on them when I was very young and I fell off and decided they were also part of a plot to murder me) and of the dragonmonster that lived at the bottom of the garden. (Where it most likely still resides- although as I moved from that house a good ten years ago now, I can’t confirm this.) I used to have nightmares about sitting outside, at the other end of the garden (where the dragonmonster wasn’t) and hearing the sound of the washing machine starting. The panic would rise in my throat and I would look around for my mother or my father or some form of comfort, but I was alone. Once it got to the thump thump thump stage of the washing cycle, all chance of escape had been lost. The nightmare would always end the same way. My father would come and ask me if I wanted to go play on the monkey bars, and just as I was thinking about how ineffective his persuasive technique was, the washing machine would slowly fall out of the sky to crush us both.


   Of course, it never quite reached us by the time I awoke from this nightmare. But the horror of seeing a gigantic appliance falling out of the sky to attempt to murder you by crushing is in itself a purely horrific experience. However, the utter joy of my situation was that I had the absolute pleasure of this nightmare being a recurring dream. Night after night after night, I was nearly murdered by a piece of whiteware.