That Devil Girl from mars!

Later on that night I was in a state of frenzy. Having actually observed Mars I was now convinced that my nemesis was plotting to come down and kidnap me. My mother’s patience and sympathy towards my plight was now tested to the limit.

"She’s coming to get me"

"No she’s not" I detected real desperation in her voice.

In a fit of pique and virtually exhausted by my fear she tried to rid me of my self- inflicted curse once and for all. Completely out of character for her, she took me outside and locked the front door.

"There" she said as she evicted me, "There is no black lady from Mars".

"There is no black lady from Mars," she repeated forlornly.

Her belated attempt at shock therapy produced the opposite result. I screamed hysterically. If any neighbours had been present, they would have been convinced that a murder or vicious assault had occurred.

However my mother possessed no real malice. I was probably only outside in the dark for no more than ten seconds. It felt like ten hours! She brought me back in to the house and comforted me, all her maternal instinct that had momentarily deserted her, returned.

The bogey of ‘The Black Lady from Mars’ remained a permanent part of my mindset for the next seven years. So too did the taunts from my brothers. Realising that whenever they wanted to amuse their friends with a cheap thrill, they only had to raise the spectre of ‘The Black Lady from Mars’. My fear provided a small amount of amusement for them. My parents remained concerned yet frustrated, hoping that my fear would eventually dissipate.

The end came about quite unexpectedly.

Sever years after ‘The Black Lady from Mars’ incident, Simon and I were both at home during the long summer holiday. It was one of those January days when the storm clouds were ominously present. We were forced to remain indoors and the only alternative was the television set.

Simon noticed that the afternoon matinee on one of the channels was a movie entitled, ‘Devil Girl from Mars’. My mother was present at the time and we all speculated whether this could be the movie that had caused so many traumas for me seven years earlier.

The three of us sat down and watched the movie together. We very quickly realised that it was indeed the same movie that we had seen before. We also very quickly realised that this was the day that I would exorcise the curse of ‘The Black Lady from Mars’ forever.

Not long after the movie commenced I found myself laughing hysterically. The technology of a sci-fi movie made in the 50s looked horribly dated even in the 1970’s. The Devil girl arrived on earth in a saucer, which looked as if it had been put together by a five year old experimenting with paper mache. The most absurd spectacle was the devil girl herself. Her name was Nyah and she was accompanied, not surprisingly for the time, by a robot. Mars had been taken over by women and her mission was to visit Earth in order to find men to help re-populate Mars!

She was as I remembered still dressed in head to toe in black. The effect, I believe would have been to create something a 1950’s version of a dominatrix. However she was as non-threatening as an infant child, especially in the rather tranquil setting of the Scottish highlands. Apparently she had been heading for London, but it was shrouded in fog so she had diverted her mission to Scotland!

That day was a seminal moment for me. By the end of the movie both Simon and my mother knew that the curse of ‘The Black Lady from Mars’ had been removed forever. Simon would no longer be able to taunt me; my mother would no longer have to reassure me. I suppose the fear was eventually going to fade, but it had taken a long time to eradicate it.

But while the fear may have subsided, the memory had remained as powerful and as evocative as on that brilliant spring afternoon seven years earlier. It seemed ironical that on the day the fear was finally expelled, outside we were being lashed with thunderstorms. Perhaps nature was purging my fear for me.