by Bernard Ross
Bugger! I was now without a familial roof or parental advice. I was without a job or many prospects. And I would shortly be skint to the point of being unable to pay my rent. The brightest thing about it all was that I had bought a return ticket that morning so I could at least get back to my digs!
I returned to my digs despondent and alone, and there I moped for the next couple of days feeling sorry for myself and wondering what the heck I was going to do next. I knew I’d be as welcome as a sick headache with my mum and I’d hardly seen my dad in years, so I was at a pretty low ebb. Mindful of Sarah’s pitiful state when she let things get on top of her, I put on my coat and went out into town. As I was short of money I wanted something that was cheap to do, the funfair was in town so I headed down to the recreation ground and lost myself for a couple of hours people-watching in amongst the dodgems and the shows.
The bright flashing lights, the smiling faces and the screams of excitement lifted my spirits, and the warmth generated by the machines and the throng was a welcome escape from the cold of my bedsit. The time passed rapidly and, even though I hardly spent a thing, I really enjoyed myself.
The next day was Friday and so the fair would be opening earlier than it did on Thursday nights. I was there as the rides first lit up and I stayed until late into the evening. I watched the guys taking the money on the waltzers and I even went and watched the wrestling in the long tent. Entry was cheap and the rain had started, so the respite and the warmth of the crowd were welcome. After each bout the young lads who worked the show went amongst the crowd collecting donations for the fighters, if the fight had been exciting and the fighters well matched, the punters were more generous. Needless to say, in my state of financial ruin I was more tempted to take money out of the collection than to put it in! Indeed, I was beginning to wonder what I would do with myself next week, when my last few shillings ran out and my landlady gave me the boot.
Friday passed and by Saturday I was now a regular at the show. By the simple expedient of keeping my ears open, I knew the first or nicknames of many of the fair people, even though they had no idea who I was.
As the fair wound down on Saturday night it was clear that they would be gone shortly, moving on to bring a little old-world excitement to another provincial town where a television was still a rare thing to find in most homes.
Just then, a funfair lad who I knew to go by the name of Don beckoned me over to where he was taking a short fag break, in the lee of the waltzer.
‘Fancy earning a few bob, mate?’ He asked with a friendly smile.
Since my pockets were distinctly light by now, I asked what I’d have to do to earn a few bob.
‘Gissa hand to pull down,’ he replied
I may not have been streetwise, but I was suspicious, so I asked him what he wanted me to pull down in return for a few bob.
He laughed, but I got the impression that he were laughing at the joke rather than laughing at me.
‘Pull down the rides and get them loaded on the trucks ready for the off in the morning, you idiot.’ Don informed me.
“OK” I agreed.
A few moments later the church clock struck 11 and all of the showmen started calling “last rides”. Within 15 minutes the crowd was thinning rapidly and the whole atmosphere within the fun fair changed from one of gay abandon to grim and workmanlike determination.
In spite of the increasing rain, I stripped off my coat and started following Don’s directions.
For the next six and a half hours I grunted and strained in the mud and the rain with the gang of young and old men. We unbolted gratings, furled up the canvas tilt roof, collapsed frames, strapped up bunches of poles, folded up steps, wound up cables and hoisted huge baulks of timber packing. We dug a big hole in to which to empty the governor’s kharzi (luckily, I wasn’t expected to actually upend the huge bucket into the rapidly filling up hole; it splashed appallingly and stunk to high Heaven). We loaded and lashed-down on to the backs and sides of the huge, ancient trucks and trailers that formed the basis of the travelling show.
By the time it was all stowed it was six thirty in the morning and dawn was lightening the sky. I was absolutely knackered. I was an office boy, for God’s sake, not a labourer. But it was a good feeling of “knackered”; my muscles were warm and loose, my head was clear and I was as happy as I had been in a long time.
“Right” said Don, as he completed the final lorry-driver’s hitch on the last piece of equipment to be lashed down, “Let’s find Uncle Hammerton and see about getting you paid.” Music to my young, and broke, ears.
