A couple of months ago a relative had a birthday and, being
a few thousand miles away with nothing material here to send, I looked on
Youtube for a suitable silly video. I found a compilation of birthday-cake
disasters. You know, the child leans forward to blow out the candles and falls
flat on his face into the cake. Or a leaf or leg of the table collapses and the
cake slides to the floor, or the proud cake-bearing mother trips on the way in
and…
It was with mixed feelings that I attached it to an e-mail.
You see, when I was very young — perhaps three — I lived with my mother
somewhere in London; Queens Park I think. Every Christmas she would take me to
Bertram Mills’ circus at Earl’s Court. It would be night-time; she would wake me
up and off we would go by the underground, a treat in itself. I still have a
cartoonish ‘wonders of science’ image of a tunnel sloping down into the ground
and then back up again at Earl’s Court, with a worm-like train running through
it.
The circus was, perhaps still is, one of the world’s
greatest: there were lions in a cage, with a jack-booted whip-wielding master;
tightrope walkers and trapeze artists; elephants; bare-back riders standing on
their horses in balletic poses as they galloped round the ring; and of course
clowns. There was a famous one called Coco, a big man with enormous shoes. And
there were dwarves or midgets (I’m never sure of the distinction) who ran round
on little dachshund-like legs; it was still OK in those days to laugh at people
who would now be called ‘Vertically challenged’ or some such.
There was one particular sketch the clowns did every year:
one clown, whose birthday it was, would sit expectantly in the middle of the
ring, and another would enter carrying an elaborate cake with great pinnacles
of icing. He would trip and fall face-down in the cake; everyone would laugh
uproariously.
Everyone except me. I would burst into tears, sometimes so
inconsolably I had to be taken outside. My mother would try to get me to
explain, and I would blurt out between sobs something about the waste of a
lovely cake. But what was really distressing me was something for which I
simply didn’t have the vocabulary, for which I couldn’t, in full consciousness,
frame the concept, let alone find articulate expression: the disappointment of
the birthday clown, and the mortification of his cake-bearing friend.
I suppose it sounds silly, trivial, or worse still precious,
but its psychological significance for me is huge. I remember that for years
afterwards I would re-enact the scene, making cakes out of paper and cardboard,
enlisting my sister or my cousin to play the part of the birthday clown. (I was
always the tripping cake-bearer.) I would do it over and over again, trying to
exorcise something. I never succeeded.
It has left me with a horror of a child’s being
disappointed, and an almost murderous rage against anyone who disappoints a
child.
I don’t know; make of it what you will: I felt the need to
write about it; perhaps this will be the exorcism I failed, back then, to
achieve. Anyway, what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t write whatever
you feel like writing?
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