The Show Must Go On

by Bernard Ross

  I had to keep the windows shut to keep out the rain, and with the dark skies, the tiring effort, rhythmic slapping of the wipers and the effects of the beer, I began to find my eyelids drooping. Two or three times I jerked awake just as I was dropping into a sleep at the wheel. The traffic was very light and the top speed of the old A10 meant that any accident I had was less likely to be fatal, but that in itself was cold comfort. Knowing I only now had a couple of miles to go I wound down the passenger window a couple of inches (it was on the lee side of the vehicle in the rain shadow and so less rain came in). I pushed on. Eventually I saw the corral of showmen’s vehicles up ahead and drove between Mal’s living wagon and the old Luton, I was so relieved to have arrived that I my eyes closed as I pulled on the handbrake.

  The next thing I knew I was stretched out on the wet grass with George and Mal’s eldest daughter, Josie, kneeling either side of me. A crowd was gathering behind them. I felt very unwell. I turned my head and deposited the pint of beer and the remains of my bacon butty breakfast onto the grass in front of Josie.

  It transpired that after putting on the brake I had simply sat inert in the car with the engine running until Josie had come out of the wagon and spotted me sitting there asleep. Out of good natured curiosity she had opened the door and I had tumbled out, to all intents and purposes, dead.

  I was hauled gently to my feet and helped to the bedroom in the AEC where I nursed a throbbing headache for the rest of the day whilst the other guys finished the build- up.

  Mal, wanting to know when I’d be back on my feet, came and had a chat then he went off looking pensive. He returned shortly afterwards to tell me that he had identified my mystery illness. Rust had made a hole in the exhaust pipe of my old A10 and that hole was just beside, and in front of, the hole in the floor under the control pedals in the driver’s footwell. As soon as I had started the car, exhaust fumes had been blowing directly in to the cab below my feet, but since carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless, and since the car smelt of burnt oil already, I’d noticed nothing. For the entire duration of my twenty or so mile journey I’d been breathing a heady mixture of wet air and carbon monoxide. My tiredness and headache was due, not to the beer, but to the rapidly rising concentration of poisonous gas in the car and eventually in my bloodstream. Had Josie not opened the door it is a fair deduction that I would shortly have gone to the great fairground in the sky and you wouldn’t have been reading this book.

  In today’s world I’d have been taken to hospital in an ambulance, admitted to A&E and given pure oxygen to breathe. I’d probably have been kept in under observation for a couple of days as well. However, we are made of sterner stuff (or we were more ignorant!), so for the time being I just took a couple of aspirin and got myself back out into the fresh air to work the muck out of my system. I determined to repair the exhaust pipe as soon as I could.

  The next night I was back in the crowd, ‘volunteering’ to challenge a top-man.

  Chapter 27

  Choking in Chessington

  I was to fight Bray again in a four round bout this time. The first round plan was simple; no major surprises, fairly evenly matched but with both of us doing more avoiding than contact. This was to get the crowd to bay for blood and action. As the second round opened Bray would be much more aggressive and give me a bash on the nose; a “fore-arm smash” to try to get my nose to bleed, reprising the gory spectacle of my maiden fight. I was to pin Bray to a submission in the last minutes of the third round.

  The first round went well; I looked as if I was confidently trying to ‘go the distance’ by keeping out of Bray’s way, and he looked as if he was trying to catch me without walking into a trap. The bell rang and we each returned to our corners. Those punters to who favoured the challenger were yelling at me to either keep out of his reach or to belt him one and everyone else was taunting Bray for his lack of gusto. One particular punter, a rather middle class wag who seemed to have had a few too many G&Ts shouted to ask Bray why he didn’t take up ballroom dancing as he seemed more suited to it.

