Stealing the Show

  Stealing the Show

  Christina Jones

  Nell Bradley’s family all work flat-out to keep Bradleys’ Mammoth Fun Fair in business. They’re expecting her to take the traditional showman’s route and make a suitable match with Ross Percival, who, with his state-of-the-art hydraulic touring rides, will bring traditional Bradleys into the twenty-first century.

  But Nell doesn’t love Ross, and still harbours dreams of an old-fashioned steam funfair, so when she discovers a dilapidated antique roundabout with carved horses for sale, she buys it and arranges to have it renovated without her family’s knowledge.

  But what she hadn’t realised is that the horses come with their own very sexy restorer…

  Published by Accent Press Ltd 2015

  ISBN 9781783753413

  Copyright © Christina Jones 2015

  First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Oriel

  Previously published by Orion Books Ltd 2001

  The right of Christina Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The story contained within this book is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, Ty Cynon House, Navigation Park, Abercynon, CF45 4SN

  The only child of a schoolteacher and a circus clown, Christina Jones has been writing all her life. When her father gave up clowning, he travelled with various fairs and Christina spent her school holidays manning hoopla stalls and playing the fairground organ. The gallopers were such a huge part of her life that she had her own horse – Uncle Sam – on Irvin’s roundabout, to whom this book is dedicated.

  For Uncle Sam and the Prefab Memories

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to all the Showmen who made my childhood so brilliantly happy and unusual, and who gave me so much help. Especially George and Mary Irvin, Bill and Benny Irvin and Uncle Sam, the Pelhams for the transport details; everyone travelling with Masons, particularly Lee Jones (painter, fairground art expert, and restoration genius); and to Rosie and Harry Hebborn for their help and encouragement. Many thanks also to the Hatwell, Williams, and Smith families for making it possible.

  And also, many thanks to Joan Hibbs, Secretary of the London Section of the Showmen’s Guild, for her invaluable help.

  I would like to add that, while everyone connected with fairgrounds mentioned here gave me accurate and correct information, as this is a work of fiction I used their facts only to suit my story. Any inaccuracies are me bending the rules to fit the plot, and in no way reflect their expertise.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter One

  She was never going to cook bacon and eggs for seven starving men in the early hours of the morning ever again. Young, muscular, and exceedingly grateful they may have been – but it played havoc with her sleep.

  Aching with exhaustion, Nell punched her pillows and snuggled down further beneath the duvet. There were plus points, of course: no matter how dishevelled and dirty or cold and crotchety she was, the plate-scraping appreciation helped to make it worthwhile. The fact that two of the plate-scrapers were her brothers dimmed the delight a little, of course, but then life was all swings and roundabouts.

  ‘Nell! It’s half-six!’ Danny’s voice bellowed into her brain from somewhere beneath her window. ‘You up?’

  Rotten dream, she thought drowsily. Danny’s voice – he probably wanted feeding. Everyone always seemed to want feeding. She curled her toes into the warmest part of the bed and started to drift …

  ‘Nell! Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes … no …’ she mumbled, fumbling for the bedside alarm. ‘I’ve only just gone to sleep.’ She peered at the clock. ‘Oh, hell.’

  Showering, cleaning her teeth, dragging on jeans and sweater, and making a mug of tongue-stripping black coffee, took a little over ten minutes. Most of this routine Nell managed to complete with her eyes still shut. Prising one open, she went through the process of packing every remaining movable object into the cupboards, securing the doors, and dismantling the gas and water-pipes in record time. Danny would scream at her to hurry again at any moment, she knew he would. She could happily disembowel her brother on mornings like this.

  Pausing in the doorway she risked Danny’s wrath, retraced her steps, and struggled into her long, black coat. The April sun was deceptively warm through the leaded windows of her bedroom, but she knew from experience that the cold Cotswold wind would whistle through the thickest layers.

  ‘Nell!’ Danny pounded on her door. ‘Get a bloody move on!’

  Muttering curses which should have shrivelled her elder brother to a warty toad, she managed to open both her eyes. ‘Have a heart, Danny. We’ve got ages yet.’

  Danny’s enraged shout indicated that they hadn’t. ‘We should have been out twenty minutes ago. Shift your butt and get down here!’

  He ought to have been a Butlins Redcoat, Nell thought, peering into the mirror to check her early-morning face, in the good old days of campers being awakened by a blistering cheerful Tannoy and plinkety-plonk muzak. Or a GMTV presenter. Or even a prime minister. Danny seemed to thrive on three hours’ sleep. She would have loved the chance of six.

  Her early-morning face peered back at her with some trepidation. Red-gold hair escaping in silky strands from a haphazard scrunchie displayed Nell’s freckles at their absolute worst. No matter that she was tall and slender, with sleepy, slanting eyes and the high cheek-bones inherited from her nomadic ancestors, those damned freckles ruined everything. Who could possibly look sophisticated covered in smudges and splodges? To Nell, the tiny golden speckles were each a yard wide and glowed like beacons.

