Lashing Tarps
the man with the gavel was going up in millions. My father bought and sold antiques for a while when I was a child, so I had seen my fair share of auction houses, spent countless despondent Saturday afternoons among the musty cool of aged furniture. But this was alien, this was a spectator sport. An excited burble rippled through the crowd, growing more intense with every bid that came from the bank of telephones. The lot, a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO Berlinetta, sat atop the stage like an old bull, de-horned and resigned to an anaemic, temperature-controlled future.
“Twenty-five million! Twenty-six million!” It was mid-afternoon on a soupy August day in 2014 on a golf course in California. Men in pleated shorts, big trainers and crisp polo shirts yee-hawed and slapped one another’s backs, drunk on the ever-loudening exhibition of wealth as it inched toward the inevitable crescendo. The sports car eventually sold for $38.11m — the new record price for a car at auction at the time — and the atmosphere was positively post-coital. Braying, revving and swilling ensued. But all I could think was that this thunderous automotive bacchanal had taken place in a tent.
Except, it wasn’t a tent, it was a marquee. One can only ever be underwhelmed in a tent, but in a marquee? Oh boy! The glamour… the possibilities. Tents are fundamentally unfun — painful to erect, gloomy to be in, unsatisfying to raze — but there’s a decadence to marquees that goes beyond protection from the elements. Think of the pale light silting through the translucent fabric, a carapace offering respite from the cruel summer without; the soft, green grass underfoot, wilted by dancing and the collective heat of bodies; the taught, sinewy guy ropes, stoic in their dedication to the levelling of errant drunks and distracted children. A tent may stop you getting trench foot, but a marquee is a petri dish of good times and bad ideas.
I grew up in the countryside where there were no dedicated event spaces — all we had was the passive jollity of skittle alleys, church halls, empty outbuildings — so when there was call for a marquee, it meant that whatever it was for would be good. (That’s not to say you can’t have fun in a skittle alley, but if the event insists on a purposebuilt structure and space for a hog roast then it has to be better than average.) Understandably, many of the formative experiences of my youth happened in the sun-cooked haze or disco-lit dark of a marquee.
As a child, I would gawp at the gleaming farm equipment and above-ground pools on show at the county show — great hulking forms removed from their natural habitats and statuesque in the quiet of the marquee. Later, when drinking became the sole concern of my peer group, we often drank in marquees. (There are always beers in a marquee, just look under the buffet tables.)
The annual “ball” at my local rugby club was probably the most depraved of all such pseudofresco shindigs. Ostensibly, it was an “awards ceremony”, but really it was just an excuse for thick-necked men to pour themselves into a tuxedo (and for thin-necked men such as myself to rub shoulders with proper shoulders). It ran for 16 hours, with a full breakfast served at 7am the next morning. And what began as a relatively erudite affair quickly descended into a blur of black tie, black humour and Blackthorn cider.
Come morning, it was like a Hieronymus Bosch painting made flesh, but the marquee stood firm.
Home from university one summer, I tried to peek behind the flap, so to speak. Seasonal jobs at the various local marquee companies were like gold dust, but I managed to wangle a trial shift at one of the bigger firms. I got to mingle with the mythic men and women that chase the sun building these monoliths of mirth, and they’re a unique bunch. It’s manual labour, but because it’s marquees, there’s a sort of unspoken refinement to it, a sense of bucolic artisanship that the other event logistics jobs couldn’t offer. More graceful than portaloo installation, less fastidious than floristry.
It was all going well until I told one of the older, more seasoned sages-of-the-’quee that his aftershave reminded me of India. I had been the year before, and something about his woody spiciness sparked visions of Himachal Pradesh, and I assumed he’d be flattered, or at least intrigued. Perhaps we would bond; perhaps he too had eaten Bhagsu cake in the hills above Mcleod Ganj. Unspeaking, he peered at me over a halfrolled cigarette with angered wonder before walking away to mallet a peg. I believe my chances of regular work went with him.
That hardship has made it easier to accept the grimy underbelly of marquees, and I’m not talking about the heinous patch of grass they leave behind, like sun-hungry skin beneath a plaster. They have a wistful, jingoistic undertone that catches in the throat like a bad teacake. The Twittersphere might call marquees “problematic”, a little bit Brexit, maybe. Easily lumped in with bunting, Bombardier beer and Nigel Farage’s baccy tin. In simplistic terms, they are big, white structures, and big white structures are being suitably clobbered throughout society. Can a tent be cancelled? I hope not.
But I often lament that missed opportunity, and more so over the past year. How different my life might have been if I’d spent my twenties lashing tarps to oaken frames, the sun scratching my back and wind rinsing my soul. Then, when the job was through or the weather was inclement, me and my cohort of vagabonds would decamp to a pub garden to revive our weary hands with crisps and cider, swapping stories of ill-fated knots, legendary erections and haughty foremen.
It is an epoch that never was, but that’s OK. A belated wedding season is just around the corner, and with this being a semi-post-pandemical summer, well-ventilated spaces will be all the rage.
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