  The bell went for round two and Bray came out like a bullet. No warning and no preamble, he just came across the canvas like a bullet and forearm smashed me in the face. There was a pop in my head and the blood veritably squirted out. I looked (and was) a bit stunned and Bray took advantage to try to get me into a hold and drop me on the floor. The mixture of fresh blood and sweat made his hands slip and I escaped. For the next minute or so I managed to avoid any major capture and just spread blood around the ring, over Bray and me and a couple of the punters in the front of the crowd. I was showing off and not concentrating and Bray had to take advantage of my showboating; he grabbed me, and dropped me. Bray was sitting on the canvas with one leg under my shoulders and the other over my neck. I wasn’t technically pinned as my shoulders were off the canvas so this wasn’t an end-of-fight moment. Unfortunately he caught me and dropped my just at the wrong second in relation to my breathing. My lungs were empty and the blood flowing from my nose was now running straight into my throat. I couldn’t breathe. I was choking. I couldn’t speak and I sure as hell couldn’t submit, I was supposed to win!

  Mal came to the rescue. Each round was supposed to be three minutes and Mal was the timekeeper, bell ringer, Master of Ceremonies and the Referee. Mal saw what was going on and rang the bell for the end of the round. Frankly I wish he’d rung it sooner, and other than Bray’s fanciers feeling a bit miffed, no-one really noticed the difference, but Mal told us afterwards that the round had actually only lasted for a couple of seconds over two minutes.

  I returned to my corner to spit blood and get my breath back. The punters who wanted me to win shouted lots of advice, some sensible some merely intended to be motivational. The bell rang for round three.

  Bray and I had practiced a move that we were going to use in the third round. This consisted of me heaving Bray upright into the ropes, facing out of the ring. I then dropped down into a crouch so that as he rebounded the backs of his knees hit my flank and he rolled/stumbled over my back and landed on his back on the canvas. This then allowed me to drop on him and pin him down, with both shoulders on the deck for the required count of three.

  For the first minute or two of the round we grappled, heaved, threw and grunted convincingly with Bray allowing me to just get the upper hand. The blood that we were both liberally smeared with was now sticky and so there was little chance of slipping out of a grip. Bray managed to twist his way out of a clinch and put almost the entire ring’s width between us before charging me. I stepped to the left, grabbed his outstretched left hand and swung him hard and fast at the centre of the ropes on the stage side of the ring. He smacked into the ropes with such force that for a split second it looked as if the corner posts would give way, then he rebounded back at me at a far faster speed than he had ever done in our practice sessions. I didn’t have time to get into a crouch but I just dropped flat on the floor, face down. They effect was far better for me as it looked far more spontaneous, for Bray it was worse because, as I was much lower, he fell from the ankles rather than the knees and he went down like a metaphorical sack of spuds. I leapt to my feet ready to body splash him to defeat but even in that short time available I could see that he was completely winded and not going to have a cat-in-hell’s chance of getting up in under a couple of seconds.

  Mal yelled out, “ONE” and I simply stood and watched. Bray didn’t move. The crowd yelled at him to get up or stay down depending on their allegiance.

  “TWO”, bellowed Mal, emulating Churchill’s finger gesture. Bray, still didn’t move, other than his chest heaving as he tried to get some air into his lungs. After the previous day’s experience in my car, I felt for him, but he still couldn’t summon the strength to get up.

  “AND THU-REE!” bawled Mal swinging both arms in front of himself in a double chopping motion. The fight was over, I was the winner. Surprisingly it took
another minute before Bray was actually able to get up off the floor by which time I and another lad were halfway round the tent with a towel collecting the nobbings. I received a good take from that session, lots of pats on the back and even a couple of kisses. It was my first “victory” in the ring and I like to kid myself that though it was a fixed fight, I really did manage to beat a guy with years of experience on only my second fight!

  Chapter 28

  A Wrestler’s Life Isn’t All In-Tents

  As a result of many years of travelling around the country and meeting flatties in their own localities we were regularly asked to put on shows in local town halls, often in support of other municipal events. And so it was that our next sojourn was to Hunstanton in Norfolk to appear in a promotion at a small local hall. We quite enjoyed these sessions as there was much less building up to do. We would need to set up the ring in the hall, but there was no leveling, no shuttering and no marquee to erect.

