The Same Children
So last weekend I finally made it to the Rottingdean Village Fair. I'd meant to go several times since moving here but something always got in the way. Not this year. On another glorious summer's day, I made my way down — wife and in-laws in tow — to investigate.
Apparently the whole village turns out for it. Children everywhere, faces painted as tigers and butterflies — you get a sticker at the makeshift entrance and you're in. An elderly chap waddled past, happily raising funds inside his own sandwich-board charity collection. Over there, a human tombola: three chortling volunteers instead of barrels. You ring the bell, they roll their arms, then reach into baskets for a piece of fruit. Get three the same and you win. Ding ding: two apples and a blackened banana.
Music drifted under the trees from Kipling's Gardens — tigers felt about right, given who used to live there — and blended with another band down by the pond. People drank Pimm's under the fig tree the way people always have.
I found a spot to sit more or less alongside Trunky T's grave — a bathing machine man and, depending who you believe, a smuggler, buried here a very long time ago. Nobody much noticed him. It made me think of a photograph in the Grange archive: children standing near that same stone, horses and a cow ambling past behind them, taken the best part of a hundred years earlier.
They are the same children. Different names, a different era, the same age, the same fair — the same churchyard doing what churchyards do: holding still while life carries on around it. I think about that kind of continuity often now, since losing my nan, Vivienne — it feels like my job to pass down what I can, to my son, and one day, I hope, to whoever comes after him.
A vintage Punch & Judy show among the headstones drew shrieks and mock outrage from an audience of scandalised toddlers. Behind them, all around them, stood the headstones of lives lived and finished. The present, laughing, right on top of the past.
Down by the pond, people clapped along to music the way villagers always have — the same spot I'd seen in an archive photograph, Victorian families skating across the ice in some long-gone hard winter.
But today was summer, and today was all about the present.
Walking through the fair felt like turning the pages of one of Mike's archive albums at The Grange: one life, then another, all circling something fixed. Different lives, the same place, all part of one longer story. I left with the specific, slightly strange feeling of having watched a century pass in an afternoon.
