All the Fun of the Fair

Oh the traveling fair. I grew up on a main road in Birmingham and once or twice a year the noisy, misshapen lorries of a traveling fair would grunt up the hill and half the neighborhood kids, including my brother and I would run alongside, praying that it would pitch close by. Our parents, not so eager were probably eying the peeling paint on the trucks, and thinking about us whizzing through the air in rusty metal boxes screwed together by the spotty, sunburned teenagers that rode past, perched on the back of the folded trucks waving at all the girls.

When we got lucky and the fair pitched up in our park, my friends and I would empty our piggy banks, put on our boob-tubes and ra-ra skirts and head off, promising our parents that we wouldn’t let any of the spotty fair boys anywhere near us. In fact, promising not to let any of the boys from up the road, or from the grammar school, or from the youth club near us either. No boys.

The moment that one of our dads dropped us off at the park gates, our ‘boys’ would crawl out from their hiding place in the bushes and we’d all takes gulps from the jam jars full of mixed spirits that we’d pilfered from our parent’s liquor cabinets. An inch of vodka, an inch of gin, an inch of cointreau, an inch of whisky. And with that vile-tasting alcoholic mess working its way through our bodies we’d enter the fair.

It was always exciting. The clashing music and the lights and the jostling crowd. The smell of frying onions and hot bodies, machine grease and candy floss. We’d ride the bumper cars, the helter-skelter, the waltzers and if we were drunk enough, or just feeling dangerous, we’d go on the wall of death, now tamely renamed the ‘Spin Bar’. Afterwards, when the jam jars and piggy banks were empty, we’d wander around on the arm of that week’s boy and hope he’d win us a cuddly toy or a goldfish with a good throw of the hoopla. That week’s boy would be hoping  he’d win us a cuddly toy or a goldfish too so he’d stand a better chance of getting his hand up our tops, or better still, down our knickers.

But that was the eighties, and now I’m grown with kids of my own and the travelling fair that pitched to the playground we visited yesterday didn’t look so glamourous or full of adventure. It was noon and they cranked up the music and the mood in the playground changed as mums and dads started to dance a little, smiling at each other while their kids looked on bemused or embarrassed. I didn’t dance. I wondered how I’d advanced to an age where I might be confused with these other parents, these uncool people gyrating to Rod Stewart in the park.

So I packed up our stuff and took the kids over to the fair. It looked kinda sad in the bright afternoon sunlight but the clashing music and spotty teenagers and tired, peeling paint were just the same. The kids ran round, wide-eyed with excitement at the flashing lights and cranking old machinery. I smelled the grease and the frying onions and hot bodies and candy floss and I wondered if, in another ten years when I pick up one of my kids and their friends up from their night out at the travelling fair, I will believe the story about why Emma is puking at the side of the road. “She ate a hotdog from the burger van, honest mum”

And as I eye the rustling bushes, I wonder if I’ll believe that my daughter, dewy-eyed and clutching a plastic bag with a goldfish in it has really just developed amazing hoopla skills.

The #526 to Ilfracombe

There’s been a heat-wave here for the last five days and somewhere in the middle of last night, a chilly wind blew through the city and I finally got some proper sleep. I woke up with Karma Police stuck in my head and so after I’d made packed lunches and dropped off the children I pulled out Ok Computer from our Radiohead section and took it out in the car with me while I ran some errands.

One day I’m going to make a list of songs that make me want to curl up in a ball. Songs that are so good I can’t move; songs that are so good I want to pull my hair out or lie in a dark room on the floor. Karma Police would be on that list, especially if it had been warmed up by the five tracks before it. It was the middle of track six and I was driving through the city centre when I saw the #526 to Ilfracombe headed towards me on the other side of the road and I felt a sudden urge to weep. According to Google maps, that bus, like me, is about 4,700 miles away from home where it’s spending its retirement shunting tourists around Victoria, the last city before Canada hits the Pacific. It was only me who noticed that the #526 was not at home as I sat facing it at traffic lights blinking back my tears. It was only me who noticed the peeling red paint and I thought about the things that it must have seen while it weathered the British coastline on its regular route. School kids fighting for the back seat, old ladies with fat legs shouting their news to the bus driver, parents with steaming soggy bags of fish and chips on their way home to the family for dinner. That bus would have seen best-friend-fights and lovers-fights and fist-fights. It would have seen giggling children and sandy children and had ice-cream dripped all over its seats. It would have seen kisses hello and kisses goodbye and first kisses with butterfly-churning stomachs. Because that’s what happens on busses back home and as I sat there thinking all that, Thom Yorke sang “For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself” and I loved that song just a little bit more.

