An Irishman's Diary

WHEN NOTHING ELSE will persuade my children to For-God’s-Sake GO TO BED, I’m sometimes tempted to invoke an old-fashioned parenting technique that was still popular when I was growing up and threaten that, if they’re not asleep in the next five minutes, the “bogeyman” will get them.

Of course, being a responsible father, familiar with all the latest thinking on enlightened childcare, I never actually say this. However exasperating it may be waiting for them to settle down naturally, I know that children need a calm, fear-free environment in which to sleep. So the other night, for example, I let them stay up late yet again waiting for tiredness to take its course.

It was the eve of the school’s Halloween party, after all, so they were especially excited. Not only did my 11-year-old daughter have to organise the make-up and accessories that in the morning would turn her into a Goth. She also had to begin work on her nine-year-old brother: applying the false scars, gashes, and weeping sores that, along with a pair of crutches borrowed from a neighbouring kid who injured his knee a while back – were essential to his disguise.

Only when she had reduced him to looking like an escapee from a slasher movie, and when she herself was ready for her transformation into a member of the undead, could they both achieve the serenity necessary for sleep.

But finally, silence descended on the house. And as I peeked in later on the “baby bat” – the technical term for a pre-teen Goth, I’m told – and the multiple accident victim, both now blissfully unconscious, I could congratulate myself yet again on not having employed the bogeyman to frighten the little dears.

Not that it ever did us any harm. Au contraire.In fact, although the bogeyman was a constant presence in my childhood – never defined but always lurking in the neighbourhood – I only once remember him calling to our house. On that occasion, a pair of teenage female relatives who shall remain nameless (but they know who they are) had been left in charge of us younger ones for the night. And when all else failed to to force us to bed, one of them quietly disappeared.

A few minutes later there was a knock at the door and a man wearing an old coat and hat, with the collar up and the brim down to hide his face, inquired if there were any “bold children” in the house. He sounded suspiciously like a teenage girl, however, and I doubt very much if, even at that impressionable age, we fell for it. The fact that the incident is still seared onto my memory 38 years later is just one of those things.

That occasion was an exception in every sense. It was crucial to the bogeyman’s credibility, normally, that he never actually turned up anywhere. He had to remain a vague, amorphous threat, because that way he could assume whatever shape a child’s imagination most feared.

Where I grew up, incidentally, the word was pronounced "Boogie-man". And as someone who was psychologically harmed by the 1970s disco craze, I don't think this was a coincidence. Sometimes I still have flashbacks to the Spanish duo Baccara singing their 1977 Euro-pop smash Yes Sir, I can Boogie. It's horrible. Horrible.

But the bogeyman’s vagueness extends even to the term’s origins. It is usually traced to the old Welsh word bwg, meaning ghost, which is probably related to the Irish puca. More fanciful explanations, however, include one that connects it with the Algerian port of Boujaya (Bougie in French) from which Barbary pirates once scourged northern Europe. In this sense the victims of the famous 1631 slave-raid on Baltimore could have been taken by the “boogie-men”; although it seems a bit too neat.

The vagueness surrounding the term continues today. Its many offshoots include the “bugs” that haunt computer programmers, and the “bogeys” that terrorise golfers (especially when they gang up, becoming double, triple, or quadruple bogeys).

“Bugbears” and “bugaboos” derive from the same quarter too.

But getting back to the role of the bogeyman in child-rearing, one man who was clearly familiar with the concept from his youth was the late John Entwistle, bass-player with The Who. In his song, The Bogeyman, he describes how the monster was once invoked in a wide range of parent-child transactions: "Sit up straight and eat your greens/Stop playing with your food/Don't pick your nose at the table/Go straight to bed, that's very rude/The Bogeyman will get you/Sure as night turns into day/ The Bogeyman will get you/He'll come and drag you away." Of course he was able to see the funny side of it. In fact, his song was considered "far too humorous" for the album

The Who were working on at the time, and only saw the light years later.

So, no more than the rest of us, clearly, exposure to the Bogeyman didn’t do him any harm. No indeed. We all just laughed it off – Ha Ha! – and we’re not in any way damaged. Honestly. Here’s the song’s last verse, by the way: “Now I’m all grown up I realise/how silly kids can be/But I stay up all night with a baseball bat/That Bogeyman ain’t going to get me.”