The strange veracity of these impressions seems to constitute a mood. Moods are like fields of force—ungraspable and everywhere. They permeate the whole of consciousness and color it, though they are never it.
Whatever it is, it is frightening, with bellyings in the silken walls that stiffen suddenly into mainsails as I consider where and when I am, the date, the location. I have a hollow, dropped feeling that’s manifested in the room—the mirror tilts, the newly lighted Trentham lamp falls over on its bulb, the long green lawn outside the window moves. The eel develops limbs and teeth and turns into a baby alligator, stuffed, in a vitrine. I am a gypsy in a caravan of curiosities.
They’ve put me in the chair, that’s what it is.
They’ve driven me across the city to the Fair, and my reactions—to the cold, the autumn reds—are plausible. I see them flexing in the depths of the pupa, fattened and growling now, a womb of pulverized grub-thoughts and biomimicry.
“Alec,” June says, “we won’t go right into the Fair, it’s just too loud and dangerous, but we can get up close and smell the candyfloss. The horrible burgers, you know.”
Trentham admits he can’t see the attraction, but he’s baffled by such things because they’re eccentric, a taste set free. And June agrees with him and for a moment pennies drop, in some mental roulette, because they’re treating me as if I’ve gone away or been exchanged and will not ever really understand again. Perhaps it’s for the best. They do not look too long at me. They will be married when I’m gone.
I say, oh yes. I point across the common to the angling pond, the cars and transit vans along the old rat-run, fishers like cut-price Rodin figurines, and couriers having a nap, some of them sleeping overnight and waking to a carless dawn, the goblet hornbeams leading down a common path to views of Battersea.
The Station’s chimneys churn out huge white clouds that everyone ignores. The dream of reason generates such silent but immense power!
My fallen body is at one Fair—Clapham Common—in the early years of our century, the twenty-first and last, and slowly answering questions, admiring sights. The rides are astronomical—Meteor, Vortex, Gravity. They tip their human cargo upside down and tumble it safely; behind the music there’s parental boredom, not just from the parents on the rides but from the rides themselves. They seem to pant between journeys that go nowhere, swinging and swaying slightly, like a father giving piggybacks, as children scramble on and off. Both Trentham and my wife are sure the atmosphere has changed over the years. No one takes money on the rides; you buy tokens. There are far fewer gaff lads from reformatories working the grounds, seducing girls, tapping up customers. June says it’s so impersonal-looking, these days, no one-arm bandits, no toy stalls with quoits and bagged-up goldfish for prizes.
We’re on the outside of the fence, a sectioned chain-link shield with warnings about dogs and thievery. Inside, unlikely things happen. Some people have a rotten time and others fall in love. I love the light rain and the smell of chips, the way I’m free to shrink away from the edges.
I miss my mother terribly. I miss my other selves I took for granted, youth and bravery. I know with certainty that when I see people in dreams—people I’ve never met whom I know to be close friends—my mind is not playing a trick, it’s sorting possibilities. I hear myself say, “Just imagine how it used to be.”
June looks at me, trying to understand, impenetrably furious.
My inner eye and person, in retreat from whatever the hospital has done to me, have cycled down the road and back in time. Together we take turns about the Pleasure Gardens in the spring of 1951. So much to choose from, such license! Battersea Fun Fair’s jangling rhythms and screams!
It seems, at first sight, from the painted rides, the shies and shows and girls watching the gaff lads walk on moving platforms like young gods, that this is what a fair has always been for laborers, ex-servicemen, the working class: a spell. Those with the time and money to imagine a future are elsewhere at the Festival of Britain on the South Bank, looking at pavilions and colored banners and displays of Land, People, and Home Design. Churchill said privately that he was rather bored by it. As if it’s that simple. The progressives and atavists are aspects of the same person and ghost each other like the showman’s wife who does accounts and runs a booth and even plays the Woman with a Bat’s Body when Josephine (who used to be a freak but wants to be a teacher) has her mathematics class in Lambeth North.
We’re here and we’re not here, the survivors of war and injury, seeking some primal recompense, the mood of innocence, horror, and glee that comes from being what you are, a filled-out shape making the most of it.
We seek quite hard in 1951 and I am shivering.
Amid the big machines in this north quarter of the park—the Dodgems and the Water Chute, the Roller Coaster I would never trust, the Goldmine Cakewalk underneath, the centrifugal Rotor and its Spider companion, the swings, the carousels and Haunted Mirror Maze—there is a simpler attraction, the boating lake, with a café. Rolls and butter, a cup of tea, all in (not bad) for just 6d. The wind roars off the wrinkled Thames. Couples with young children throw crumbs at fluffed-out ducks or sit at tables talking the kids through the things they’ve done so that the recent memories can deepen like a puddle sky into familiarity (“and we’ve been on Nellie the steam engine, and it was—like a cartoon, yes it was. A whistle and a weathervane!”).
At a far trestle, with her little boy and girl (twins? eight?), sits one young mother, in a coat and scarf. She has a nice dress on beneath the coat—a collared purple hand-me-down. It is her best, soft wool lapels, a brooch. A little old for her, and not the newest look. She likes it nonetheless: it makes her feel she counts. She holds a balloon on a stick. Her daughter clasps a small bottle of Clayton’s Sparkling Orange and sips it through a bendy straw. Her brother watches, waiting for his turn.
“Now me. Can I—Mummy—”
His mother tells him there is plenty left, but there is not.
“Mummy—”
His sister carries on drinking. Eventually, she puts the bottle down, and its light wobble on the tabletop confirms its emptiness. He absolutely knows he can’t complain. There is a mouthful left if he can get the straw in the right place.
I must be visibly staring, because the woman smiles.
“You took your time!” she says.
I come into my body with a jolt. I’ve been to the café. I’m holding a tin tray with one more bottle of orange on it and two green mugs of scalding tea.
Another couple at a nearby table get up, grin, and walk into the afternoon.
“It isn’t very busy here today,” the boy says, thoughtfully. It’s when he doesn’t say what he might mean by this—that I have no excuse for being slow—that I am struck by how tactful he is. And then, irrelevantly, as his latest obsession comes back to him: “Do you know, Daddy, that you get into the garden—or—the island in the middle of a maze if you, if you—”
Someone has given him a book of puzzles that is full of inky marks. There are chapters on mazes, magic squares, and probability. He has it next to him, his reading for the train. He looks up anxiously, lost in the maze of his new thought, and as he does so, the park halts. The rides suspend their motion on an in-breath, with a pause so brief it doesn’t jump the film, the lucky Big Wheel cars stopped at their zenith near the topmost branches of the London planes, cars halted elsewhere in a differently angled plane of rotation—the Spider, caught spinning its web.