There are fairs and fair days. Fairs for selling horses. Like in Ballinasloe, County Galway. Fair days. Fairs that people visited like in Omeath across the border from Warrenpoint. Fairs in town, for raising money. Fairs that were permanent like Smithfield in Belfast. Until it went up in flames. Smithfield was our casbah. Fairs in the countryside for country people. Selling and buying. Summer fairs. Fun fairs. Fair days. My fair is a fun fair. A summer fair.

It was like this...
It seemed to be every summer, late on, when the fair took over the football ground across the road from the house I grew up in. When the football season had ended, of course, and before the re-seeding of the pitch, battered and mauled in the rain-soaked, windy months of use. From my bedroom window, atop a mid-terrace of seven red bricked houses, I could see across the walls and turnstile to the Ferris wheel and stalls and hear as plain as day the slightly eerie strained music and watch the people traipse into the old football grounds to try their luck - pot-shots, throwing discs, buying candy floss, riding a miniature Dodgem car, spinning wheels of fortune. Chancing their arm. Mothers and fathers and kids; young couples; groups of boys and girls wandering about the place in the gathering dusk sometime in the summer of the late nineteen fifties and sixties.

A travelling fair. I didn't know how long that stand had lasted. Did it happen there every year before the war - the Second World War? The part of Belfast of which I speak had escaped the blitz of 1941 but nearby had not been so lucky. Had the families and crew who worked that fair been doing so for years, decades, generations? I suspect so. Whatever happened to them is another mystery. By the early seventies, when I had gone, the fair hadn't appeared for some time but I can still see it clearly and the groups of people squeezing in through the door into the grounds in a kind of Fellini-esque evening light. The background night is lit-up with street lamps, and the amber strobes of the descending city, not too far in the distance, and the mechanical chains and pulleys and noise of the fair with its repetitive music and the shouts and cries of kids and people strolling or showing off or trying their hand at winning garish prizes that everyone knew didn't amount to much, but who cared anyway, it was all a bit of fun that came around once every year when you were least expecting it there it was the trucks pulling up and even parking on the pavements and the fair being put up like a child's toy set, like a toy train or a farm with animals and tractors and pens.

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The Ferris wheel spinning away above and over everyone, lit up it must have been, unless I'm only imagining it all and a horse or two or a donkey and cart and plastic mementoes like BLESS THIS HOUSE or TO THE MOTHER I LOVE like the steering wheel of a ship and the sound of all the different stalls and the people milling about and shouting in an excited way for things knowing each other and I could see them closing up when the night was over and in the morning before anyone came there was a watchman in a trailer or a caravan wandering on his own through the deserted fair as if he was lost somehow but was really checking on things, going about his business, whatever that was, in the surprising brightness of the day and everything looked very matter of fact, mechanical, ordinary so much more different from the night before that you'd imagined was a bit dangerous but there he was one of the men walking through the fair in broad daylight as if he was just walking in his work-place looking after something with a hammer or a monkey-wrench in his hand and for all I know he could have been whistling, the sky was mostly cloudless and the sounds were of the everyday like a bus taking the corner at Alexander Park Avenue, a ship clearing the docks a couple of miles away, or the sound of a transistor radio on someone's back garden or kitchen porch and all the fair's gadgets and tents and entertainments were standing there in the old football ground silent and still until other people appeared and started to clean the place for the evening time. I think it was always night they opened but needless to say I could be wrong, all wrong. Maybe the fair only stayed for a week or two maybe it was in August before school started back and there was not the Ferris wheel, not really, just an imitation one to attract punters but no one actually sat in it and spun around looking over the north of the city to the lough and the rising hills but there was a man, he I can still see in the morning light walking through the fair, knowing what's what by the looks of him and the way he looked at things, looking maybe for something wrong or checking, double checking, seeing about something that may be broke the night before he I definitely saw from my window at the top of the house overlooking more or less the football ground and the fair in the summer sometime ages ago.

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