All The Fun
by Karen Jones
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: Creative non-fiction about family holidays to Blackpool.
_____________________________________________________________________
At the back of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach there used to be a huge building with massive, crooked red letters proclaiming that this was the FUN HOUSE. A Fun House. A house just so full of fun it said so right above the door.
When I was a child, our family holidays meant Blackpool, and for me and my three older brothers, Blackpool meant the Pleasure Beach. However, Dad was always reluctant to let us explore the Fun House. We couldn’t think why. Was it the extra admission fee? Or was it viewing the outside passageway where you could see people walk across, let out a sudden scream then briefly disappear?
The passageway may have served as a warning to Dad but to us it was an enticement. Why were they screaming? What was going on? What were we missing out there, with our candyfloss and doomed goldfish we had won by first terrifying as we threw hoops over their bowls?
Eventually our pleading and whining wore Dad down. He grumbled as he paid the entrance fee but we assured him it would be worth it. After all, now we had access to – well, whatever was going to be so much fun.
The fun started the minute we went through the door. We had to negotiate three sets of six-feet-high skittles, which were rigged to bang together at imprecise intervals. The trick was to time it right and run through. It was a trick I never mastered.
The skittles were plastic but seemed to have been reinforced with steel. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many times Dad’s face appeared through the gaps to safety, the skittles clattered me to and fro until I fell out the other side, battered, bruised, but determined not to cry. It was our holiday, and Dad never tired of telling us, “Yous are here tae enjoy yersels.” And anyway, Mum promised to buy me a pokey-hat to take my mind off the pain.
Having passed the first test, we thought we were into the main attractions. Not so simple. Next we found out why people had been screaming and disappearing from that outside passageway. The cold evening air hit us and we discovered that the floor leading back inside consisted of square, steel sections. Step on the wrong section and your foot plunged into what felt like oblivion but was really just a dip – but a dip big enough to break an ankle. Dad carried me through successfully. My three brothers ran through with the kind of mad abandon that makes me glad they’ve never been in a situation where they had to negotiate a minefield.
Once inside, the possibilities for bruising, bleeding and maiming were endless. If Pennywise had a holiday home, it would have been The Fun House. But I had my cone and I was happy. I opted for a go in a strangely hypnotic spinning barrel. The point was to get inside and run – run your little legs off in time with the barrel’s spin. If you didn’t … well, if you didn’t, you ended up like me. I got in and ran – next thing I knew I was hitting the floor of the barrel, being spun to the top and then dropped in a heap, spun to the top, dropped in a heap, spun to the top – yeah, you get the picture.
I had been badly sun-burned that day (it was the 60s so sun cream meant being basted with pure coconut oil and sent out to broil to a ripe tomato redness) and the sun-burned skin was being methodically ripped from my exposed arms and legs, but the ice-cream from the cone was landing on me with every revolution of the barrel, providing a soothing but ultimately unsatisfying balm. Mum and Dad were screaming at the two big boys who’d climbed in either side of me to let me out, Dad repeating “Bloody hell” over and over again. The boys weren’t bad, they just couldn’t let me out because they didn’t know how get off the bloody thing either. Dad assisted. One boy was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and deposited in a grateful heap at Dad’s feet. Then Dad reached in for me and was almost sucked into the vortex of fun I was having. But he was a big guy and no stupid spinning barrel was going to get the better of him.
Safe in Mum’s arms, what was left of my arms was covered in Pond’s Cold Cream and kisses. Dad decided it was time to find my brothers and get out of the place.
We found one brother trapped and crying at another ‘attraction’. This particular instrument of torture was really quite ingenious. Two steel chutes facing each other, meeting in a steel valley. The idea was to run as fast as you could down the first chute, thus building up sufficient momentum to make your way up the second. Many small children, like my brother, couldn’t do it. Those whose parents hadn’t accompanied them into the Fun House may have been stuck there for years, like those prisoners of war who didn’t know it was all over, waiting for rescue and, in this case, a cone to soothe their pain.
But we had Dad and his now familiar mantra of, “Bloody hell!” He climbed the stairs, hurtled down the first chute, grabbed my brother’s T-shirt and hauled him up the second chute, reaching the top with a gasp that could have heralded a heart attack, but was really just a precursor to another, “Bloody Hell!”
Two more brothers to find and we could mount our escape. When we heard screams coming from across the room we knew where to go.
The oldest brothers were on ‘The Record’, a steel disc with a pole in the middle (seriously, these people must have had shares in a steel works). The disc spun at a ridiculous speed. One person ran on and held onto the pole, everyone else ran on and held on to that person. About sixty kids were now pinning their hope of remaining on the disc on clinging to one v-neck jumper – my brother’s jumper. Nobody’s knitting’s that good.
Children were being hurled off and smacking the walls at a rate of three per second, Dad valiantly trying to gather them all up and deliver them to shocked parents. When my brothers were eventually thrown free of the contraption, Dad said, “Right, let’s get out of this bloody place.”
We didn’t want to go. There were things we hadn’t been on yet. There was the zip wire, the biggest chute in the world, the…
Dad gave us a look that said, ‘Move!’ We moved. Well, we limped, we dragged, we whimpered.
Back in what now appeared to be the sanity of the main Pleasure Beach, our cries of, “Can we get waffles? Can we, Dad? Can we get waffles?” were met with a stony stare of disbelief from Dad and a gentle, “Let’s go,” from Mum.
The fun was over. Well, until next year. The Fun House would probably have been filled with new ways to kill us by then. And we couldn’t wait.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Creative non-fiction about family holidays to Blackpool.
_____________________________________________________________________
At the back of the Blackpool Pleasure Beach there used to be a huge building with massive, crooked red letters proclaiming that this was the FUN HOUSE. A Fun House. A house just so full of fun it said so right above the door.