Don led the way over to a man who I had seen around both during the time the fair was open and whilst we were pulling down. He stood about five foot four, was slight of build and had short, almost black hair. His skin was quite dark; an outdoor complexion, and quite heavily lined for a man in his, I guessed, mid forties. He was clean shaven and, though I had seen him working in the rain and the mud with the rest of the fair people he was still immaculately turned out. His brown Oxford shoes were a bit muddy it was true, but his brown three-piece worsted suit still had sharp creases down the fronts and backs of each leg, his tie was still tightly knotted at his throat, his gold watch chain still hung immaculately across his neatly buttoned waistcoat and his fingernails were still clean. The only concession to his lifestyle was a slightly incongruous flat cap, which clearly was not only old but looked disreputably greasy to boot.
‘ ‘evening, Don...’ He greeted his nephew, ‘...and who is this young gentleman?’ he asked, turning to me.
Don remained silent....he didn’t actually know my name!
“I’m Bernard, Bernard Ross” I said, slightly proud at being referred to as a ‘young gentleman’.
“Well, Bernard, I’m Mr Hammerton Rose; Don’s uncle and the proud owner of this magnificent Waltzer.” He gestured to the towering pile of components that we had all sweated to dismantle and load onto the trucks, and as his hand returned from the sweeping gesture, he extended it to me as the formal part of our introduction.
I shook his hand and he didn’t try to crush my hand or turn it over. He just shook it as if he was a man and he was treating me like a man. That was the first ‘grown up’ handshake I’d had in my life.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr Rose”, I said formally. Somehow, I got the faint impression that ‘Mr Rose’ was more appropriate than ‘Hammerton’, for such a cleverly smart man.
With his left hand he reached into his waistcoat pocket and, collecting the contents, he thrust three ten-shilling notes into my hand,
‘There you go young man, it seems you’ve earned it. Now, fancy a drink?’
Don produced a bottle of Scotch from the cab of the massive tractor unit and the three of us stood around the front of it as Mr Rose poured out three large ones.
I’d never tasted Scotch before, but sipping rather than sinking seemed to be the order of the day, so I sipped and therefore avoided any coughing and spluttering embarrassment. We made small talk for ten minutes and then as Mr Rose drained his glass he said, ‘Don, we’ve got an early morning, and you, lad, your parents’ll be wondering where you are.’ This last was, of course, directed at me.
‘I’ve ‘got no parents, Mr Rose, there’s no one waiting up for me.’ I said.
He looked at me and asked, ‘So where do you live?’
‘Got a bedsit.’ I responded
‘And what do you do?’ he asked
‘’Lost my job last week.’ I confessed
‘Want to join the travelling fair, lad?’ he asked with a glance at Don
It was a complete surprise; I hadn’t given any thought to such a bizarre move before that moment. Suddenly, I realised that I may have spent much of my life in Buckhurst Hill, but I had no unbreakable ties. I had no home there, no family there, no job there and no real friends there. In terms of m
aterial possessions I had little more than the clothes on my back, and what I had in the bedsit wasn’t worth enough to get excited about. I had no formal contract or lease on my bedsit and no more money to pay rent beyond three days time.
Amazingly, all these thoughts went through my head in about a quarter of a second.
I nodded at Mr Rose.
‘OK, lad’ he said to me, ‘welcome to the family.’ He brought his hand up to his face and mimicked spitting into his palm. He thrust forward his hand I got the second manly handshake of my life. I had just ‘run away from home to join the circus.’
Mr Rose turned to Don, ‘Don, find our new boy somewhere to kip for a few hours, we get moving at ten and I want to be on the road by ten thirty.’
And so I kipped down for a couple of hours in the back of one of the trucks on a large rolled up tarpaulin and in the weak grey light of a Sunday morning, that was it.. I was now a showman in a travelling fair.