  ‘You’ve been kissed by the sun, my love,’ Adele, her

  mother, used to say as she watched Nell scrub her face with lemon juice. ‘They’re nature’s blessings.’

  Nature was more than welcome to them, Nell thought. With her endless legs and long eyelashes, she had total sympathy with giraffes.

  Danny, stocky, weatherbeaten, and seven years her senior, grinned with all the smug superiority of a lark over an owl as Nell opened the door. ‘About bloody time. Me and Claudia are ready to pull out. Sam’s coupled up, and the Mackenzies were set ages ago.’

  Nell staggered down the steps of her living wagon and shivered. She ha
d been doing this all her life and still loathed the early starts. ‘You back the car up then, and I’ll do the hard work.’

  ‘Do you want one of the lads to help you? Hold your eyelids open?’

  With further anti-sibling invective, Nell slithered across the damp grass and stepped over the living wagon’s drawbar as Danny slid into the driving seat of her Volvo estate and began to reverse.

  He twisted round behind the steering wheel, looking as irritatingly wide awake and golden as a breakfast cereal advert. ‘Stop yawning and grab the coupling. And you have secured everything inside this time?’

  ‘Yes, of course I have. Most of it last night. After I’d fed everyone, washed up, checked the water tanks and the gas.’ Nell took a deep breath and heaved the ball-and-socket coupling into place, then snapped the electric wires from her trailer into the Volvo’s connections. Once – only once – had she left the Crown Derby and Edinburgh Crystal still on the shelves, but Danny never let her forget it. ‘And before I went over the loads, paid the lads, and made sure that Sam had put the takings in the night safe. Somewhere in there I also managed to get about five minutes’ sleep.’ She straightened up and glared at Danny. ‘OK. That’s fine – now stop being so unbearably cheerful and go and nag someone else.’

  Nell stretched, pushed her hair more firmly into its anchorage, and rubbed her eyes. By midday she’d be human, and by ten o’clock tonight she’d be the life and soul. By ten o’clock tonight she’d be in – oh, yes – Broadridge Green. Fifteen miles south down the A34 and into the leafy greenery of Oxfordshire. Bradleys’ Mammoth Fun Fair was moving on.

  This start to the working day was as commonplace to her as the mad commuter scramble for city-bound trains. Packing up, travelling, arriving, unloading, building up, spreading magic, packing up again … And people thought it was exciting and glamorous. Nell knew. They’d told her so. But then they only saw the glittery lights and the gaiety; they weren’t there on cold, wet mornings when the lorries refused to start, or the trailers were bogged down, and your hands were frozen and your feet saturated. Or at night when the crowds had gone home to snug beds and there were still three hours of pulling down, dismantling, and packing away before you could grab a cup of tea. She sighed happily. It was her life – and she absolutely loved it.

  The bark of a Seddon-Atkinson’s diesel engine blasted into the early-morning silence and Nell side-stepped the load-towing lorry. Danny, still functioning on fast forward, leaned down from the driving seat. ‘Go and ginger the lads up, Nell. They’re probably still asleep – and we need to move. Now.’ He revved the engine impatiently, making the towering two-tier trailer stacked with dodgem cars tremble.

  Nell, who didn’t blame their workforce for clinging to oblivion for as long as possible, headed across the slippery field towards what she and her brothers irreverently referred to as the Beast Wagon.

  ‘Danny’s on the warpath,’ she yelled up into the battered, dark-green truck. ‘We’re pulling out now – and if you don’t shift this instant, I’m not cooking when we pull in at Broadridge.’

  Muffled curses, a colourful oath, and one declaration of immediate suicide later, five unshaven and rather unkempt figures stumbled into the morning. The Bradleys’ regular core of gaff lads were fiercely loyal, extremely hard-working, and, as far as the authorities were aware, didn’t exist. Like most casual fairground workers they were there because it was preferable to their past. Some were ex-prisoners, some perennial drifters, some running away from debts and tangled love lives. As long as they were generally honest, worked well, and didn’t cause any trouble, no one pried too deeply. Casual staff members were recruited on a daily basis from wherever the fair stopped, but the regulars laboured long hours for cash-in-hand wages, three meals a day, and a bed and basics in the Beast Wagon. They all seemed happy with the arrangement.

  Relieved that this morning there were no dishevelled teenage girls sliding coyly from the depths of the Beast Wagon, Nell stopped in mid-yawn and tried to be business-like. It was difficult when her body still yearned to be beneath the duvet. ‘I knew that’d fetch you. See you at the other end.’

  ‘With sausage sandwiches?’ Terry, the youngest and most recent addition to the gaff lads, who looked like a fallen angel and managed to seduce a new girl every night, asked hopefully. ‘And brown sauce?’

  ‘OK.’ Nell nodded. She’d promise them anything to keep Danny off her back in the early hours – and sausage sandwiches seemed a small price to pay. ‘And brown sauce. Now scarper.’