  We arrived in Hunstanton and went to the hall. The caretaker had already cleared the place out and swept it immaculately and informed us that once we had set up the ring, he would put out chairs for the punters to sit on....it was almost palatial in comparison to what we were used to.

  On the tober with the wrestling show, being so much quicker to set up than the Waltzer or the Skid, we were wont to repair to the local hostelry to have a few bevies once we had set up our gear. This meant that quite often we were well oiled by the time the fight started. When we were working a hall, we had even more drinking time and so it was that we found ourselves in Hunstanton. By mid afternoon there were seven or eight of us, Mal included, sitting in a pub, filled up with fish and chips, pints of winkles and even more pints of beer. Davy kept nodding off and so the decision was made that it would be a good idea to go out and get some fresh air on the seafront to clear heads a bit (and take us away from the temptations of the bar). We took a walk along the promenade and stopped to lean on the railings watch the workmen dismantling the narrow gauge railway from the pier. It seemed strange to think that the pier was being so stripped only a few years after being fictitiously renovated in the Alex Guinness film “Barnacle Bill”, still I mused, perhaps life doesn’t imitate art.

  Suddenly I caught sight of Mal in my peripheral vision sneaking up behind Davy. Mal grabbed Davy’s ankles and flipped him neatly over the cast iron railing to fall the fifteen or so feet onto the beach below. Davy appeared to land flat on his back with a thud that should have presaged a broken spine, a fractured skull or at the very least a serious concussion. He lay there for a second, staring up at us upside down to him. Then slowly he sat up, brushed off the back of his head, stood up, dusted off his jacket and trousers and staggered slightly unsteadily along the beach twenty yards or so to climb the stairs back up to the prom.

  Mal was almost wetting himself with giggles and all he had to say to Davy as he re-took his place at the railing was, “I’m glad you got your break-fall in in time!”

  A ‘break-fall’ is a method of reducing the impact of a fall (it does exactly what it says on the tin) whilst still giving the appearance of an uncontrolled crash landing. Whereas a parachute landing fall requires you to land on your feet and then crumple to take the shock out of the landing on your knees, hips and shoulder in sequence, a break fall requires you to land on your back. Before reaching the floor you arch your back and raise your head so landing on the heels and the shoulders using your spine like a leaf-spring and keeping your head clear of the floor. It requires more bottle than a parachute landing fall and very different muscles. Clearly it also requires a heck of a lot of physical coordination. Davy was an absolute past master as he clearly demonstrated that day in Hunstanton.

  It also has to be said that being several sheets to the wind was probably also beneficial in reducing the short term serious damage that we could have otherwise suffered; since the 50s and 60s numerous medical studies have shown that the relaxation brought by a high level of blood alcohol has been a contributory factor in many accident victims’ survival and so I could put down my long life and good health to a copious quantity of beer from the local pubs and, over the years, many hundred of bottles of cheap red wine from the off-licenses of England.

  Chapter 29

  The Battle of the Bulge

  The second bout of the evening was to feature George as the top man and Arthur, one of Mal’s black-book men, as the challenger. The challenger was to win in the fourth round by dint of heaving George out of the ring. This was a popular stunt at town hall promotions as the punters were seated and so there was more opportunity to cause a little extra drama by the ejected fighter landing on a table as a way of braking the fall somewhat.

  During our traditional visit to the pub George managed to insult Arthur in some way (I was taking a slash at the time and missed the offending comment so I can’t recount the details or justification for the insult). When I returned to the group, George was looking superior and Arthur was looking resentful. They were not talking.

  As we left the pub, Mal took Arthur to one side and had a quiet word to ensure that Arthur didn’t let his temper take him beyond the plan. Arthur was calm and controlled and assured Mal that he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the show, but that George was ‘a stuck up little shit who really needed to be taken down a peg or two’.

  When the show started there was George, all oiled up and posing for the crowd, his trunks were tight and stretched over his firm bum and his bulging crotch. Without being overtly provocative, he clearly enjoyed deliberately attracting the support of the female proportion of the audience.

