On being scared, coping through preparedness and going to bed with my shoes on…

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When I was younger, I went to bed every night with my shoes on. I’d grudgingly consent to pyjamas, and to being sent to bed. But before wriggling under the covers, I’d velcro my feet back into my trainers, and only then could I settle. In my own bedroom, I could get away with this nightly ritual, completing it secretly after lights-out. When staying overnight in other places, it was even more important, but much trickier to get away with.

At relatives’ houses, family members wanted to tidy away my shoes to their assigned spot by the front door. If they realised when they came to say goodnight that I still had my shoes on, they’d fear for the state of their sheets. What outdoor grime and bacteria was I dragging in with me under the blankets? Probably there was some concern too, but mostly I remember bafflement. Come on, you silly sod, take those off. You don’t need them now. Explained over and over with varying amounts of patience. I was a bright child, so people were bemused that I couldn’t seem to grasp this simple concept. But I insisted. I wouldn’t sleep without them.

The reason I was so adamant: I was terrified of fire. The imagined ravages of the smoke and flame ripped through my imagined version of wherever I was without mercy. Always in the dead of night, while everyone slept, sweetly oblivious of their impending death. Had I seen something on television showing people who’d had to abandon their homes in the face of fire or natural disaster? The bare feet was a detail I fixated on. I imagined the cold air gnawing their toes, the pain of broken glass and tarmac underfoot. I couldn’t control anything else, but I would never be one of those sooty-faced traumatised urchins staring in barefoot shock at the fire-ravaged ruins of their home from their vantage point over the road. I wouldn’t be bundled out of a window like a pathetic rescued ragdoll. When it came time to watch a former safe haven burn, I’d have my shoes tied tight in preparation. When annihilation inevitably came knocking, I was going to be ready to run.

When I look back, a childhood preoccupation with disaster seems telling. I can’t remember a time it wasn’t there. Maybe before my parents’ dramatic split, before we became homeless, before taking refuge in my grandparents’ box room, my Mum, brother and I sharing a sofa bed. At some point, I learnt that home was a thing that could go up in smoke at a moment’s notice: that it only took one electrical fault, one sloppy cinder, one unattended candle, and everything could be destroyed.

It could have had its origins in my immigrant heritage: my grandad describing the things they’d brought across to England from India, how everything had to be condensed into one trunk each, home having to be recreated from scratch in a world where nothing was familiar. When my aunt died, I found the trunk she’d brought in the garage: still with stickers allocating the cabin for their weeks-long ocean voyage. Its wood had started to rot in the intervening decades, but its structure was still solid. A container for an entire world.

I was much older before I heard the stories about their trip, but maybe it was somewhere encoded deep within my DNA, because my nightly ritual wasn’t just the shoes. It was the rucksack too. The bag I used for school, emptied out onto my bed, my pencil case and reading books abandoned for more important supplies. A grubby threadbare Care Bear. A Famous Five novel. A notebook, a pen. A makeshift first aid kit I’d scavenged from the cupboard under the sink: plasters, safety pins, pocketknife and a long length of tightly-wound cotton bandage. A torch. These are the things I thought I’d need when disaster inevitably struck. There would be no wasting precious seconds scrambling to save important items; I slept with my arm hooked through my rucksack strap, and if and when everything kicked off all I had to do was escape. I was ready, and the never-voiced family motto was that being ready made you safe.

I had other fears, about being snatched from my bed, spirited away to some fae otherworld, and I knew from all the books I’d read that strange creatures couldn’t be trusted; they might promise adventure and magical powers, but they were tricksters with ill intent. If they were to come and whisk me away, I wanted my favourite things to hand. I could distract or entertain myself while trapped, or maybe even use some of the things I’d brought to barter my safe passage back. My meticulously-curated rucksack would save me from both mythical and mundane obliteration. I could cheat storybook villains and I could cheat death itself, as long as I had the right supplies.

To this day, my mum keeps a suitcase in the car with a change of clothes, bottled water, granola bars. Wind-up torch and radio. Tinfoil blankets. Medicines. Ready for any 3am eventuality. If and when calls came — someone in hospital, someone ill or injured — she was ready and behind the wheel in moments. Some of this is practicality, some of it experience. Some of it she learned from her apocalypse-ready religion, the same cult I was raised in, and some days I question how much all of that shaped my childhood (and ongoing) obsessions with safety and readiness.

A few years ago, I related some of this to my then-therapist. She listened then did her wise-owl head-tilt. And do you still do this now?
Course not, I said, then thought again. At the time my bedside table was a vintage suitcase, lying on its side. A kitschy place to rest my morning mug of tea, my book. And inside: a photo album, a collection of battered Iain Banks paperbacks that once belonged to my dad, my wedding dress in a plastic bag. Trinkets from family members dead and alive. Ancient gig tickets and birthday cards. It hadn’t been intentional, or even conscious, but still. Without even realising, I’d assembled all the things I’d want to save should disaster come knocking in the dead of night, keeping them in arm’s reach while I slept.

These days, that suitcase lives on top of the cupboard. Not quite in arm’s reach, but close. While I never want to take my safety for granted, I am grateful for it. For my socked feet in bed and being but not always needing to be ready: a slowly-built but precious trust.

Found in drafts with a 2023 date-stamp, but if I’m remembering right this evolved from a post-therapy journal entry that I then typed up, faffed with a bit but never developed further. As a practice of iteration over perfection, here it is as a half-formed then semi-forgotten thing I might return one day, or not, we’ll see. 

content warnings: contains mentions of childhood fear, fire, homelessness and religion