The Fairground Child

The wind on the Cape came in from the south-west and, if a boy stood still enough on the top of the hill above Woodstock, he could hear the steam organ of the fair before he could see it. William Heygate Edmund Colbourne Butlin was a boy who stood still enough. He was seven years old, and everything about him — his overlarge coat, his damp black hair, the sixpence sweating in his palm — was borrowed.

The fair belonged to his grandmother's people. His mother had run away with a showman and been forgiven for it, and unforgiven, and forgiven again. In the tent where the fortunes were told, he learned the smell of paraffin and the trick of never turning your back on the customer.

He did not yet know that he would spend the rest of his life inventing places where the customer would never want to turn his back at all.