When I was a child, our family holidays meant Blackpool, and for me and my three older brothers, Blackpool meant the Pleasure Beach. However, Dad was always reluctant to let us explore the Fun House. We couldn’t think why. Was it the extra admission fee? Or was it viewing the outside passageway where you could see people walk across, let out a sudden scream then briefly disappear?
The passageway may have served as a warning to Dad but to us it was an enticement. Why were they screaming? What was going on? What were we missing out there, with our candyfloss and doomed goldfish we had won by first terrifying as we threw hoops over their bowls?
Eventually our pleading and whining wore Dad down. He grumbled as he paid the entrance fee but we assured him it would be worth it. After all, now we had access to – well, whatever was going to be so much fun.
The fun started the minute we went through the door. We had to negotiate three sets of six-feet-high skittles, which were rigged to bang together at imprecise intervals. The trick was to time it right and run through. It was a trick I never mastered.
The skittles were plastic but seemed to have been reinforced with steel. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many times Dad’s face appeared through the gaps to safety, the skittles clattered me to and fro until I fell out the other side, battered, bruised, but determined not to cry. It was our holiday, and Dad never tired of telling us, “Yous are here tae enjoy yersels.” And anyway, Mum promised to buy me a pokey-hat to take my mind off the pain.
Having passed the first test, we thought we were into the main attractions. Not so simple. Next we found out why people had been screaming and disappearing from that outside passageway. The cold evening air hit us and we discovered that the floor leading back inside consisted of square, steel sections. Step on the wrong section and your foot plunged into what felt like oblivion but was really just a dip – but a dip big enough to break an ankle. Dad carried me through successfully. My three brothers ran through with the kind of mad abandon that makes me glad they’ve never been in a situation where they had to negotiate a minefield.
Once inside, the possibilities for bruising, bleeding and maiming were endless. If Pennywise had a holiday home, it would have been The Fun House. But I had my cone and I was happy. I opted for a go in a strangely hypnotic spinning barrel. The point was to get inside and run – run your little legs off in time with the barrel’s spin. If you didn’t … well, if you didn’t, you ended up like me. I got in and ran – next thing I knew I was hitting the floor of the barrel, being spun to the top and then dropped in a heap, spun to the top, dropped in a heap, spun to the top – yeah, you get the picture.
I had been badly sun-burned that day (it was the 60s so sun cream meant being basted with pure coconut oil and sent out to broil to a ripe tomato redness) and the sun-burned skin was being methodically ripped from my exposed arms and legs, but the ice-cream from the cone was landing on me with every revolution of the barrel, providing a soothing but ultimately unsatisfying balm. Mum and Dad were screaming at the two big boys who’d climbed in either side of me to let me out, Dad repeating “Bloody hell” over and over again. The boys weren’t bad, they just couldn’t let me out because they didn’t know how get off the bloody thing either. Dad assisted. One boy was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and deposited in a grateful heap at Dad’s feet. Then Dad reached in for me and was almost sucked into the vortex of fun I was having. But he was a big guy and no stupid spinning barrel was going to get the better of him.
Safe in Mum’s arms, what was left of my arms was covered in Pond’s Cold Cream and kisses. Dad decided it was time to find my brothers and get out of the place.
We found one brother trapped and crying at another ‘attraction’. This particular instrument of torture was really quite ingenious. Two steel chutes facing each other, meeting in a steel valley. The idea was to run as fast as you could down the first chute, thus building up sufficient momentum to make your way up the second. Many small children, like my brother, couldn’t do it. Those whose parents hadn’t accompanied them into the Fun House may have been stuck there for years, like those prisoners of war who didn’t know it was all over, waiting for rescue and, in this case, a cone to soothe their pain.
But we had Dad and his now familiar mantra of, “Bloody hell!” He climbed the stairs, hurtled down the first chute, grabbed my brother’s T-shirt and hauled him up the second chute, reaching the top with a gasp that could have heralded a heart attack, but was really just a precursor to another, “Bloody Hell!”
Two more brothers to find and we could mount our escape. When we heard screams coming from across the room we knew where to go.
The oldest brothers were on ‘The Record’, a steel disc with a pole in the middle (seriously, these people must have had shares in a steel works). The disc spun at a ridiculous speed. One person ran on and held onto the pole, everyone else ran on and held on to that person. About sixty kids were now pinning their hope of remaining on the disc on clinging to one v-neck jumper – my brother’s jumper. Nobody’s knitting’s that good.
Children were being hurled off and smacking the walls at a rate of three per second, Dad valiantly trying to gather them all up and deliver them to shocked parents. When my brothers were eventually thrown free of the contraption, Dad said, “Right, let’s get out of this bloody place.”
We didn’t want to go. There were things we hadn’t been on yet. There was the zip wire, the biggest chute in the world, the…
Dad gave us a look that said, ‘Move!’ We moved. Well, we limped, we dragged, we whimpered.
Back in what now appeared to be the sanity of the main Pleasure Beach, our cries of, “Can we get waffles? Can we, Dad? Can we get waffles?” were met with a stony stare of disbelief from Dad and a gentle, “Let’s go,” from Mum.
The fun was over. Well, until next year. The Fun House would probably have been filled with new ways to kill us by then. And we couldn’t wait.
About the Author
Karen Jones is from Glasgow. She was short listed for the 2007 Asham
Award, took third prize in the 2010 Mslexia short story competition, received
an honourable mention in The Spilling Ink short fiction competition 2011, won
second prize in the Flash 500 competition 2012, first prize in Flash 500
competition 2013 and first prize in the Words With Jam Shorter Fiction
Competition 2013. Her stories have
appeared in numerous magazines, ezines and anthologies. She salsa dances. She salsa dances a lot.