The traffic lights changed and the song passed and the moment passed and I pulled myself together without curling into a ball or lying on the floor in a dark room. But now I can’t decide whether the #526 is better off trundling through the streets of Victoria, camera toting tourists aboard, or whether it would have been better off crushed into a small square and packed off for recycling, red flaky paint chips blowing in the gusty Devonshire wind.

Shoplifters of the World

It was the late 70’s and we had Canadians staying with us. Arthur and Ella were, at least to my 8-year-old eyes, ancient. They had frizzy white hair, crazy accents and liked to dress in full Cape Breton McDonald tartan outfits complete with kilts and yellow pompomed berets. Yes, both of them. At 8, I thought this was pretty cool, but it’s only now that I can look back and imagine the horror my mother must have felt when they accompanied her to the local Birmingham supermarket for our weekly grocery shopping trip.

Arthur and Ella were fascinated by the fact that my mum brought shopping bags from home with her so that she didn’t have to pay for new ones. They were even more fascinated when she informed them that the check-out ladies didn’t pack your groceries for you here, but that you had to pack them yourselves- an idea as completely foreign to North American’s at the time as packing them was foreign to Brits.

So it was with full tartan attire and minds stuffed with quaint notions of packing your own groceries in your own bags that Arthur and Ella crossed the threshold of Sainsbury’s with my mum, my brother and me. We went about our normal shop; methodically up and down each aisle picking items only from the shopping list. We started in fruits & vegetables, continued through tins, jams, tissues, cleaning powders, baking, breads the deli and ended in the extensive alcohol section, where my mother noticed that there had been no sign whatsoever of the Canadians the whole time we’d been there. We combed back through the store with quizzical expressions on our faces as we scanned for the sight of bright red and yellow tartan but our search turned up nothing. It was then that we were approached by a worried looking man in a suit- the store manager who seemed to know my mum's name. We were led to a security office behind the check-out counters where a disgraced Arthur and Ella sat in their tartan kilts and pompomed berets. Not fully understanding what my mother had meant by ‘putting the groceries in your bag’, they’d been apprehended by security putting a bottle of whisky into Ella’s handbag.

Now this is one of my weirdest early memories and I’m sure my mother never thought she’d be fast-talking Arthur and Ella out of a shoplifting charge. But most of all I like to think about Sainsbury’s manager that day, and how he would have received a call saying that there were some old people in tartan skirts who’d just pocketed a bottle of booze in aisle 11. And that they were wearing matching pompom hats.

The Dog and the Y-fronts

It was March sometime in the early nineties at the end of a long cold winter and we had cabin fever. Anyone who has gone through an Ontario winter knows that there comes a time when all the slipping around on the frozen grey slush, and the biting morning cold that freezes your hair and the endless layering of woollens addles your brain a bit, giving a green light to things that wouldn’t seem such good ideas at any other time. Well, that’s what I’m blaming it on.

There were four of us there, toasty warm in the living room of our friends house; one of those houses where everything happened, and we were bored. We’d watched three movies, eaten a lot of popcorn and by three in the afternoon we were drawing straws for who’d brave the cold and hike out to the video shop. This process wasn’t easy because we’d been drinking since before noon. As the only girl there, and as a soft foreigner, I claimed immunity- my poor British bones would surely freeze out there in the outdoors. I was adding the final touches to my argument when, reaching down between the cushions of the soft sofa, I pulled out a large pair of Y-fronts. After the initial laughter and disgust, we laid them out on the floor while we explored possibilities about where on earth they’d come from- a near impossible task considering this was, as I said, one of those houses where everything happened.

I don’t know where the idea came from, but suddenly the alcohol and boredom peaked and before any of us knew what we were doing, ‘the house where everything happened’s dog, a huge lolling Lab/Rottweiler cross was wearing the Y-fronts, a neat hole cut for her tail. We were still wiping the tears of laughter from our faces when the doorbell rang, and as my friend, D signed for a parcel, the dog, knowing it was being laughed at, made a run for it.

