Far From Home. Anne Bennett

in the Bell pub over there and many will think themselves the strongest men in Christendom and then they will take on the champ.’

      ‘Ugh,’ Sally said. ‘Well, I think it’s horrid and I don’t see why anyone thinks it might impress us.’

      ‘Nor me,’ said Kate. ‘Tell you the truth, I would have severe doubts about any man who was willing to allow himself to be punched into the middle of next week for five pounds.’

      ‘Me too,’ Susie said. ‘Funny ideas about women some of these men have. Now, do you want to see the man tied up in chains or the one lying on a bed of nails first?’

      Sally laughed. ‘As I have never come near seeing anything like either of those, it’s all one and the same to me.’

      ‘Right then,’ Susie said decisively. ‘Let’s see Birmingham’s answer to Houdini first.’

      Sally hadn’t been sure who Houdini was, but she was soon enlightened when she saw the man standing with coils of chains all around him: he was urging the audience gathering around him to test their strength. Kate and Susie dropped coins in the hat that was lying on the floor watched over by an assistant, and Kate whispered to her sister, ‘He will do nothing until there is a pound in the hat.’

      ‘Then what does he do?’

      ‘Well, his assistant ties him up with chains, pulls a curtain around him and he frees himself.’

      ‘How?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Kate admitted. ‘And you can test those chains. Anyone can. Me and Susie have done and neither of us can see how it can be a swizz. He does the same thing every week.’

      However, the money in the bucket rose only slowly and it was cold to stand in one place for long, so after a while the girls wandered away. The stilt walkers were still parading around, bowing to people and proffering their raised hats, and Sally heard the chink of coins as people showed their appreciation of such skill.

      When she got her first glimpse of the seafood being sold from a van, she thought that she had never seen anything so disgusting in her life. It didn’t seem to her like any food a person should eat and the jellied eels looked positively slimy. ‘Fancy some?’ Susie said, seeing the distaste on her face.

      ‘Not likely,’ Sally said. ‘I’d say that I would have to be well hungry before I ate anything like that – near starving, in fact.’

      ‘I feel exactly the same,’ Susie admitted as they wandered back to the man now being encircled by the chains. Sally watched with awe. The man was trussed up like a chicken and she didn’t see how he was ever going to escape. The curtain was pulled and the assistant began a drum roll. The curtain billowed out in places as the man struggled inside it.

      People watched, some as anxiously as Sally, but she was also enthralled by the excitement of it all. And then the drum roll reached a crescendo, there was one last billow of the curtain, and then the man was standing before them, unharmed and unfettered, as he rolled up the curtain and tossed it to his assistant while he took a bow.

      Sally clapped as energetically as anyone and was still talking about it as they walked away. Kate remembered Susie taking her around the Bull Ring one Saturday night not long after she’d arrived in Birmingham and how amazed she had been by everything, so she knew just how Sally was feeling. ‘Another treat in store for you,’ she said.

      This time it was a man lying on a bed of nails. All he had on was a white sort of nappy and another white cloth on his head that Susie told her was called a turban. In the light from the spluttering gas flares, Sally saw his brown body gleaming, as if he had oiled it. ‘Wouldn’t you think that he’d be cold?’ she said in a quiet voice to Kate.

      ‘Probably doesn’t feel it,’ Kate said. ‘I mean, let’s face it, a man who can lie on a bed of nails as if it was a feather mattress is probably not concerned about little things like being a bit chilly.’

      ‘No, probably not,’ Sally agreed. ‘Is that all he does, just lie there?’

      ‘No. Watch.’

      A fair crowd had collected around the Indian lying on the nails and amongst them a group of about six girls. Those were the ones the assistant targeted. Eventually, coerced by the man, and urged on equally strongly by her friends, one of them stepped forward. ‘Up you go, darling,’ the assistant said. ‘He promises not to look up your skirt. Ain’t that right, Abdul?’

      ‘That’s right,’ said Abdul, though he still had a great grin on his face.

      The girl removed her shoes and then, holding the assistant’s hand for balance, stepped cautiously on to the man’s stomach. A sympathetic ‘Ooh’ ran through many of the women watching because the nails could clearly be seen pressing into the Indian’s skin, but he made no sign that he could feel it and even the expression on his face didn’t change. To Sally it was almost unbelievable, and she watched avidly until the girl had got off Abdul and he had risen to his feet to take a bow. Then she gave a great sigh of relief. ‘Gosh, I thought when he stood up he would be all over holes,’ she said to Susie and Kate as they began to walk away, ‘but he wasn’t.’

      ‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘We’ve seen him many times.’

      ‘But how does he do it?’

      ‘I haven’t a clue.’

      ‘Come on,’ Susie urged. ‘Stop worrying about him. It’s time for a bit of jollification now because the fiddlers and accordion players are setting up in the corner there, see?’

      ‘Oh yes,’ Sally said, following the direction of Susie’s pointing finger. As they approached them, Susie said, ‘They will play songs and tunes from your homeland first. It used to make Kate feel really homesick sometimes, didn’t it?’

      ‘It did. I’ll not deny that,’ Kate said. ‘But it was the people I missed rather than the place and now I think it’s nice to hear the tunes I grew up with.’

      Sally agreed with that, and even more as the music began and it made her feet tap. ‘A lot of this is really music to dance to,’ she said.

      ‘I know,’ said Kate. ‘But if you tried that here you might end up being locked up. They’d probably think you’d gone doolally tap.’

      ‘Yes, they might,’ Sally said with a smile. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t do anything. I just wish I could.’

      Seeing the two of them so engrossed in the music, Susie stole away to where she had seen the baked-potato man park up. She could smell the delicious aroma of the potatoes cooking as she approached, and a little later, Kate and Sally were delighted to be given one each, served in a poke of paper folded over into a triangle to protect their hands. ‘Aw, that was really nice of you. Thanks,’ Sally said, tucking into the potato with relish.

      ‘That’s all right,’ Susie said. ‘Like Kate said, as soon as the smell wafted down, I felt hungry.’

      ‘Well, we did only have teacakes earlier,’ Kate said. ‘They don’t fill you up over much.’

      ‘Yeah, and I thought you needed your strength built up for the singing,’ Susie said.

      ‘What singing’s that then?’

      ‘Songs from the music hall,’ Susie said. ‘That’s quite popular in Birmingham. You probably won’t know any of the songs, but they’re easy to pick up. It’s mainly funny stuff, you know?’

      And Sally found that it was just as Susie said – she was able to pick up the choruses when she’d heard them a couple of times. They started with ‘Hello, Hello, Who’s Your Lady Friend?’, and then went on with ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’. ‘I’m Henery the Eighth I Am’ made Sally laugh, and so did ‘Oh Mister Porter’, and she loved ‘Tar-ar-ar Boom-de-aye’, and the fact that it was repeated eight times, which meant that she could belt it out with as much gusto as the rest. ‘Daisy Daisy’ got everyone swaying,