The violence of my youth

Are there still funfairs? If so, are there dodgems? I haven’t seen either in years. The point of funfairs was that they travelled. They came to town and went away again, leaving only yellowing grass. Fun, in other words, was just a visitor. It was also tawdry, a word deriving from St Audrey’s Fair, which was famously down-market.

Funfairs were run by men in singlets, with wiry biceps, weather tans, roll-your-owns and Keith Richards faces. There was a cynicism to the way they fleeced you and that was part of the pleasure. You knew that nothing you paid them ever reached the taxman. Fairground people didn’t belong to the world of clean underwear and life insurance. They lived in caravans and the fun they sold was cheap sin.

There were dodgy shooting galleries and dodgy hoopla stalls and dodgy hamburger vans and a thousand dusty electric bulbs fed by seriously dodgy cabling. It was Satan’s glitter palace, luring the children.

Any physicist will tell you that centrifugal force is a fiction. Any funfair man will tell you it’s fact. And a fact that makes money. The rides depend on it. It flings people out and makes them scream. It’s the scream they pay for, the sense of danger. It’s a tease of mortality.

But to this boy at least, the best thing at the funfair was the dodgems. They were red meat, the heart of the matter, the thing to which everything else was a sideshow.

Dodgems were cartoon cars, the shape and colour of clowns’ shoes. Around their base ran a band of hard rubber like the handrail on an escalator. The controls were a steering wheel and a single pedal. Dodgems didn’t brake. A sort of rooster tail rose from the back of the car to a strip of bent copper that rubbed against a ceiling grid. Keith Richards went from car to car collecting money, then the power went on, the music started and the cars ran.

There were signs above the rink saying ‘‘This way round’’ and ‘‘No head-on bumping’’. Perhaps they were there to soothe adults, or to reduce legal liability, but they were transparent falsehoods, wonders of irrelevance. For these were cars you drove only to crash. The point was the violence. It was violence without consequences, but it was the violence, not the consequence less ness, that was the attraction.

Inside the car was a seat for one, or two at a squeeze. The squeeze was deliberate. It all but obliged the boy to put an arm around his girl. With the other hand he steered, casually defending his princess from the attacking horde. The more she screamed, the tighter his protective grip.

Head-on collisions were good, but broadside were better. What you sought was weakness, the car that had allowed itself to become trapped, immobilised, pinned against the rink’s edge. Then you drove at it like a dive-bombing Stuka, head down, elbows up and a grin on your face as wide as the Devil’s Dyke.

Even the meekest child became an assassin, venting the stuff he wasn’t allowed to do or say, the perilous stuff that weighs upon the heart. The Greeks had the Dionysian Mysteries, with their trances, dances, booze and ecstasies. The Romans had the Bacchanalia until the old men in the senate tried to ban them.

But you can’t ban human nature. It’ll bubble back up through repression and denial. There will always be things that bring out the happy worst of us. And the best of those things were the dodgems.