Full back piece of masked figures and a clown

Mam says I am not to write about the fair, so I will write about nothing else. The travelling show came through Ashby after the stoppage, three wagons and a painted van, and they set up on the cinder field behind the Miners' Welfare where the lads play football. Your Dad took me on Saturday. Under the big top a man in a gas mask walked the sawdust with a lamp on a string, and when the lamp swung past the front row the men went quiet the way they do at the cage before the bell.

Don't read this out at tea, but there was a clown at the end, nose painted like a pillar box and hair like the flames off the old coke ovens. He never smiled once. He held a paper twist of pennies out to the children, and every time one reached for it he pulled his hand back and laughed like a gull. Gordon Pryce said it was the most frightening thing he had seen since the Hollin fire, and nobody argued with him.

After, the strongman sat on the step of the van with us and told us the masks were cut from the old respirators the pit stopped using in '52. He said a man can wear anything if he is sure what it is protecting him from. I asked what that was, and he said, "Nothing you could cut out with a knife, lass," and went back inside.

I have kept one of the pennies in my apron pocket. Tell Tommy I am coming down on the Sunday bus and I will bring it for him to hold, and he can decide for himself whether the joke was on the clown or on us.

Love, Ivy