  The preliminaries over the first bout took place as planned and we moved to the second bout of the evening.

  George and Arthur took their corners and Mal did his spiel, the bell rang and the fight began. To the punters it all looked like a realistic match; George clearly had technique, grace and style on his side. What Arthur appeared to lack in fighting experience and professionalism, he made up for with bulk, physical strength and gusto. I was acting as a second in the challengers’ corner that evening and at the break between rounds two and three Arthur, his lips barely moving, muttered to me, “Nah, let’s take the wind out of the little shit’s sails”, and he gave me an almost imperceptible wink.

  The ball rang and Arthur went straight for George. He managed to get him in a clinch and I could see his hand very deliberately grab hold of the lower seam of the left leg of George’s trunks. Arthur gave a huge heave to try to lift George off the deck, and hidden by the grunt of exertion was a tearing sound as he opened an L-shaped split in the fabric of George’s trunks, about three inches long and three across, from seam crotch-ward. George managed to escape the lift and failed to notice the tear to his trunks; there was nothing indecent about his appearance but clearly his trunks were now somewhat less structurally sound than they were designed to be. George may not have noticed the damage, but it was clear to the crowd as the flap of bright silk was hanging down from the neat line of the seam. Several ladies seemed particularly attentive to this aspect of the fight.

  A couple of seconds later Arthur bent double and rammed George in the midriff, as he flung his arms around George’s waist he grabbed the waistband of George’s trunks and pulled them backwards. Not downwards as if to remove them, but away from George’s body to put maximum strain on them. There was a further tearing from the already torn seam and Arthur let go, jumping backwards, away from George. George stumbled backwards almost in slow motion as the lower front of his trunks tore and slowly, with infinite majesty, a rolled-up pair of black woolen socks fell from George’s crotch and bounced on the white canvas of the ring floor. Silence fell immediately. The socks rolled across the ring and ended up in the very centre. George seemed transfixed by the socks, as did Arthur, the former with a look of extreme anger on his face and the latter trying, and almost succeeding, in looking as if he had no idea where they came from. There was a sti
fled giggle from a girl in the front of the audience and this was followed rapidly by another masculine laugh. Seconds later, the hall erupted in hysterical laughter and the poseur was metaphorically unmasked, his impressive ‘manhood’ lying in literal tatters before several hundred people. I’m sure that under the mask George was blushing fit to burst a blood vessel.

  Mal rang the bell.

  The two fighters returned to their corners. Arthur did his ventriloquist act again as I handed him a towel, “That’ll teach the stuck up little berk to come all airs and graces with Arthur Bennison”

  The bell rang for the final round and George gave all the signs of having completely lost his cool. His technique went completely out of the window and he just went for Arthur like a bull in a china shop. Within ten seconds of the start of the round he was being held up above Arthur’s head and was clearly about to be thrown unceremoniously out of the ring. He was. Arthur was the winner as planned but George was the loser in more ways than one. His ego was in tatters and a couple of days later he just disappeared, never to be seen again in Mal’s show.

  Chapter 30

  SIW

  Blood was always a welcome sight for both the top men and the challengers as it got the crowd roaring and tended to increase the nobbings by a pretty large proportion. The problem was getting blood without doing someone real harm; my nose bled almost to order but for most of the guys this wasn’t a natural phenomenon. For many of the older guys, who had been in the ring for years, the scar tissue in their noses meant that you could have probably ripped their noses off with pliers without so much as a dribble of the red stuff. It would theoretically have been easy to simply whack someone hard enough to split a lip or tear an ear, or a cheek. Real life isn’t like the movies, however, and the kind of blow that will do that sort of damage will have the short term effect of making the recipient insensible for enough time for the bout to be over regardless of the plan. Especially when you bear in mind that half of the people in the ring were not meant to be professional fighters but plucky-members-of-the-public. Fake blood was just not an option, this had to look really real to an audience that was a matter of just a few feet away.