Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher

I loved sucking my thumb as a toddler, and had a fabulous yellow wool comfort blanket with satin trim which I would push under my nose while I sucked. To this day I still have an indentation permanently embossed into my skin where the thumb rested on my incisor. I suppose my parents realised this was going too far when I started waving goodbye to my friends with four fingers while the thumb remained resolutely in my mouth. It was clearly time to wean me off the thumb.

My mum first decided to get rid of my blanket, and took the short-sharp-shock approach: I was simply told I was too old for it now and it had been thrown away. I was utterly devastated and declared myself unable to sleep at night without it. Since no blanket was returned to me I was forced to take matters into my own hands, and I waited until my mum's back was turned and crept into the kitchen drawer to steal some scissors, retiring to my bedroom and cut a blankie-sized piece of terry towelling out of the undersheet on my bed.

I'm not sure how I thought my crime would go undetected. I suppose my infant mind imagined that the beds made themselves and that my mother never had call to go near them. Anyway, the destruction was quickly discovered and I was severely punished. As this was the 1970s, when one didn't go throwing things out simply because they'd been slashed by an infant with scissors, my mum sewed my new blankie back into the undersheet and there it remained until way into my late teens, an uncomfortable ridge under my heel when the 16-year-old me was trying to sleep.

Once I had finally grown used to the absence of the blanket, my mum exposed me to the horror that is Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher, the terrible tale from Shockheaded Peter in which a young boy is told not to suck his thumb while his mother goes to the shops. I recall identifying with the boy in the story very well, and even feeling slightly cheered to see him finally submitting to his addiction and sucking his thumb, so it struck me with an extraordinary level of horror when a skinny old man with a giant pair of scissors broke into the house and snipped off both thumbs as a punishment (for some reason, my brain believes this story was told on Rainbow, but that seems unlikely).

I went to bed that night utterly horrified, convinced against all reason that a man would break into my room and cut my thumbs off with scissors. My dad came back from work late that evening and went to kiss me goodnight, surprised to find me still awake, and I pleaded with him to leave the lights on in case the scissor man came in and tried to amputate my thumbs.

I remeber quite clearly the confused look on his face, and my mum's shrug as she stood at the bedroom door trying not to look sheepish. I don't think I heard any more Shockheaded Peter stories after that.

[Time: 1980]