Dodgems
08/29/1969
“They’re called dodgems for a reason, Isabella. They’re not bumper cars, they’re dodgems. The aim is to *avoid* being bumped.”
He loved fairgrounds. It was the one thing I could guarantee whenever he came back home – a trip to Battersea. ‘Anyone for the seaside?’ he’d joke. Mother would always demur.
The park was schizophrenic. Half the rides were set in someone's (a man's) idea of an olde world English village. The other half was space-age themed. For the first few years, I was too small to go on the bigger, faster rides, which meant residing in olde world.
We’d sit in vintage cars running on rails, me pretending to drive and Daddy providing commentary on an imagined race with Graham Hill up ahead. Or he’d buy me a head-sized plume of pink floss and chauffeur me around the central lake in a tiny buzzing motor boat. I can remember how the wooden stick of the floss would rasp against my tongue.
We’d sit together on a gilded horse, looping round and round and up and down to the sound of a dopplered Wurlitzer. ‘Giddyup’, he’d say. ‘Don’t let go!’. And he’d hug me round my middle and I’d breathe in the smell of his jacket.
By the time I was eight he would let me ride a horse on my own. With each rotation I’d seek him out and see him stood in the same place, hollering and waving ‘til the end of ride. Sometimes he'd do a double take as if he’d caught sight of me for the first time. Sometimes he'd hide behind someone else and then jump out.
The fairground was one of the few places I could see him as a joyous person, fun to be with, laughing without any sign of the distance or sadness that modulated most of his attempts at a shared joke or a lark. He’d shoot corks at little tin men and win me a gonk, smack coconuts with wooden balls, bounce ping pong balls into goldfish bowls, hook yellow plastic ducks from a piddling stream. He’d banter with the stall holders, his voice becoming louder and more piratey, like an old Kentish hop-picker. And he’d always win more than he lost. I never came away with anything less than three fluffy toys and a bag of sweets.
As I got older, we entered the space-age with its spinning, dizzying, lurching, up and down, round and round, humping, bumping rides. Daddy loved it. He was particularly expert at shifting his bodyweight on the waltzers - the Cavalcade of Swinging Cars! We would spin non-stop at a dizzying rate ‘til my ears popped and my head rang like a sailor after a storm.
He would roar and wave his hands in the air on the water chute, savouring every moment - the slow cranking climb, the sudden rush, the swoosh and the splash.
And he’d wait behind me at the top of the Joy Glide helter-skelter, both of us with our scratchy frayed doormats in our hands and a liberating glimpse of the river. He’d promise not to go too early, but then jump on soon after me, so I could hear him skidding and scuffing nearer and nearer all the way down, calling to me – “I’m coming. Hurry up. I’m coming!”
His favourite was the Dodgems. We’d always wait a while before targeting the car we wanted, with fuzzy 50s rock n roll music blaring out of filthy speakers in the ceiling, and him shouting in my ear, pointing out which ones had better electrical contact and which ones were sluggish or needed servicing. He’d never let me drive on my own. Even as I got bigger he’d insist on squeezing in with me and sharing the driving.
And we’d wrestle for control of the car. Any moment he thought I might bump into the side or into another car, he’d grip my driving hand fiercely and yank the wheel hard. So proficient was he at driving that he could turn the car on a sixpence and would sometimes show off by insisting on driving backwards for the entire ride, avoiding any kind of crash, even though he knew all I really wanted to do was bump and bump and bump...
Every fair visit he’d tell me how the makers designed the cars so they were deliberately hard to control and naturally veered and zig-zagged in what he liked to call ‘a promiscuous and irregular path’. "A path no daughter of mine will be taking," he would add. He'd brag about teaching Elvis to drive a dodgem in 'Roustabout', how terrible Richard Attenborough had been at driving jeeps and how he'd raced his ancient Mercedes against famous drivers and film stars of the Fifties with names I'd never heard of: Mike somebody, Peter somebody, Jimmy somebody, all of them mangled up in car crashes long ago, forgetting they were meant to be dodging instead of bumping.
And as the afternoon died and the lightbulbs on the giant windmill started to glare and glitter in the dusk, we’d always end with the Rotor. He'd be the show-off who'd start off with a handstand, his trousers sagging down to reveal his embarrassingly long socks and thin white legs. We'd start spinning and all stick to the wall, and then the floor would sink. There he'd be, stuck upside down to the wall like a pigeon that had smacked into the front of a train - his eyes closed, playing dead, pretending to be so unbothered by it all that he could fall asleep. The centrifugal centre of attention he'd be, until some weakling puked up and we all got splattered.
And then home, later than had been promised, with mother always sitting primly in the sitting room with her third gin and Cin and a fag on, sourly fretting to Daddy about me being taken to ‘such a place’.
Just after my 12th birthday it was all over. Three children killed and dozens injured on the ancient The Big Dipper. The carriages had broken free of their haulage rope, failed to brake, hurtled backwards down a steep incline and smashed through the barriers at the bottom. Carnage.
‘It was always a health and safety nightmare that one,’ said Daddy. ‘No proper maintenance.’
‘I told you so,’ said Mother. The whole fairground shut down and we never went back.
That next year, Daddy started taking me to the movies instead. We went to see ‘That’ll Be The Day’. I squirmed in my seat worrying that Daddy would see how much I fancied David Essex, with his deep brown-eyed stare, his thick black hair, his cheeky reedy East End voice. Daddy didn’t notice. He was too busy pointing out errors – how the fairground scenes were set up, how Essex handled the dodgems, how Ringo Starr loaded the lorries. “They’ve never worked a day on a fairground in their lives,” he whispered loudly. I could hear people behind us sniggering.
And then there were the sex scenes. Grubby behind the rides sex. Back of the caravan sex. And I was watching it with Daddy. Had that been going on at Battersea, while me and Daddy romped and spun, drove and rode so innocently? Was this the kind of life that Daddy had been living with chums like Mike, Peter and Jimmy? Suddenly the fairground became, a less innocent place, a place one maybe shouldn’t go with one’s father.
I blushed my way through the rest of the film, steadfastly looking straight ahead, keeping my hands very still and firmly on my lap, cradling a Kia Ora drink, but never daring to put the straw to my lips.
Every moment David Essex grabbed and mauled another girl, I imagined my father looking across at me to gauge my reaction, monitor my emotions. The film went on forever – David at the fair, David leaving the fair, David going home, David getting married, David having sex with his best friend’s girl, David arguing with his mother, David getting a job, David quitting a job, David buying a guitar.
When the credits finally rolled and the lights came up, I was so relieved I thought I might wet myself. I jumped up out of my seat and pushed past the rest of the people in the row. I didn’t even say sorry. I just wanted to get away and hope Daddy would take me home without asking me any questions – “What did you think of it? Did you like that young fellow? He’s a pretty boy, isn’t he? Hardly Elvis though”
But when I looked round to check he was following me, he wasn’t there. I couldn’t see him. And when I stopped to check, I could see he was still in his seat, slumped down, flat out.
He’d spent the whole second half of the film fast asleep., dreaming, no doubt, of one more circuit of the dodgems, one more ride on the flume, or another upside-down performance on the Rotor.