***Chapter 20***

***Slugger's Story***

(Part Two)

Despite the swirling January snow, carrying her few belongings and, for much of the way, her young son too, Alice Jones had determinedly walked ten miles to Eddie Shaw's Travelling Fair only to faint from hunger at the very last hurdle.

She and her child were all alone in the world now. Tom Bennett had been killed in a fall from a roof while working as a labourer and there being no insurance pay-outs to common law wives or illegitimate offspring, Alice was left with only the pittance that they had managed to save. In those days, men were given preference in the jobs market and unmarried mothers, treated as the lowest of the low, had little chance of employment. Without work there was no money to pay the rent and one day, after another fruitless search, she returned to find the locks changed and her worldly goods piled on the doorstep.

For some days, Alice begged on the streets and slept where and when she could, but she had not yet given up hope. The news that Eddie Shaw's was setting up several miles away might mean the chance of something and she wrapped the toddler in an old woollen sweater and set off. Her arms ached when finally she put him down so that she could rap on the caravan door but at that moment her weak body finally gave out and she crumpled to the ground.

Convinced Alice had died and not knowing what to do except to continue hammering on the door in her place, the two-year-old was hysterical. Even more so as he felt himself floating in the air when the tattooed stranger snatched him up by the arm as both he and the plump woman hurried over to his mother. They were shouting and swearing and, alerted by the commotion, strange-looking people, the like of which the little boy had never seen before, began to emerge from caravans and tents: an enormously fat woman puffing and panting as she waddled up the slope; a lady and a man in sequin-sparkling semi-costumes and with glittering moons and stars painted on their faces; someone who looked like a man but with long yellow hair, who wore a purple satin cloak as if he/she had lately flown there. Thinking he must be to blame for the mayhem and quite terrified, being far too young to understand they wanted to help, poor little Slugger added to the terrible din with ear-splitting screams.

Neither Slugger nor Alice could know how that day would change their lives.

Eddie Shaw's Travelling Fair, with its acrobats, clowns and strongmen; with its magicians, dancers and singers; with its freak show and its music hall parodies, was hugely popular though Fair was probably not an accurate description of the nomadic show. It was a curious travelling circus minus circus animals - indeed, the only animals to be found anywhere were the horses that pulled the caravans and which were never expected to perform any tricks any time by anybody. A carousel, a handful of children's rides and try-your-luck stalls made up the "fair", but the real stars were its eccentric characters: the lonely and the unloved; the strange and the unwanted; those who were passed by and those who never quite fitted in: flotsam and jetsam cast adrift on life's ocean come together and gaining strength from each other.

Eddie Shaw was an odd mix of a man. A violent, hard drinking, heavy smoking ex-con, he could terrify grown men and yet be a gentle giant with the weak and vulnerable.

He had killed twice.

Once in a red mist of rage after seeing a man kicking a kitten to death. Eddie was tried for manslaughter, but the case was dismissed on a legal technicality. There was no legal technicality to set him free next time.

Wealthy Barbara and Jack Swales had lately bought The Oak Tree, one of the pubs he delivered to on his rounds as a drayman. Like Eddie, Barbara was an animal lover and they had got into the habit of exchanging banter and small talk as she brought apples or carrots for the horses that pulled the dray. Gradually the small talk became the confidences of friends.

From the very beginning, Eddie had remarked on the bruises and black eyes, but Barbara insisted she was accident prone. When finally she admitted to what he already knew, she pleaded with him not to touch Jack.

"I love him," she said desperately. "I can change him. He don't mean to do what he does. It's the drink talking."

The last day of her marriage, she limped towards Eddie, bloody, bruised and broken.

"Jack raped me again last night," she whispered, as she fell sobbing on his shoulder.

The prosecution said that Jack Swales's death had been particularly brutal. That he'd been flung about like a rag doll, kicked and stamped on, punched so hard that one eye was knocked out of its socket and his tongue pushed to the back of his throat. That the walls and floor were streaked with a mass of unrecognisable blood and bone that once was a human being and that Edwin Albert Shaw should be sent down for a long, long time.

When, twenty-five years later, Eddie finally tasted freedom again, Barbara, who'd visited him every week in prison, was waiting. Both now in their late forties, they married and sold up The Oak Tree, bought caravans and horses and followed the open road with their travelling fair…