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Andrews UK - Bernard Ross

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79 pages

English

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"running away from home" aged 15 Bernard Ross joined a travelling funfair, this book follows his adventures as one of the last live funfair wrestlers in the UK

Informations

Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	27 janvier 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785380587
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Title Page
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
A young man’s adventures with a travelling show in 1950s Britain

Bernard Ross & Rus Slater

Publisher Information
The Show Must Go On
Published in 2015 by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
The rights of Bernard Ross & Rus Slater to be identified as the Authors of this Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998
Copyright © 2015 Bernard Ross & Rus Slater
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Dramatis Personae
Bernard Ross, “Bernie” : - Our Hero
Mr Hammerton Rose : - Proud owner of the Waltzer
Don: - Mr Hammerton Rose’s nephew and right- hand man
Old Mrs Rose : - enerable Matriarch
Mr Charles Rose : - Proud owner of the Dodgems and elder brother of Mr Hammerton
Mrs Anne Rose : - Mr Charles Rose’s Wife
Charlie : - Mr Charles’ son-and-heir
Princess : - A dog of dubious ancestry and large teeth
Fred ‘The Brakes’ : - A funfair ‘chap’ with a self explanatory monika
Helen : - A young ‘lady’ of dubious morals and prodigious appetites
Ernie : - A peanut and coal vendor with a low standard of public Health and Safety
Bruno : - A relative of Princess with similar characteristics
‘Jock’ : - A Scotsman of great heart and impenetrable accent
Davey : - A gaff lad with a strong sense of diplomacy
Mr Cartwright : - A civil servant with a strong sense of hatred for our hero
Mike, Dave and Joe : - Young men with a strong sense of self preservation but a very low sense of duty
Mal Bede : - A Showman with a punch
“Madame Renee” : - A fortune teller who couldn’t foresee a metal breakdown
Brady : - A rare breed; an uneducated but intelligent professional fighter
George : - “The Harrow Hammer”: A wrestler heading for a fall and a submission
Davy the Dustman : - A stand-up wrestler
Irish Mick : - A hard man (to get along with)
Althea : - A barmaid who tempted me

Author’s Note
This book has been written in the 20teens; some 45 years after the events happened. The narrative is the result of discussions and notes made by Bernard in the past year and then created as a story by Rus. Consequently, though the events described are all real, the order, location and exact participants may have suffered some degradation of memory or some poetic licence. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, and the not-so-innocent.

