The Show Must Go On

by Bernard Ross

  And with that he gently closed the door, meeting over. I stood there with my mouth open. In modern parlance, I was gobsmacked. Then I heard a footstep behind me and I turned to find Jock standing, fully dressed and wrapped in a zigzag patterned blanket, looking like a Red Indian from a Saturday afternoon matinee movie.

  “Arvgo’aweebi’aspacei’matrookifyadoonfancygeeinbackwi’yanastyrats, laddie” he said, looking at me in an enquiring way.

  It took a few seconds for this pronouncement to translate itself in my mind but as soon as comprehension hit my brain, I could have kissed him! He was offering a bed space in his truck, away from the rats! At that moment if someone had told me that he had a reputation as a sodomising mass murderer I’d have still seen his offer as saintly.

  Ten minutes later I was ensconced in a small compartment in Jock’s truck and slowly nodding off.....free from rats and the smell of mouldering peanuts.

  The winter was hard; it was not particularly cold, but living in the back of the truck with no heating was not a holiday. Washing was done either in cold water or in the gents of a pub or a café. The work was similarly back breaking, whether you were filling sacks or delivering sacks. In the former you were bent over shoveling for hours on end and in the latter you were legging it up and down driveways and garden paths with the equivalent of your Mum on your back.

  There was only one change in pace and that was when the coal mountain needed topping up. To do this, we went to the railway yard, where Ernie would have bought all or part of the contents of a sixteen-ton railway wagon full of coal. The side door would be opened and we would either shovel the stuff straight into the back of the truck to then be shoveled out at the yard, or we would shovel it into, and weigh up, individual sacks, stacking them in the lorry as we filled them up.

  One particular morning the three of us arrived at the railway siding armed with a large stack of empty sacks, shovels and the coal scale. I climbed into the back of the truck and went to grab a shovel from on top of the scales. At the same time the railwayman unlatched the door of the wagon, ready to lower it onto the bed of the truck to act as a loading ramp, unfortunately he didn’t bring it down under control, but lost his grip. The wagon door, which was made of inch thick oak and steel banding, swung down in a vicious arc, slamming into the sack-bed of the coal scales with a mighty “whump!”. It would have been more of a “clang!” except that the door was impeded in its fall buy something soft and yielding. This soft and yielding item was my right arm, and the door had just smashed it very, very hard..

  “You fuckin’ idiot!” snarled the railway-man, as I yelped in pain. It was the last thing I heard before I blacked out. The last thing I saw was my arm....it was bent at a forty five degree angle just below the elbow....and again at another thirty degree angle just above the wrist. The door had broken my right arm in two places. I passed out before I could think about this anymore.

  When I came to I was stretched out on the grass under an old greatcoat, my arm was splinted with two bits of planking and fixed in a sling to immobilize it against my chest. I could see Ernie and Jock loading and weighing bags of coal about twenty feet away.

  Jock looked across and saw that I was awake. He said something to Ernie, who stopped shoveling and downed tools; he walked over to tower above me.

  “That’ll teach you” he said, then he squatted down to be a bit closer. He reached out and rested a hand on my forehead.

  “Don’t worry,” he said quietly, seeing me wince, “Jock was a medic in the War, he’s got you sorted just ‘til we finish this job then we’ll drop you at the hospital on the way back to the yard.”

  What? I had to wait until the bloody job was finished before I could get to hospital....I was just about to yell at Ernie when he reached out and took my left hand. As he rose to stand he hauled me to my feet and he jovially said,

  “Come on lad, you’ve still got one useful arm, and the quicker we get the job done the faster you’ll get to hospital.”

  So, I helped to move bags and hold them open to be filled for the next couple of hours. I hate to say it but it certainly took my mind off the pain and made the time seem to pass faster. Maybe the National Health Service should consider “hard labour” as a treatment for injuries in the future!