Chapter 3
On The Road For The First Time
Don roused my from my stiff and exhausted slumbers. No cup of tea, no gentle waking, just a quick punch on the arm and a hoarse whisper of “C’mon, Bernie, shift yer lardy arse, mush’
The first job to do was to start the trucks. I had had little experience of motor vehicles at this stage in my life having seldom even travelled in one, but these beasts were a major revelation. Bastardised and converted from a range of different sources, the array of vehicles on the recreation ground that morning only had one thing in common; any one of them would give a 21st century MOT tester an apoplectic fit.
I was dragged by Don to the front of a mid-sized AEC truck, where one of the other men was ramming an enormous crank handle through the front bumper. He lined it up so the crank was upright and then lashed a 20 foot length of ¾ inch rope to the handle. He, Don and I then took up position tug-o-war style, whilst the driver primed the engine. Then we heaved. It took four repeats before we managed to get the engine to fire and on each repeat, we were pulled almost off our feet by the sheer weight of the engine’s flywheel righting itself. When it did catch, the roar was deafening and we were immediately engulfed in clouds of thick, black, greasy smoke. As our colleague on the rope disengaged the starter handle from the bumper I heard him call to the driver, ‘You let the bastard stall and you’re on the f***ing rope next time!’ Since the road laws were still rudimentary, and the MOT test was still three years in the future, this vehicle, and many others lacked many of the features that later would be thought of as fundamental, such as a battery and a starter motor.
At this stage I thought we were ready to go but Mr Rose called us over to a stubby great monster of a truck that I recognised from my dad’s days with the Yanks, it was a Diamond T US Army truck. You could still see the outline of the white star-in-a-circle on the door, even though it had been painted over with new livery. The engine was already running and it had been manoeuvred to a heavily laden trailer which clearly held most of Mr Rose’s beloved Waltzer. Mr Rose wanted us to hitch up the trailer with a rigid drawbar. This wouldn’t have been too much of a strain if the whole lot had been on hard standing, but both truck and trailer were on the relatively soft grass of the Buckhurst Hill Municipal Recreation Ground and the recent rain had made the ground softer still. The trailer was very heavily laden and the truck had the two enormous Gardner diesel generators mounted on its back. It took a good ten minutes of grunting, sweating and swearing to get the two aligned and coupled together. I couldn’t help noticing as we did this that another group were coupling two other trailers together and manoeuvring them onto the road...without a tractor to pull them. I didn’t say anything because as the new boy, I presumed that everyone else knew what they were doing. Mr Rose drove the tractor-trailer combination off the rec and reversed it expertly up to the front of the twin trailers and the gang immediately coupled the dodgem trailer to the twinset. Mr Rose now had a ‘train’ of one huge six-wheeled tractor unit and three massively laden trailers behind it, the weight of the four pieces must have been in the region of thirty five ton tons!
Mr Rose beckoned to me to join him in the cab of the six-wheeler.
I climbed up the side of the vehicle and joined Mr Rose and a fellow he introduced as ‘Fred the Brakes’, I was wary enough not to ask the reason for the slightly odd name.
A lad ran down the side of the assembled convoy and each driver signalled that he was ready for the off and with a huge roar, massive clouds of oily black smoke and much grinding of gears, the mighty snake of vehicles set off at ten thirty precisely.
Conversation wasn’t an option that morning for two reasons; firstly the cab of the truck lacked any side windows and the noise of our own and other engines was so loud as to render any chit chat impossible. And secondly, it rapidly became clear that driving this rig required a concentration from all in the cab that was too great to allow the kind of multi-tasking that would, in later years contribute to many road accidents.
The Diamond T was a hard enough vehicle to drive anyway, but for reasons of economy, the original American petrol engine had been replaced with a British Gardner diesel engine. This was not a factory conversion, but a back-street garage job with a degree of ingenious improvisation. Added to that, the massive train that was behind us was in potential danger of snaking and so Mr Rose spent almost as much time looking in the wing mirrors, to keep the trailers aligned, as he did looking forward to see where he was going.