Chapter 1
An End
In her hands was a bouquet of wildflowers gathered from the surrounding meadows.
Her clothes were her ‘Sunday best’, and she wore every piece of her jewellery; necklaces, bracelets and rings. The large, gold hoop earrings, that she had worn every day since she was seven years old were in her ears. She even had her late husband’s miniature Great War medals pinned to the breast of her black woollen coat, just below the fur-trimmed collar.
She was cold. Stone cold. Stone cold dead.
She had been lovingly laid on her narrow bed, dressed in her finery, surrounded by all her possessions.
Outside, in the rain, in a circle around her, stood her ‘family’. Some forty people, ranging in age from babes-in-arms to people in their sixties. To two of them she was “Mum”, to others, Grandma, Auntie or Old Mrs Rose. The ‘old’ was not a term of disrespect, but a formal title rather like the queen ‘mother’. To some she was loved, to all she was respected, to a couple she had been feared. They stood in the drizzle, stiffly and in silence as a mark of respect.
As the first tiny tongue of flame began to grow and multiply along the doorstep of her ‘van, there was a palpable relaxation in the assembled circle of people. This may not be the end, but it was the beginning of the end.
An hour later, the caravan roared. The heat from it had caused the only movement in the people; they had shuffled back a few feet to escape the worst of the heat that had originally been welcome in the chill early morning mist. The respectful silence that had pervaded the meadow was now shattered by the crackling of old timbers, the sizzling and popping of blistering paint and the bursting of jars and cans in her store cupboards. The people remained silent.
This was the passing of the matriarch. Though her husband had died many years before, passing the reins of the Show to her sons, she had been there for as long as anyone could remember; indeed she had lived ninety-six years with the Show, and for the past seven had never left her ‘van. Each evening her elder son, Charles, had knocked respectfully and taken a cup of tea and a glass of port with his Mum. His wife, Anne, had cooked and delivered Mrs Rose’s meals and had cleaned the van each day. It had fallen to one of the young lads to empty her chamber pot twice daily.
The pot-bellied stove in the van had not been cold for that past seven years. Now it glowed red in the blazing inferno.
Still the people stood in respectful silence.
With a loud bang, one of the ‘blooms’ burst explosively. As that corner of the van dropped, the shock load broke one of the main structural foundation beams. As the floor of the ‘van buckled the walls caved inwards, pulled by the remaining weight of the cupboards and pictures inside. The barrel roof broke in two and collapsed, and the whole caravan disappeared in a cloud of brilliant orange sparks and flying embers. The assembled people flinched and were grateful that they had moved back earlier. Still the people stood in respectful silence.
As the cloud of embers settled, the roaring died down. Starved of so much air, the fire took on a less aggressive tone, flames danced rather than leaping.
Still the people stood in respectful silence.
Slowly the flames became smaller. The last standing timbers collapsed or slowly keeled over into the bright mass of smouldering, red embers.
Still the people stood in silence, though an observant and alert watcher would have seen the occasional shuffle of feet as people tried to keep warm and aching joints moving in the cold, damp, afternoon drizzle.
Bright red embers gave way to white ash edges and the heat slowly dissipated. Cold crept in as the height of the fire fell, closer and closer to the ground.
Still they stood in silence, as if frozen and uncomfortable.
At last Charles turned and walked slowly away. His wife, Anne, followed and the people took this as their cue to disperse, still silent, back to their own ‘vans.
Tonight there would be no show; there would be no movement to another field. There would be much drinking and much storytelling about the old days. The days when Showmen’s ‘vans didn’t have ‘blooms’, but iron rimmed wooden wheels. The days before Charles’s Dad had gone off to the War.
Tomorrow there would be some bloody sore heads! And mine would undoubtedly be one of them.

Chapter 2
What Am I Doing Here?
By force of two years of habit, I tended to wake early in those days and, so it was that morning that I awoke shortly before dawn.
My head was throbbing. My eyes were gritty and sore. My mouth felt and tasted like the bottom of the proverbial budgie’s cage. I lay in the darkness waiting for the various pains to subside and watching the weak grey edge of the dawn’s light creep across the inside of the roof of the 15 ton AEC Mammoth Major 8 truck that was now my home.
There is nothing like a death to make a man ponder the meaning of his own life, even a man as young as I was; for I was only 17 years old.
You, dear reader, don’t know me from Adam, so it would not have crossed your mind, as it did mine, to wonder what the hell I was doing here. Had I been born into a travelling family, had I had a showman’s blood coursing through my veins, then there would have been no question as to why, at this tender age, I was parentless and sleeping alone on the cab of an ancient, knackered and heavily bastardised former army truck.
My name is Bernard Ross and I was born into a relatively “normal” middle class family in Surrey. I attended a private preparatory school and seemed, from that young age, to have a fairly clear, professional, middle class life ahead of me.
It is popular today to believe that fatherless children and homeless youths are a phenomenon of “broken Britain”; that conglomerate mess which resulted from years of liberal policies, national shame and ego-centricity that have been such a feature of successive governmental policies since the swinging sixties. But in reality, it started long before that.
I was born in 1943 and my parents were traditionalists. My mother had been educated at a convent and my father at Chigwell School, a small but successful public school in Essex. They had met whilst striving to improve themselves at Pitman’s secretarial college and had married in 1930. My mother had immediately become a “housewife” and my father secured a management job in merchandising.
My mother’s traditional values included what must have been, even for the age, an amazing level of sexual inhibition because it took them 13 years to produce me!
And I’m an only child!
She was also a great believer in forward planning for her unborn children and so she saved money to send me, at the appropriate stage of my life, to my father’s alma mater, Chigwell School. In my form