  Ernie dropped me outside the hospital on the way back to yard. He didn’t park or stay to see how I was; he couldn’t, he’d never have got the truck going again. Jock gave me a couple of bob to get the bus back to the yard when they let me out.

  In Casualty, they plastered my arm and put it in a proper sling and, within a couple of hours, I was on a bus back to Heathrow. I was working the coal the next day....no sick leave, not even “light duties”, just get-on-with-it. I just worked as best I could one handed and after a couple of weeks started using my right hand tentatively. I finally got the plaster off just before the Easter Bank Holiday weekend when I was able to return to the funfair. At least Ernie didn’t dock my pay!

  Chapter 12

  You Can’t See The Wood For The Trees

  Ernie had a mate, a crony you’d probably call him, whose name was George. We didn’t call him George, he was always known as ‘Woody’. This nickname was related to his occupation; where Ernie’s business was to provide coal, Woody provided wood. He sometimes sold this as kindling to our customers, and sometimes to larger houses and pubs for their wood fires. Woody wasn’t a member of the travelling fairground fraternity, but lived not far from the yard. He and Ernie had met in the local pub and had immediately sensed that they were kindred spirits. Woody didn’t have a place of his own to store large quantities of the timber he sold, so he ‘rented’ a bit of space from Ernie in his yard and often followed us through the streets on our round. There were mutually beneficial reasons for this; firstly, if Ernie’s old truck stalled or stopped we could use Woody’s van to tow it to a bump start and secondly, if Woody followed us we offered between us a one-stop service for the domestic fireplace. This was before the days of internet shopping or even ordering by phone and it was also a time when most households were run by a housewife who was at home for most of most working days. Our business was generated in two ways; we might run up the garden path to the front door and knock or ring. When the lady of the house answered, we would offer to deliver coal or wood for the fireplace. If we were asked to provide, Ernie would manage the sale whilst I delivered the requisite number of sacks and Jock kept the truck running. Usually making a sale would alert the immediate neighbours to our presence as 40lbs of coal crashed into a bunker or even more noisily down a shute into a coal cellar. This eased the door-knocking aspect of the whole enterprise. Alternatively the noise of the knackered old truck and the belching clouds of black smoke were also harbingers of our arrival.

  Woody followed us along hawking his kindling, or occasionally leapfrogging to a pub, hotel or bigger house that was more likely to want wood.

  Woody had a small son who was about four, and a sweeter and more innocent looking urchin you would be hard pressed to find. As Woody worked, the lad would gambol back and forth playing cowboys and Indians, ambushing his dad and hiding behind garden gates. He was self entertaining and with his good looks and good humour he was appreciated by everyone.

  Whereas our old coal truck had an open flatbed at the back, Woody used a smaller box-body van that he would fill in the morning with two piles of wood; one of smaller, chopped kindling and one of larger logs, seasoned and ready for the hearth. Unlike us who carried a couple of hundred pre-weighed and filled sacks of coal, Woody only possessed one large, heavy-duty calico sack, this he would throw into the back of the van before climbing up onto the tailgate and disappearing into the cavernous interior. Here would labouriously load his sack before dragging it back to the tailgate, jumping down to the ground and hefting it onto his padded shoulders. He would then carry the sack to the woodshed or store room before emptying it out and stacking the timber ne
atly in cords for the customer.

  Woody had a very effective but secret method to boost his income. This combined his own dubious morals, his son’s sense of fun and his customer’s ignorance.