As it turns out, Canadians are far faster at pulling on boots and mittens than drunken English girls are and I’d only just got myself kitted up for the chase by the time one of my friends returned, dog in one hand, Y-fronts in the other. He’d found her in the local park, dressed in her Y-fronts trying to get-it-on with a guide dog. It wasn’t one of our prouder moments.

The Big Red Bus

Although the Big Red Bus that showed up for my son, A’s preschool outing yesterday was neither big nor red, it caused a frenzy of excitement among the preschoolers who clambered aboard wide-eyed and, in the case of my baby S who was strapped to my front in a sling, panting like a puppy. She’s earned the nickname Rocket-Dog from me lately because she chases balls, licks up floor-crumbs, chews everything and pants when excited.

The kids didn’t care about the fact that the bus wasn’t a British double-decker, but the parents were disappointed. The kids also didn’t care for the pre-recorded narration that was telling them about opium dens in China Town, whore houses down by the water and gallows in Market Square, instead they pressed their little noses against the windows, waved to strangers, squabbled with each other, and in A’s case, not quite tall enough to see out of the window properly he sung Old MacDonald over and over for the entire 45minutes. Five minutes into the ride there was an unpleasant eruption from S’s bum- which I remind you was strapped to my chest- so I sat in the stench listening to ‘ee-eye, ee-eye oh’ and thought about double-decker buses to escape.

When I was a teenager, we caught the bus to school every day. It was a double-decker, but not red like in London- blue and cream and in order to have any street cred at all, you had to sit in the dirty smoke-filled upstairs. Even upstairs, segregation was in full swing- the further back you sat, the cooler you were and if you actually got the back seat, you were pretty much in charge. I wasn’t in charge.

The buses drove fast on the narrow Birmingham roads and you learned how to hold on to avoid death round corners, how to lean in a certain way when the bus came to an abrupt halt and how to manage your heavy school-bag without knocking fellow passenger senseless.
I loved those buses.

A few years later when we started going out at night we’d sip our cans of larger on the way to Town, smoking cigarettes- one of the safe places where our parents would never catch us. At 2am, soggy half-eaten-bag of chips clutched drunkenly in one hand, the last bus home would be filled with similarly drunken club-goers and things were never dull- chip wars, people snogging, fist-fights, undercover police, people getting stoned…..I even got pepper-sprayed once, caught in the middle of two sloppily drunken lads fighting over some bog-boobed-girl. It’s been years now. Long ago we graduated from the bus to taxis, then stopped clubbing, traded that in for nappy-changes and night-feeds and the vomit-comet seems a lifetime ago.

Sitting there yesterday on the Big Red Bus (that wasn’t big or red), I smiled, thinking of a particular friend who I caught a lot of buses with when I was thirteen. It’s odd, but I think some of my best memories of her were up there on the top deck. Up there it was just the two of us and we didn’t have to be anything but ourselves. It didn't matter if we were popular or skinny or if we kissed boys yet; it didn't matter if we wore the right clothes or got good marks or got asked to the 'it' parties. We were just two best friends riding to school. Slowly, slowly over the months we moved towards the Holy Grail of the back seat. Slowly, slowly we earned the respect of the upstairs crowd and then suddenly we were there. Back seat all ours: we’d made it.

As it turned out, the back seat wasn’t that interesting. Like a lot of things you think you want when you’re that age, the mystery was broken the second we got there and realized that the shitty vinyl upholstery was slashed and the back window rattled and it was the bumpiest place in the whole bus. But just for a while it was ours, and before we moved on to the greener pastures of trying-to-get-the-seat-next-to-the-cute-boy-of-the-week, we appreciated the moment. And then we discarded it, like a lot of things you think you want when you’re that age.

Net curtains

The people over the road from us have net curtains. I've been staring at them for days now, wondering why I am so attracted to something that I dislike so much and the only conclusion that I can come to is that I am truly British.

