Ray Bradbury's classic horror about a travelling and malignant carnival is as good today as it was when it was published. When I was a kid the local A&P (agricultural and pastoral) show was a big event, not because of the animals, of which there were hundreds, but because of the sideshows which provided a colour seldom seen in my small town. I lived on the edge of town with easy access to the show-grounds and I haunted the show from the moment it started to set up the tents. The people who set it up were not like the locals, who were farm boys and dairy factory workers. These looked like hard men with their tattoos and bare chests, driving tent pegs and spikes into the ground. The whole process was quite fast and it only took a day to create the minor but colourful tent city.
I can't remember seeing many women around and I assume they were inside the many caravans, cooking for those semi-naked guys. This was the fifties and I assume (again) that the night before the show - it was only there for one day - the men who had shown off their bare chests decamped to a local hostelry, drank heavily and challenged the locals to physical confrontations. My family was teetotal so this is pure speculation. No reports came back to me.
Ball throwing, darts, dodgems, ferris wheel, candy floss - I remember wondering why I could only get candy floss when the show came to town - ring toss (we actually won two packets of cigarettes on the ring toss one year. I can't remember if it was illegal to give cigarettes to young people back then, maybe it wasn't. Anyway, they tasted like shit.)
House of Horrors ride, a cowboy sharpshooting show, and wasn't that assistant with the cigarettes used as targets glamorous? You bet she was. Glamour beyond a ten-tear-old's comprehension, as was the half man-half woman. What was that about?
The carousel, or roundabout as we knew it, was always favourite. Recently I've been looking at carousels with a new eye and I've written a short story about a carousel which is basically pornographic. The story, not the carousel, Actually that's not true. The story infringes copyrights belonging to the Elvis Presley industry. This means it will never be published but somehow Elvis was an obvious participant and I think he would have enjoyed the experience. Thank you very much. I love the many carousels you come across in Europe and the States. It seems so civilised.
As the sun went down and the lights came on, the sounds of conflicting music from rides blared louder and I was sent home clutching one last stick covered in candy floss and starting to feel sick, a sure sign of a good time.
