The Treat

The ritual falls on the same day every year and and I am just one of many children gathering outside the church in the early morning, waiting impatiently for the parish priest to make his appearance. St Vincent’s Junior and Secondary schools remain shuttered for the day and at the time lessons usually start teachers and parents and children, everyone dressed in their Sunday best, can be seen making their way to Hardy Street, to the side entrance of the parish church to join the swelling crowd of parishioners congregating around the sacristy. The appearance at the sacristy door of Father O’Donohue hushes the milling souls into respectful silence: making the sign of the cross with his raised right hand, the old Latin ringing out over a sea of bowed heads, he delivers his blessing. This holy kick-off to the day’s proceedings triggers the dispersal of the crowd into Park Lane, now blocked to traffic, where the chaperones set about organizing scores of excited children into parade order behind the waiting parish band, WWII veterans resplendent in burgundy and gold uniforms and peaked caps, instruments polished and at the ready. Parents part from their children and drift to the pavements in front of the tenements either side of the church to loiter and chat and keep an eye on what’s happening to their kids shifting about in the road. Receiving the nod to lead off, Drum Major Gam McHugh gives his mace the high lift; the percussive snap and crack of sticks on snare drums and the sudden tremendous thud of the bass drum draws all heads to the front as the brass — tubas, trombones, horns and cornets — lets go with a rousing battle hymn of the Holy Roman Church. In high spirits the marchers advance.

The Band
Courtesy of Peter Salcedo

This was the ritual that started the day of The Treat, as it was known by every child and adult in the parish, a day-long pilgrimage to the seaside town of Southport, twenty miles to the north-west. It was a terrific business to be a child marching behind the band and singing your head off, irrepressibly happy at the prospect of the pleasure waiting for us in a land of magic and illusion and toffee apples; along Park Lane, past Paradise Street, across Canning Place, up South and North John Streets, into Dale Street, passing the grand offices of shipping firms and insurance companies, into Moorfields and Exchange Station, there to board the chartered locomotive waiting just for us, the children of the parish of St Vincent de Paul.

The elevated track ran parallel to several miles of riverside waterfront and from the train it was possible to look down onto the wharves, packed as they would have been with merchant shipping loading and unloading their cargoes in busy docks whose names memorialised an imperial past: Victoria, Trafalgar, Clarence, Nelson, Wellington; then it turned inland on a route through posh suburbs and miles of flat Lancashire countryside before approaching another coast and the even posher, greener suburbs of the marchers’ destination; after passing through the Birkdale golf links the train slows down to ease into its measured glide to Southport Station.

St Vincent’s de Paul’s Secondary School girls on the Treat.
Photo courtesy of Joan Davies Hart.

After lining up behind the band out on the street the marchers made their way to Salt’s Café, a capacious eatery in the town able to cater to large numbers of hungry children, there to be served lunch of fish and chips or sausage and mash, bread and butter, a pudding, and sweet milky tea. And after, onwards for the last leg of the journey to the Pleasureland Arch, the scenic entrance to the walled funfair at the edge of the beach. Here the children were unfettered and set free to wander and spend at will a precious ten or fifteen bob, or even a pound, at the windowless, warehouse sized Fun House with its hair raising Electric Chair, the revolving giant Barrel Walk that tipped you arse over end as you tried to get through it, the tilted Merry-Go-Round that threw you off when you tried to mount it, the maddening Moving Staircase, whose treads slid steeply up and down when they were stepped on; or to board a slow moving boat and ogle the silent, other worldly tableaux of the River Caves; and looming high over The Caterpillar ride a life-sized Noah’s Ark, a surprise hidden around every corner; The Hall of Mirrors, to catch a glimpse of infinity; The Cyclone, The Haunted Swing, The Helter Skelter, The Ghost Train, The Big Wheel, The Waltzer, The Dodgems. But the cash never stretched far enough for satiety and when it was gone the rest of the day was endured as a penniless voyeur, observing familiar faces at the games stalls tossing and hurling balls or firing air rifles at moving targets, or feeding the penny-a-go slot machines in the arcades, or the grinning faces on bodies being hurled about on the wild rides; and when it all got too frustrating, wandering around the beach and playing in the sand hills until it was time leave.

As the day wound down tired revellers converged on the Pleasureland Arch in dribs and drabs to ready for the exodus, a weary slog to the train and the return journey to Liverpool. Exiting Exchange Station, exhausted children and grown-ups marched in a body back to Saint Vincents, collecting once more around the sacristy to be led in a rendering of Faith of Our Fathers by the priests (our parish had three to care for the flock). The long day now drawing to a close with the trudge home, mercifully not far; then the fall into bed and the slide into oblivion.

Of the scant and often disjointed memories of my early childhood, I can recall with extraordinary clarity the afternoon I sat in the darkness of the Hope Hall, an old dissenters’ chapel converted to a cinema, watching Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. In the middle of the front row, perched on the edge of my seat, head craned up towards the giant screen, I gazed transfixed as the little wooden boy Pinocchio was led astray by Honest John and Gideon and sold to the wicked Coachman as jackass cargo to be transported to the menacing land of Cockagne and its haven for wayward boys, Pleasure Island. It was a spellbinding place, flaunting every kind of temptation for naughty children; I’d never seen anything like it before. The morality tale, the fearfully hypnotic subtext of Pinocchio’s seductive entrapment, has long since receded from view, but Pleasure Island’s geography, however, I can still vividly recall: the fair’s exquisitely colourful attractions that simultaneously enticed and repelled, the phantasmagorical landscape thrumming with a deranged buoyancy, are unforgettable. I was very young when I saw the film and as impressionable as only a small child can be, but when I went on my first Treat and experienced the fun that could be had in an actual fairground I feel sure there was an emotional arc coupling the reel magic of Pleasure Island with the real life enchantment of Pleasureland; the one preternaturally incubating the other. I retain a complete olfactory record of this bewitching place: the salty air wafting in from the Irish Sea, a bracing scent I’d buy if it was bottled; hamburgers and onions sizzling on hotplates puts me there; the smell of malt vinegar sprinkled on hot chips will bring it back; and I can be undone by a single narcotic whiff of candy floss.

In the days before the Big Bang of the digital universe, before the advent of colour TV, the Beatles and rock ‘n roll, and before fairgrounds like Pleasureland came to be described as amusement parks, the Southport funfair lodged in my consciousness as a blaring, primary coloured kingdom, an alternative reality before such things were conceived of, pumping out thrills and excitement from all points of the compass. On one intoxicating day of the year, like Pinocchio I was transported to an enticing, irresistible world far, far away from home.

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