Seventy Years a Showman by Peter Scupham
1833, Oxford. Hilton's drivers try to pass Wombwell's:
a clash of crowbars, tent-poles, whips. The fat man
made for the living skeleton with a door hook;
the skeleton batters the fat man with a peg mallet.
Wombwell's elephants break their wagon to splinters
while two little trembling figures, in our night-gowns,
press at their caravan windows. It goes down blazing.
At six years old, he works the family peepshow,
a mite in a clean pinafore and well-greased boots
pattering the death of Maria Marten by William Corder
in the famous Red Barn. At twenty-six peepholes
strings tighten on Corder's neck by tallow candlelight;
at the Red Lion, Wantage, a wretch with a fagging-hook
half-severs the landlady's head. All was confusion.
Learn the moral. Keep your temper, my boys,
keep you temper. The peep-show is briskly altered:
a cut-up woman, taproom, savage sickleman - and with
a plentiful supply of carmine for gore, the trick was done.
Newbury is all smallpox, bells and funerals. Father
lances each child's arm with a darning needle, rubs in
pustular serum. The results were all that could be wished,
and winter-work is carrying goods round Berkshire.
At the 'Bell and Bottle', two strangers beg a lift, hoist
a parcel of duds and things for a little job on the back rail.
He loosens the sack, and glimpses, bared by moonlight,
the pallid wax-like face of a dead woman. Trembling,
he gives way, drops off the wagon, runs to catch it up -
Georgie, not a word! Keep on the side of the horses!
'The Riots at Newport' quickly revamps the peepshow,
but at Lansdown Fair Bath roughs led by Carroty Kate -
strong as a navvy, a big brutal animal - wreck the booths
in a frenzy of drink, fire and mayhem. The showmen
yoke the wreckers on tent-ropes, drag them through water,
trice them to wheels, thrash them with whalebone whips:
Three dozen for every man jack of 'em. Lay on, boys!
On Romney March, he slips on a roundabout. A bolt
literally tore the flesh of the calf away from the limb.
Father, who fought with Nelson on the Victory,
saddles up the horse, rides three miles for a doctor,
refuses amputation, sews back the half, sailor-fashion -
sixteen huge stitches looping the silk. Don't halloa,
it'll soon be finished! Be a man, Georgie!
Glad when Nellie gives up the Lion Queen business,
he's off to Stalybridge wakes, where a row breaks out
at the gingerbread stall. Sheppard is kicked to pulp:
a ghastly shapeless thing in the clear sunlight,
purple stains blotching the white road-dust.
(Lancashire fights with teeth and iron-tipped clogs.)
That same night the family hear of Father's death,
and in the fall of the year he marries his Nellie.
Life is good with the Wonderful Performing Fish,
the Tame Oyster and the Suspension by Ether.
He performs in a charnel house, buys Astley's,
receives a gold medal from the Ostend Burgomaster,
tricks the Prince of Whales with a whitewashed elephant -
and is murdered in 1911 by a berserk servant.