  Woody would agree the number if sacks the customer wanted, if the order was large; more than five or six sacks, he would start filling, carrying and emptying bags as expected, often under the watchful glance of the housewife through the net curtains, or the landlord as he went about his cellar work. Woody’s journeys would be accompanied back and forth by his little lad. Alternatively the boy would simply appear and disappear seemingly at random, but never out of sight for more than a few minutes. The lad would always climb up into the van when Woody filled a sack, as he was keeping watch for spiders that were hiding in the pie of logs. For the first couple of bags all would go according to the customer’s expectations. Then, when the time came to fill the sack for the third time, Woody would climb into the truck with the empty sack and the routine, hidden from the customer’s view in the back of the truck, would change. He would roll a cigarette whilst his son threw a couple of logs around the back to make it sound as if the sack were being loaded once again. Then the lad would climb into the sack and Woody would drag it to the tailgate, hop to the ground and hoist it onto his shoulder. To the watching customer, there was no apparent difference between the sack now and the sack a few minutes ago when it was filled with bona fide firewood. On reaching the woodshed Woody would lower the sack to the ground and the lad would hop out and start playing again, stealing quietly back to a point where he could appear in plain sight without having apparently come from the wood store. Woody, meantime, would throw a few logs around for several minutes before appearing again with an empty sack and repeating the proper process. By pulling this stunt only once or twice on each of the bigger orders Woody was able to increase his ‘sold’ stock by between ten and fifteen percent. Customers often surreptitiously counted journeys, but none ever caught on that some of the bags contained firewood but some contained nothing more combustible than a grubby faced urchin with an angelic smile and a great sense of fun.

  Chapter 13

  Return to Narnia

  Ernie was letting the yard go back to its owner and going back on the road, and he was aiming to start off at a fair up in Lancashire over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend. I had borrowed his copy of “The World’s Fair” and so I knew where I’d find Hammerton and Mr Charles, it certainly wasn’t anywhere near Lancashire, but down in the West Country. Consequently, at dawn as Ernie and Jock rolled the truck for the last time, I waved them goodbye through the familiar cloud of filthy black smoke.

  Shouldering my duffle bag containing my still meager worldly possessions, I walked to the A30 and, having done so, raised my thumb to hitch a lift to Devon.

  Hitching lifts is a fickle way of travelling; sometimes you get picked up almost immediately by someone going all the way or even past your destination, and sometimes you seem to stand hopefully but stationary for hours before getting a lift only a couple of miles in the direction you want to go. On my first return to the fair my hitching fell into the second category.

  It was a clear, warm spring day with a mild breeze. Standing by the side of the A30 wasn’t unpleasant as the traffic trundled past. There were middle class parents taking their children for a day out, bus parties of factory workers and office types heading off for works outings, truck drivers setting off to deliver their loads to local shops or distant towns. I stood close to the road’s edge, duffel bag at my feet with my thumb out trying to make eye-contact with the drivers as they passed. Private car drivers tended to have their seats full with families and works outings would only stop for tea breaks and wee breaks. So I concentrated on the truck drivers who would often pick up a hitcher just to have some company to relieve the boredom of a long drive.

  No one seemed to be feeling charitable that day, and it was four hours before I finally had a bit of success.

  Ironically, the first lift I got was not from a trucker but a ‘commercial traveler’, the term of that era for a sales rep. He took me as far as Andover which we reached at about four in the afternoon. He dropped me at a transport café before disappearing into town. I was short of cash, as usual and since it looked as if I’d not be getting to Devon tonight I scrounged a can of baked beans and a loaf of bread from the cook in the transport café for sixpence, then I went back the roadside and tried my luck again. By seven thirty the traffic was very light and the sky was getting dark. Even in those days hitch hikers rarely struck lucky in the dark so I wandered off the roadside in into the surrounding fields. I found a nice sheltered spot in a dry ditch under a thick, laid hedge about 75 yards from the roadside. I cut off the top crust of the loaf with my jack-knife and scooped out the soft white crumb from the middle leaving a bread trough. I opened the tin of beans, which I poured into the trough. Using the top crust as a spoon and the big squidgy lump of fluffy crumb as soldiers, I proceeded to eat all the beans and the rich tomato sauce. Finally I munched through the remaining crust of the trough that was now deliciously soaked in cold baked bean sauce. It was a totally mess-free meal that left me very full for a few pennies. Hammerton and Mr Charles were quite particular about rubbish and litter and so, out of force of habit and personal integrity, I dug a small hole and buried the baked bean tin before pulling my coat over me and curling into a ball under the hedge to try to sleep.