My nationality has been in debate for a while between my husband and I, both of us shifting as new discrepancies surface. I was born on my mums and dad's bed in our house on Coronation Road- not to be mistaken for the Coronation Street. Ours was in Birmingham, halfway between London and Manchester and famous for an accent that everyone ridicules, a grotty train station, Cadbury's Chocolate and HP Sauce. It was a typical ex-council house street, with grey pebble-dashed houses with tiny uniform gardens and tight little porches with squeaking doors. But we weren't like the neighbours. We stood out you see, because my parents were 'the foreigners'. Fresh off the boat from Toronto, no really, my dad was terrified of flying so they caught the boat, their accents and weird ways of doing things confused and amused the street in the same breath.

Most of the neighbours were kind. We got hand-me-downs from Jean Smith when her kids outgrew their clothes and if mum needed to go out she would take us in. 'Uncle' George in the house opposite took us all, mum and dad included, under his wing and told stories about being in both wars; submarines and fighter planes. So my parents settled in, lived normal lives, but they didn't do things the same way as everyone else. They didn't eat the same foods, didn't cook the same way, didn't read the same papers, didn't watch the same TV and didn't go to the pub or get fish & chips on a Friday night or watch the football on a Saturday. And Mrs. Woodcroft next door was watching.

Here's where the net curtains come in. My mum started teaching antenatal classes from our home in the evenings. A group of couples would come around during early pregnancy- at that point where it would take a keen eye to notice the 'bumps'. Then every other week they would come back, the same couples, their bumps getting bigger, heavy breathing, panting even, and laughter in the lounge as someone got stuck down on her floor mat or as the occasional loud fart slipped out. And Mrs. Woodcroft was watching, which we knew because her net curtains were twitching. Then Jean Smith came up to tell my parents that the truth was out....via Mrs. Woodcroft, and the whole street knew. We were holding wife-swapping parties. And judging from the multiple pregnancies, no one was using contraception. That pretty much summed it up. If something was going on in your house, everyone knew. If something was going on in your marriage, everyone knew. If you said something odd, or cooked unusual food, or made your own bread or had wife-swapping parties....everyone knew.

Years later, when I was living in Liverpool on a street that looked exactly like Coronation Street- the TV one, I was the only one without net curtains, yet I was probably the one with the most to hide. I wasn't well- spent my days in bed or sitting in the yard chain smoking cigarettes or painting in the back room upstairs. One day, the window washer, wooden ladder flush against the glass stuck his head through my open window as I was standing in front of a canvas, paintbrush in my hand to tell me about the bloke up the road who painted amazing oils. And there was a lady down the street- wasn't sure what number- who did these intricate pencil crayon landscapes- I should check them out.
I got my gossip from the kids who I paid to weed my front garden. They told me about Mrs Biggs who always ate lunch on her own at the cafe and Mr Jenks three doors up who beat his dog after he'd had to many beers, and his wife pretended not to notice because she had her own problems. She wore a wig because all of her hair was gone.

And then I got really sick and decided to end it all. The ambulance came and they wrapped my wrists in tight bandages and walked me barefoot into the street and I remember that there were neighbours coming outside to watch so I closed my eyes. Later one of the kids told me that the woman opposite had taken photos through a crack in her net curtains just in case it made the newspapers, which it didn't because I didn't do it properly. They watched, they talked, they took photos on extreme occasions, but- and this is the thing- they were there. When my kitten got lost everyone helped push notes through doors and I got cheers when he turned up safe and well. When I got a boyfriend, the street was happy because now I'd got someone to look after me. And on New Years Eve 2000, we all tumbled out into the road and pulled fire-crackers and ate cake and poured each other shots and it didn't matter who did what or ate what or who smoked, or who had little strips of scars down her arm because we were all just there, in that moment and I was a part of something. I bought net curtains the next week, a sign that I no longer had anything to hide.

It's a decade later and the people across the street have net curtains which you don't see much around here -with their lacy edges and sticky dust. I think I miss them. I can't stop staring because I'm wondering if there is someone behind them watching the street as it spills it's secrets.

The Animals came in Two by Two

I’ve had this bizarre song stuck in my head for the last two days that goes something like, “The animals came in two-by-two hurrah, hurrah, the animals came in two-by-two hurrah hurrah, the animals came in two-by-two the elephant and the kangaroo” blah-dee-dah-dee-blah. It got me thinking about a whole bunch of stuff including the Christmas when we found out the truth about Santa, or as we called him, Father Christmas.