  They did. Within minutes the eight-legged Foden trucks containing the dodgem tracks, the bulk of the paratrooper, the painted rails, and carrying the generators, chugged choking fumes into the wine-sharp air. The articulated Scammell wagon-and-drag that housed the waltzer immediately joined in, vibrating with throaty roars. Nell watched with a critical eye as the cavalcade pulled off the field, cheered away by the usual knot of fairground devotees and small boys, before picking her way back round the remaining loads.

  Each of the lorries and trucks were liveried in bright blue, with ‘Bradleys’ Fun Fair On Tour’ splashed across them in huge spiky scarlet letters and underlined with a sprinkling of Day-Glo yellow stars. Her brothers had chosen the primary colour scheme on the retirement of their parents, and Nell, who had objected strongly at the time, still detested it. Out-voted, she’d agreed that it was eye-catching, vivid, up-to-the-minute, but –

  It was a big but. Nell, who hankered after the maroon paintwork and romantic gold lettering of the fairgrounds of the past, had dared to say so. Her brothers had been outraged. Old-fashioned, out-of-the-ark, arty-farty to the point of bankruptcy, had been-some of their milder comments. Nell had acquiesced with bad grace to Danny and Sam’s self-professed superior business acumen, and vowed that one day she’d have an entire procession of wagons, painted in the traditional regalia, with ‘Petronella Bradley’ picked out in gold leaf.

  ‘Dream on, Nell,’ Danny had mocked. ‘Those days are long gone. We’ve got to look to the future and expand. We’re way behind the times even with the paratrooper, dodgems, and waltzer. We need up-to-the-minute rides that’ll bring the punters in in droves. No one wants the old stuff any more.’

  But she did, Nell thought, as she checked that every piece of litter had been collected and stacked in sacks for the refuse men to pick up. She always had, she admitted, as she made sure that there were no permanently-rutted wheel tracks or discarded cables to give coronaries to the high-ups on the parish council, and she probably always would. It was a dream that refused to go away.

  She straightened up as the Mackenzies, an entire family who ran a juvenile ride, swings, and various side stalls and who had travelled with the Bradleys for generations, chugged past her. Nell waved. The older couple were always referred to as Mr and Mrs Mac, and she doubted if even their sons and daughters-in-law and abundant grandchildren were aware of their Christian names.

  Satisfied that the ground was exactly as it had been when the fair arrived a week earlier, and would cause no eager cub journalist on the local rag to write headlines about the fairground’s desecration of the rural idyll, she headed back towards the remaining vehicles in the gateway.

  ‘Has he gone?’ Claudia, Danny’s wife, called from the driving seat of her Shogun. ‘He’s not just parking up the road and coming back to supervise the rest of us with a bullwhip?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ Nell said. ‘The way he was champing at the bit, he’s probably carved up everything on the A34 and is pulling on to the playing fields at Broadridge Green as we speak. Why? Have you got an exciting escapade planned? Are we going to run away and join the circus?’

  ‘Sadly, no.’ Claudia flipped down the vanity mirror. ‘Just got to see to the priorities. Danny’s such an old woman on pull-out mornings. He never understands that it’s vital for me to do the full slap before I face the world.’

  ‘Maybe you should get up earlier?’

  ‘That’s rich, coming from you.’ Claudia paused i
n applying black mascara to already black lashes. ‘There. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Very glam, if a bit OTT for the crack of dawn in Oxfordshire.’ Nell and Claudia were far closer than sisters-in-law. Their deep friendship and shared laid-back attitude exasperated the workaholic Danny. ‘Still, I’m sure Danny’ll appreciate it when you’re building up the dodgems.’

  Claudia slicked on glossy red lipstick, snapped the mirror back into position, and started the Shogun. ‘That’s the trouble, Nell, as you know. Danny doesn’t appreciate it at all. See ya.’

  Nell watched as Claudia negotiated the gate with the Shogun and the long, elaborately-chromed living wagon and gave a sigh. She had a sneaky feeling that her brother’s marriage was well into injury time. It was impossible to say anything to Danny, of course, and Claudia would never actually admit it. Nell opened the door of the Volvo. Divorce, or even separation, was very much frowned upon in showmen’s families. Their moral code was still deep-rooted in the previous century. You were expected to marry into the business – and stay married.

  The Volvo purred into life. Nell wondered what her parents would make of it. Thank goodness their retirement meant they weren’t on hand to witness the gradual disintegration. Parental guidance and approval was still much sought after amongst travellers. Patriarchal power reigned supreme. Although in the Bradleys’ case it was Adele who called the shots. Not, Nell admitted, that either of the Bradleys had ever been strict parents, but they certainly stuck to the rules – and expected the same behaviour from their offspring.

  Adele Bradley made no secret of the fact that she was desperate to become a grandmother. And as neither Nell nor Sam were showing any signs of making a serious commitment, Adele had pinned all her loudly-voiced hopes on Danny and Claudia. Nell winced as the Volvo and living wagon jolted across the field and hoped that the rift would be patched up before her mother got wind of it on the travellers’ grapevine. It would not be well received.