  I awoke to the deafening sound of small birds singing their hearts out in the pre-dawn twilight. The dawn chorus may sound fantastic from a nice warm bed or even the cold back of an old Luton van but when the birds are a matter of a few feet from your head you would be amazed at the sheer volume a tiny little robin or sparrow can make! I was cold and stiff from the hard ground and so I quickly rose and hefted my duffel bag over my shoulder. I’d had no luck in this spot yesterday and I needed to move to warm up. It was also too early for much traffic so I started walking westwards.

  As I walked I listened for vehicles approaching from behind and every time one approached I would turn and raise my thumb in hope and expectation. Amazingly I had only gone about a mile and a half when a truck slowed and stopped and the driver asked where I was headed.

  “Great Torrington, it’s in Devon ” I replied.

  “Yer in luck mate, I’m going to Barnstaple, ‘sonly eight or nine miles from Torrington, ‘op in!”

  So in I hopped and soon we were grinding away the miles to my return to the life of a gaff lad in the show.

  Though there were no spy-in-the-cab tachographs back then, there were no motorways either, and so we made steady but slow progress averaging about 30 miles an hour all the way to Barnstaple. We made one stop in a lay-by ‘greasy spoon’ for the driver to have a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich and another, even more brief one to let out the cup of tea against the offside front wheel. By two in the afternoon I was bidding my travelling mate a quick farewell and hitting the road to Great Torrington. Needless to say there was no traffic at all on the road that was going to make my life easier and so it took me until half past six to reach the fairground where, thankfully I found that Don, Charlie, Mr Rose and Mr Charles had already done most of the setting up of the rides.

  Seated around the yog that evening we brought each other up to date with the news and anecdotes of our winter sojourn, before I returned to the Luton van bedroom that I had used last season. As we using the Ark (it being the Easter Bank Holiday in the West Country and big crowds being anticipated) the van was almost empty, so I had masses of space to spread out and, more to the point, I could get into and out of bed easily. I got a much better night’s sleep than I had the night before.

  It took no time at all to get back into the swing of taking money on the Ark and the Waltzer, I was now seventeen and the hard work through the winter months and my increasing maturity had bulked up muscles and developed a stamina that made life less demanding than it had been in my first season.


  Chapter 14

  Changing Gear

  On the last night at Torrington we pulled down the Ark and packed everything ready to move on to Taunton the following day. I noticed Hammerton and Mr Charles in conversation and casting regular glances at me so I was a bit worried when, as we finally tied down the last rope, Hammerton came over, holding something in his hands, hidden behind his back.

  “Right, young Bernard, you’re seventeen now and this is a “travelling” show so you know what that means don’t you?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about but the hidden something behind his back made me think that this was not going to be good news.

  “No, Mr Rose, I haven’t a clue what you mean” I confessed

  With a flourish he produced a roll of string and two pieces of cardboard, each about a foot square with a rough capital “L” painted on them in red.

  “It’s time you learnt to drive, lad. ‘Travelling’ means trucks and we need everyone who can to drive one. So tomorrow you are driving to Taunton with this on and then, if it looks as if you could pass a test, we’ll get you one arranged as fast as possible. Don’t worry about paying for the test fee, I’ll pay it stop it out of your wages over a couple of weeks to keep it all square.” He handed me the homemade L plate and gestured to the small 30 hundredweight van that was standing nearby. I noticed that it had been uncoupled from the living trailer that it normally pulled and that the trailer was being hitched to the Luton.

  Hammerton was standing in front of me grinning like a Cheshire cat and Don and Charlie were about ten feet away, watching the proceedings. At this point the two of them burst out laughing,

  “Bernie, Mate! Your face is an absolute fucking picture!” blurted Don

  “You look as if you are going to crap yourself!”