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This week, Frank makes a confession…

In one of her recent Dispatches From The Former New World, Rita Byrne Tull confessed to having had a teenage crush on Harold Wilson. Readers – and no doubt Rita herself – will have chuckled ruefully at such youthful folly, but for me there was the shock of recognition. For I, too, had a teenage crush on Harold Wilson. In my case, please understand it was not some heady brew of politicohomoerotic infatuation. It had more to do with my arachnophilia.

A lonely child, sometimes bedridden when I occasionally and unaccountably lost the use of my lower limbs, I developed an intense relationship with a spider which used to patrol my bedroom. I suppose I adopted it as a pet where another child may have lavished their attention on a cat or a dog. I was also a precocious reader, and I would often pick up and pore over the books my parents brought home. One such was The Pencourt File (1978) by Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, which told of the two journalists’ investigations into the events surrounding Harold Wilson’s sudden and unexpected resignation in 1976. One evening, shortly after his announcement, Wilson invited Penrose and Courtiour to his house on Lord North Street, served them stiff drinks, hinted at mysterious forces at work in the land, and charged them with uncovering the truth. One passage in particular struck me, when Wilson reportedly said:

“I see myself as a big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet, I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.”

I immediately identified my own fat spider with the former Prime Minister. Lying abed, I began to engage in long conversations with it. Though it never told me to go and kick a blind man on Charing Cross Road, or anywhere else, and though I did most, or all, of the talking, the spider became my closest confidante. I called it “Harold”, or more respectfully “Mr Wilson”, and I cut out of the newspaper a little photograph and, by adding a loop of thread, fashioned a little Harold Wilson mask for it to wear. I even began work on making a tiny pipe for it to smoke.

Used as a verb, the word “crush” has a more literal, physical meaning, of course. It so happened that one day, when I had regained the use of my lower limbs, I rushed up to my bedroom to impart some important, now forgotten, news to my beloved spider. It was, however, not in the corner, but skittering across the floor, and I did not see it, and in my hurry, I trod upon it, and crushed it underfoot. Decades have passed, but still I feel the pangs of a lost love. RIP, Harold Wilson, the spider which brightened my teenage years. Well, a couple of weeks of them.