I was never scared of spiders until..........picture the scene...an old abandoned cement works quarry, Greenhithe, Kent, circa 1981...on a warm summers afternoon some friends and i decided to explore the far left corner cliff face...it got cooler as we walked among the trees and bushes until we found the cliff side...200 foot of chalk cliff face, ivy growing half way up. After 15 minutes skirting the base we saw it...a cave! A small dark opening in the white chalk, about 3 foot high and 2 foot wide. Dare we enter? You bet we dared. So on hands and knees we entered the cave. The heat inside was tremendous! We saw at the entrance a few spider webs but thought nothing of it. Why would we? there were droplets of moisture coating them, like tiny glistening eyes bearing witness to our rite of passage. The further we went in the warmer it got...probably due to lack of fresh air...after a while it was pitch black, our voiced muffled yet echoing in the crawlspace. We pulled from our pockets rolls of newspapers to use as a torch. Passing the light back we all lit our paper...and then screamed! the walls we had been brushing with our heads and shoulders were covered in cobwebs! A grim chalky white blanket of silk...and scurrying across almost every inch was a spider!!! The cave was three foot high...the flames licked the ceiling causing spiders to drop down on us...lots of spiders! In our hair and crawling on our faces and over our hands! the four of us screamed blue murder! In our panic the newspaper torches were dropped, plunging us into a stygian darkness that resounded with the screams of four terrified children...the blind panic of us all trying to turn around on all fours without touching the walls, all the time screaming, the screams bouncing back into our ears, the rising panic! Only to find one of our friends had rolled an old oil drum into the entrance...we went through it like a dose of salts, chinned the lad responsible then rolled on the floor screaming and yelling, convinced for days afterwards that something was clawling across our collective necks! 25 years later I asked some of the lads who were there if it really happened...maybe Id embellished the story....they all confirmed what i held to be true as fact. they have built a housing estate over the old cementworks now....I wonder if anyone there knows that at the bottom of one of the gardens, nestled deep in the wooded area in the top left corner of the cliff face, the Cave of the Spiders still holds its minions...and what lives at the very end? So there you have it....why I am not a fan of spiders....
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 15:35:56 +0000
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