“So you’ll be going to the fair?” He said.
He had been standing at the corner of Main Street, where it joins School Hill, handing out badly photocopied flyers. A typical fair worker, all bravado, muscles and slicked back hair, complimented by tattoos and a biker jacket. He gave off an air of casual danger and excitement that none of us could compete with. Us, the sons of farmers and crofters and fishermen, with little experience of life beyond the peninsula we’d grown up on.
We had been on our way to the pub for a few drinks. Just a standard Friday night in the village, a few pints then back to someone’s house for a few more. Warm cans of lager and ‘Bat out of Hell’ on the stereo – you couldn’t go anywhere that year without hearing it. I hated it, but had sat through it enough that I knew all the words. I was one of few dissenting voices in the village when it came to Meat Loaf.
One of the girls, Maggie I think, thought that this guy from the fair was cute so we’d decided to go along for an hour or two. The boys in the group were against it, but we acquiesced, just as we always did. We knew how it would go, the girls giggling and flirting and knowing we were jealous, us standing in a group smoking and ignoring them, working hard at being nonchalant and tougher than we were. Typical teenagers, I suppose.
We were all just kids then, just a couple of weeks out of school and enjoying a last summer of freedom before moving towards adulthood and whatever that would bring. A few of us were going to study in the cities down south, a couple were going abroad for a year, and the rest had already started work locally. It frightened me, the thought that their lives were mapped out at seventeen, as they started with their fathers on the boats or in the fields. My father was the local minister; the chances of my following in those footsteps were slim to say the least.
The fair arrived around the same time every year, the few weeks of the school holidays. They went right round the west coast, stopping in the larger villages. The lorries would roll along the coast road, followed by the caravans and a couple of 4x4s. They’d pitch in the car park down by the beach, and within a couple of days they’d be up and running. If you were looking for Blackpool Pleasure Beach, you’d be sorely disappointed.
The main attraction – there would always only be the one – would be the Octopus, or the Dodgems or the Waltzers. It was the Waltzers that year, all blaring Europop and head spinning speeds, the metallic creaking noises and mechanical banging drowned out by Rock Me Amadeus, 99 Red Balloons and shrill screaming.
The fair workers would single out the prettiest local girls for ‘faster spins,’ with leering grins and bad intentions. There would be local casualties who’d get on full of bravado after having a few beers in the afternoon then stagger off to be sick in the long grass. There was an arcade, a metal shed full of fruit machines that never paid out, Double Dragon and Outrun and one of those penny waterfalls. Add the rifle range where the air rifles were so obviously fixed you had to aim two inches left of the targets to have any change of winning, and you can see why we’d rather have been in the pub.
I could never have predicted it at the time, but that night would change us all forever.