Fred’s unusual moniker also became clear every time we started down the slightest incline. The three trailers were generally a dead weight that caused massive strain on the Diamond’s engine, clutch and gearbox, but as soon as we were going down a slope, they threatened to become a runaway train of gravity-induced missile. Fred had a ratchet lever beside him, which was connected to each trailer by a complex system of steel cables. With Mr Rose orchestrating and Fred straining on the lever, the speed of the trailers was kept under control behind us.
Designed as a tractor to pull large artillery pieces across rough country for the US Army’s artillery regiments, the Diamond T had a high ground clearance, and to assist the crew in getting in and out of the cab, there are running-board steps beside the doors. The bonnet of the vehicle was virtually flat, parallel to the ground and about seven feet long. Either side of the bonnet was a long, flat-topped mudguard made of heavy steel.
The drizzle that had been with us the night before had returned and the windscreen slowly built up a surface of raindrops, soot and road grime that became more opaque with each hundred yards that we travelled. As the windscreen became less see- through, Mr Rose slowly, but perceptibly, began to lean forward and squint to see where we were going. I was just reaching that state of panic, where my reticence at questioning the boss was outweighed by my sense of self preservation, when Mr Rose pulled a big wad of cotton waste from under the seat, tossed it blind towards me and called across the cab, ‘Off you go, lad, I can hardly see a bloody thing’
‘What’s wrong with the wipers?’ I asked pointing to the large, rubber bladed wipers mounted in the roof of the cab. ‘They haven’t worked for three years...’ he replied with a wry smile, ‘..and that’s what we’ve got you for; you didn’t think we brought you for your good looks, did you?’
I stared at him dumbly; unless I misread the situation, he wanted me to climb out of a moving truck and wipe the windscreen from the outside. We might only be going at about 15 miles an hour but it still wasn’t a job I fancied at all. I was also acutely aware that the clouds ahead were darker and more foreboding than those above, and that we hadn’t yet covered eight miles since we set off. I also knew that we were heading for St. Alban’s, some thirty-five miles from Buckhurst Hill. He just had to be joking. Right?
I smiled at Mr Rose and rolled my eyes, to let him know that I got the joke. However, his face turned serious, ‘Lad, unless you want us all to be scraped off the pavement shortly, you are goi
ng to have to get out there and wipe that windscreen.’
Fred stared studiously ahead and it became quite clear that though this was no joke. It was also an important rite of passage. I had to prove myself. I took a deep breath and picked up the wad of cotton waste.
Opening the door and getting out on to the running board was easy, then I had to shuffle backwards and hang on for grim death whilst Fred pulled the door shut, locking me on the outside of the truck as it thundered along the road. Next, I had to shuffle forwards until I could get one foot onto the mudguard and therefore lean across the windscreen and wipe from the nearside pillar as far as I could. Mr Rose gave me a thumbs up and then pointed to the 30% or so of the windscreen on his side that was still filthy.
‘Oh, God’ I thought, ‘I’m actually going to have to lie on my belly across the bonnet to be able to reach.’
Had the vehicle still had its olive drab paintwork it would have been less slippery but the several layers of brush applied gloss paint, wet with rain, were a slick as a frying pan, and nearly as hot.
I searched for something solid to hold on to in order to carry out this death-defying feat, ironically the only thing that I could both see and reach was the unserviceable windscreen wiper, and even that didn’t look too solid.
With my heart in my mouth, I grabbed for it and spread-eagled myself as much as I could across the top of the bonnet, through my clothes it was pleasantly warm after the cold of the cab, but I didn’t let myself get lulled into a sense of security. I quickly wiped the windscreen clean and slithered sideways back to the mudguard and then the running board. Once I was at the very back of the running board step, I called to Fred to let me back in. Needless to say, the bastard feigned deafness and asked Mr Rose if he could hear a squeaking noise. After a few seconds, which seemed like hours, they let me back in and the cab seemed warm and safe after the bonnet.
