TARDIS with striped scarf on upper arm

Nobody went in. The candyfloss man said the windows glowed from inside on dark nights, though he admitted the glass looked black by day. Wilf Harbord, who had lost a finger to a rope in the wet summer and believed in very little, took a striped scarf from his trunk, the stripes of rust and mustard and bottle green his mother had knitted before she died, and wound it twice round his neck. He said it was for luck. On the fourth night he climbed the three steps and knocked twice, the way you would knock on a neighbour's door.

The door opened on a room far larger than the box, with a round console humming like a kettle and a thin man in a coat too long for him, who looked up and said he had been expecting a spanner. Wilf said he had come about the fair's luck. The man said luck was only time not yet spent, and he could lend Wilf an hour of it if Wilf could say what he would do with it. Wilf looked out past the door at the ferris wheel, its gondolas swinging empty over the field, and asked for the wheel to keep turning until his granddaughter had ridden it once.

The man tugged the loose end of the scarf, and a stripe of rust came away in his fingers like a thread of cooked sugar. He tied it to the lamp on the roof. When the lamplighter came round at dusk the wheel was still turning, and every autumn after, the fair pitched on Harrowgate Green with one blue box at the edge of the tea tent, and a fresh stripe of wool hung from its lamp.