It had to be every summer, late on, when the fair took over the football ground across the road from the house he grew up in. When the football season had ended, of course, and before the re-seeding of the pitch, battered and mauled in the rain-soaked, windy months of use. From the bedroom window, atop a mid-terrace of seven red bricked houses, he could see across the walls and turnstile to the Ferris wheel and stalls and hear as plain as day the slightly eerie strained music and watch the people traipse into the old football grounds to try their luck – pot-shots, throwing discs, buying candy floss, riding a miniature Dodgem car, spinning wheels of fortune. Chancing their arm. Mothers and fathers and kids; young couples; groups of boys and girls wandering about the place in the gathering dusk sometime in the summer of the late nineteen fifties and sixties.
He doesn’t know how long that stand had lasted. Did it happen there every year before the war? That part of Belfast
The background night is lit-up with street lamps, and the amber strobes of the descending city, and the mechanical chains and pulleys and noise of the fair with its repetitive music and the shouts and cries of kids and people strolling or showing off or trying their hand at winning garish prizes that everyone knew didn’t amount to much but who cared anyway it was all a bit of fun that came around once every year when you were least expecting it. There it was the trucks pulling up and even parking on pavements, and the fair being put up like a child’s toy set or a farm with animals and tractors and pens. The Ferris wheel spinning away above and over everyone, unless he’s only imagining it all and a horse or two or a donkey and cart and plastic mementoes like BLESS THIS HOUSE or TO THE MOTHER I LOVE, like the steering wheel of a ship and the sound of all the different stalls and the people milling about and shouting in an excited way for things, knowing each other.
And he could see them closing up when the night was over and in the morning before anyone came there was a watchman in a trailer wandering on his own through the deserted fair, as if he was lost somehow but was really checking on things going about his business in the surprising brightness of the day and everything looked very matter of fact, mechanical, ordinary, so much more different from the night before that you’d imagined was a bit dangerous but there he was one of the men walking through the fair in broad daylight as if he was just walking in his work-place looking after something with a hammer or a monkey-wrench in his hand and whistling.
The sky was mostly cloudless and the sounds were of the everyday like a bus taking the corner at Alexandra Park Avenue, a ship clearing the docks a couple of miles away, the sound of a transistor radio on someone’s back garden or kitchen porch and all the fair’s gadgets and tents and entertainments were standing there in the old football ground silent and still until other people appeared and started to clean the place for the evening time.
For it was always night they opened but needless to say he could be wrong, all wrong. Maybe the fair only stayed for a week or two maybe it was in August before school started back and there was not the Ferris wheel not really just an imitation one to attract punters but no one actually sat in it and spun around looking over the north of the city to the Lough and the rising hills. But there was a man in the morning light walking through the fair knowing what’s what by the looks of him and the way he looked at things looking maybe for something wrong or checking double checking, seeing about something that may be broken the night before, he was definitely there, spotted from the window at the top of the house overlooking, more or less, the football ground and the fair, in the summer, sometime, ages ago.
Copyright: Gerald Dawe
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