One of the earliest and most terrifying images I can remember from my childhood is of an old, derelict sea mine. I was young- watching some old television drama with my parents- I don’t remember what, or even the plot- when suddenly I was seeing the menacing outline of a lost sea mine bobbing and tumbling in a stormy grey sea, having apparently emerged at some time from the dark waters below. This image filled me with dread, or maybe that came later as I dwelt on it, but it comes back to me now, and brings with it the same old horror.
It was a menacing, cunningly-submerged, iron ball bristling with trigger-pins like spikes above and below- clearly very old, rust-red and pitted-black on a steely-grey sea. It was this 'submersion' that horrified me, revealed in the gradient of its colour; bright at the top where it peeked above the waves, but darkening toward its hidden underside in the black water, where it would be trailing it’s broken, rusted tether. It wasn’t the evil nature of the device that frightened me- of explosion and sudden death- though this vague connotation may have hovered near to my immature mind- it was of the unknown, and the combination of menaces. I was overwhelmed by the sudden awareness of antiquity, the mystery and alienism of an unknown artefact- frighteningly anachronistic- its maker and purpose long forgotten, and its seemingly dumb and directionless existence. Then of course, there was the sea. I am not afraid of the water, but the idea of things existing below its surface- unseen or obscured, like a submerged tree limbs or jagged rocks unnerves me.
The sea- cold and timeless, indifferent to man but amused to harbour his destructive devices, adding its own old cunning to their potency, alongside smashing waves and suffocating depths.
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Photo credit; Wikipedia, Accessed March 9, 2013. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mine_%28AWM_304925%29.jpg
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