Caroline O'Donoghue: Halloween and growing pains

Caroline O'Donoghue

I don’t remember most of my Halloweens. Like Christmas or Easter, it’s hard to recall individual years, and easier instead to group batches of Halloweens together under vague time-sensitive umbrellas. There were the baby Halloweens, wandering up and down our park, a white cotton vest under my costume, fairy wings made of wire hangers and tinsel. 

There were the student Halloweens, wearing Ann Summers ‘sexy cat’ costumes with 80 denier wool tights underneath, garlic cheese chips on the footpath, snatched kisses with boys in equally imaginative costumes such as ‘Zorro’ and ‘zombie in a t-shirt’ and ‘James Bond’. And finally there are the adult Halloweens, which usually come around every four years or so when someone can be bothered arranging a party or a group screening of The Shining.

Lost in the shuffle and rarely revisited, however, are the adolescent Halloweens. I’m talking about the Halloweens between 12 and 14. We talk, as adults, about ‘difficult periods’ of our life, and we are usually talking about years where money was lean, or where someone was sick, or when our mental health was bad. I have been through ‘difficult periods’; I don’t think any of them were as difficult as the years between 12 and 14.

Twelve, in particular, is a real freak show. I was a bad case. I still felt very much like a child and unlike a lot of the girls in my class, had no urge to reach adolescence at all. People were already getting into make-up and bragging about their training bras. A deep, sneering trench had already formed between the girls who had wired or un-wired bras. The former being considered real, significant, feminine, and the latter as deluded, nauseous, a Potemkin village of the tit. 

I was revolted by all of this. Not because I was some kind of tree-climbing tomboy. That, at least, has a kind of dynamism attached to it. I was just not ready to leave childhood, and thought it was a tragedy that I was being asked to. I left dolls behind, reluctantly, at 11, but would still whisper “I miss Barbie” to my mum occasionally, like she was a friend who moved to another country. I remember the whole period as being very melancholy. 

I was trying to protect the sanctity of childhood, but it was my own childhood I was trying to protect, so it had the strange effect of making me feel both like a baby and a thousand years old.

My 12th Halloween was the last one where I went trick-or-treating. I know this because I remember knocking on a door with my best friend, Mags, and having the woman who answered look us up and down with disgust. “You’re too old for this,” she said, sounding like she pitied us. “What are you? Twelve? This is for little kids.” The embarrassment winded us. We went back to my house early, and talked about how wrong she was. “We’re not too old,” we said, nervously eating our mini Milky Ways. “Are we too old?”

The following year was the year when sleepovers really took root in our culture. Mags and I had, of course, been sleeping over in each others houses since we were seven or eight, and it was always the same: takeaway chips on a Friday night, renting Casper Meets Wendyon VHS, getting a giddy fit at about 11 and then conking out at one. 

By the time we were 13 that had changed. There was an edgy streak to sleepovers now: it was about sneaking vodka, and reviewing some porn found in someone’s brother’s room, and not going to sleep, and having a lot of girls in your house at once.

For this Halloween, I had somehow ended up hosting the sleepover. The plan was, obviously, to rent scary movies. Scary movies in the early noughties were no joke: it was the era of Saw, and Hostel, and other movies where extremely young people were viscerally butchered for no good reason. (I’ve since often thought whether this trend was anything to do with the Iraq War, and the huge amount of young people who were being viscerally butchered for no good reason.) 

I was, of course, terrified of horror movies and deeply worried about the idea of watching them. The worst part was, I was very interested in witchcraft. I loved the idea of magic, but I couldn’t stand the notion of being scared. I wanted the plot of the Exorcist carefully explained to me but I could not handle actually watching the Exorcist.

I still remember the week before Halloween that year as being one of the most stressful of my life. If I rented the horror movies, I would become scared, and possibly traumatised, and I wasn’t prepared to risk losing a speck more of my hoarded innocence. If I did not rent them, I would have failed conclusively at throwing a Halloween sleepover. In the end I couldn’t face it. I rented Shrek 2 and Bridget Jones’s Diary, and everyone was disgusted with me.

The strange thing is, I now write books for adolescents that could be broadly termed as ‘horror’. Certainly there’s a lot of scary stuff in them: witches, kidnappings, blood, murder, all that. And with Halloween this weekend, I’m pushing the book on more people than ever, in a concentrated marketing push for the spooky season. It feels unfair. “Read this,” I say to twelve-year-olds.

“Not that I would have.”