The circus arrives

Text 1: The Field Behind the Chapel, by Bryn Howells

An original novel extract.

Nobody heard them come. That was what Elwyn would remember afterwards, more than the elephant or the coloured wagons: that the circus had arrived in the night without a sound, like snow.

He went out at six to fetch the milk, as he did every morning, and the field behind the chapel, which had been nothing the evening before but thistles and a broken pram, was full of strangers. There were caravans painted red and gold and a lurid green, with curtains at their little windows. There were horses steaming in a rope corral. There was a tent, half raised, its great grey canvas sagging between two poles like the wing of something wounded.

The men working on it did not look like the men of the valley. They were brown from the sun instead of grey from the pit, and they called to each other in a language that went up and down like a song. One of them had a gold tooth that flashed when he laughed. One of them was a woman, in trousers, swinging a mallet as hard as any man.

Elwyn stood at the gate with the empty milk jug against his chest. He knew he should go. His mother would be waiting, and his father’s snap tin wanted filling before the hooter went at seven. But his feet had stopped listening to him.

Then something moved behind the nearest wagon, something large and slow and grey, and he forgot about his feet altogether. It came round the corner one step at a time, swaying, its skin as creased as an old coat. It was bigger than the chapel door. It was bigger than anything that had ever been in the village that was not made of iron. Its small dark eye found him across the wet grass and held him, quite calmly, the way his grandmother looked at him over her glasses.

The hooter went, far off at the pithead, long and flat. For the first time in his life Elwyn did not hear it.

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