It started simply with a kitten 'Kola' who came down from friends of ours on the train with my mum. She growled and hissed all the way, and we should have sent her straight back because it was definitely a sign. She wasn't an awful cat, but she knew what she wanted, she knew what she didn't and the years of child-inflicted-abuse at the hands of my brother and I pushed her towards her ratty latter years when we all had to refer to her as 'The Duchess' and she'd only eat warmed chicken breast. But I mean, what cat wants to be stuffed into baby clothes- which is what I did to her and seeing as my brother was into chemistry, God only knows what she suffered at his hands.

Next came the chickens. The people who'd lived in our house before us had kept chickens and there was this empty coup at the back of our long garden, just begging to be filled. So soon, Slow-Coach, Quick Quick, Tabitha, Oscar, Olivia and Cecelia joined us. My brother and I would rush outside every morning to check for fresh eggs though this novelty wore off, of course, when it came to mucking out the stinking coup or rubbing ointment onto the rear of the poor lassie at the bottom of the pecking order. But we loved them nonetheless, which should be taken into account when it comes to their rather sinister ending.

I think the next to arrive was the gerbils, Hustle, Bustle and Nustle, though it could have been the rats Fudge and Toffee. These two crews didn't mix as I found out once, when I foolishly thought that they might all be friends. Nustle was never the same and although no one else who was present agrees, that day convinced me that rats could smile. Finally came my brothers snake, Natty. It wasn't very big, not much more then a fancy shoelace but it was a snake- which was pretty exotic for grey-old-eighties-Birmingham and it had a special tank with a warming light and a water bowl and some rocks to sunbathe on.

It's only now, that I am a mum and have bills to pay that I fully appreciate the potentially astronomical cost of Christmas. We grew up on a tight budget and my brother and I were used to getting just one gift each from our parents plus stockings from Father Christmas but as we all know, it's the stockings that get you, and I can picture my poor mum shifting pennies around to try to make sure we had all those little stockinged treats, a book, a chocolate bar, some stripey socks.....And now that I am a mum, now that I know that Father Christmas isn't real and that it's the stockings that get you, I have some sympathy thinking back to the pained look on my mum's face a week before Christmas when I came home from sewing class with stockings for Kola, Hustle, Bustle, Nustle, Fudge, Toffee and Natty the snake. I'd stitched them all with love- to the great amusement of our Home Economics teacher who probably had an idea what my poor mum was in for.

Let's just pause a minute here and consider what the UK was like in the eighties. Shops closed at 5pm, nothing was open on a Sunday and you ate what was in season only. Supermarket vegetable aisles were much more like a greengrocers selling what was delivered day to day without guaranteeing anything more than the absolute staples. So on Christmas Eve what a treat it was when mum came home with a Webb lettuce that we'd not seen before- a Webb lettuce so delicious that we spent the whole mealtime discussing the wonderful-deliciousness of it. I'm avoiding the obvious here- how, with such stimulating dinner-time conversation could my parents possibly have thrown in the towel on their marriage just a few short years later- but that might get me too far off topic and I'm sure you want me to get the the damn point. So after dinner I proudly pulled out the secret project that I'd been working on quietly all day while mum was out slogging her way around the pet shops: a stocking for the chickens. After all, it wasn't fair to leave them out and Father Christmas would be bringing something for them. Of course.

After all these years I can still picture the look on mum's face- the look of a struggle. She was perfectly hogtied. She probably wanted to belt me around the head and shout that Father Christmas wasn't bringing the chickens anything because he wasn't real, and even if he was, he wasn't going to bring presents for the chickens because they were farmyard food not bloody children. But she didn't, she kept her quiet panic to herself and after our ritual stocking hanging we went off quietly to bed.

Christmas morning dawned and bright and early my brother and I leaped from our beds, raced down the stairs ripping open our stocking gifts. Twenty minutes later, when the mess of paper was settling down and my sleepy parents has surfaced we inspected the pet's stockings. We found fish flakes for Natty, cat treats for Kola, millet for the gerbils, a chew toy for the rats and Webb lettuce for the chickens. Hang on...webb lettuce? My brother spearheaded the hunt and we searched through the fridge for the remains of the salad from the night before. There was none. And it was as simple as that- we'd found out the truth about Father Christmas. He was a dirty thief.

It could have been worse, as the chickens found out that summer when we ate them.