Bears of England Read online

  The bear filled its lungs, brought both paws up before it, and slowly raised its head. An awful grimace was spread across it. And the crowd saw how the bear drew its paws out towards its shoulders … and how the chain that held them took the strain.

  The crowd was entranced, and for the first time in several days a stillness fell across the fields. Samson rolled its head right back, teeth bared, to face the sun. And those down at the front were able to see how a single link in the middle of the chain slowly opened. Until, finally, it flew off, the chain split, and the bear’s arms were free.

  The audience was half-inclined to cheer such a spectacle – but something stopped them. Something held them back. Samson studied the crowd quite coldly. Then filled its lungs again. And this time, instead of holding its breath, to generate the strength required to break its chains, the bear opened its great jaw and all that power came flooding out.

  A staggering roar rolled across the city … raced up the river … swept down every lane and alleyway. And after a moment, in the silence that followed, other roars came rolling back in. One came up from Saffron Hill … one from Toothill … another from out at Hockley-in-the-Hole. Every bear in the city was calling out now. The roars grew louder and more persistent. And it was at this point that the crowd felt a sudden and powerful inclination to be somewhere else.

  The stage had been built to a height of twenty feet, to allow as many Londoners as possible to witness the ceremony and to discourage them from attempting to climb up onto it. But Samson was down off it in next to no time. People suddenly started moving. In a matter of seconds the ground before the stage was cleared, save for the Lord Mayor’s mangled body, like a drowned man, revealed by the tide’s retreat.

  As Samson advanced people began tripping and falling. Began to be trampled underfoot. And when they headed into the streets and those same streets narrowed, the crowd heaved and surged like a mindless animal, until the bodies began to collect, compressed and breathless, and the rest turned back and went charging off a different way.

  Here and there, the bear stopped to pick up some scrap of food, dropped in the melee. For the first time in his life Samson was entirely free from chains. And as he made his way down Houndsditch he roared again, and a hundred roars came echoing back towards him, as the city’s bear population began to rally, began to come to life.

  Down at Bankside a dozen bears heaved at the bars of their cages until the cement finally cracked and crumbled and they went charging out into the streets. And every bear from Aldgate all the way over to Long Acre took hold of the bars and they too started heaving at them, their strength suddenly doubled now that the roars of all the free bears filled their ears. As each bear broke out it joined forces with the others and together they followed the roars of those bears still imprisoned and set about liberating them, until some bear-jailers panicked and threw the doors open, in the hope that their bears might go off and lay waste to some other part of the city and that they might be spared.

  The bears roamed the streets in great packs, broken chains still hanging from their wrists and halters. And the blinded bears came up into the daylight, led by the sighted bears. The dogs barked, then ran for cover. The cats hid wherever they could. And people dashed here and there, frantically looking for husbands, wives and children, as the bears toured the streets of this new London. And anyone foolish enough to try to obstruct them was swept away.

  The Londoners retreated into their homes, then up into their attics and finally out onto the rooftops, where they had a grandstand view of their neighbourhood being ripped apart. For three whole days the bears ruled the city. On the Sunday the infantry were sent in to try and impose some sort of order, but within a couple of hours they were chased back out.

  Bear-anarchy was firmly established and people began to wonder how many weeks or months the bears might prevail. But on the Tuesday morning the city woke to find the streets deserted. The roars had subsided soon after midnight, but no one dared investigate until the sun was well and truly up. When they finally crept out it seemed as if every pane of glass in the city had been shattered – not just those in the shops, but in every house and church and inn. Furniture had been dragged out and homes ransacked. Horses wandered, wild-eyed. Rats flitted between the debris. But the bears were gone.

  In the weeks which followed there was the odd report of a gang of bears seen on the move, upcountry – the first on the outskirts of Oxford, another just south of Manchester. Then nothing. And it was widely assumed that the bears had either set up shop in another part of the country or simply starved to death. For the people of London, either outcome would have been quite acceptable.

  But essentially that was the end of bear-baiting and bear-pits and bear-gardens. Perhaps, some Londoners thought, it was for the best. All the same, as they swept up the mess and salvaged what little they could from the wreckage, they were inclined to wonder how they might be expected to entertain themselves now – now that their bear-sport had been suspended and the bears had had their sport with them.

  4

  Circus Bears

  It was a time of elasticated ladies – a time of human cannonballs. Right across the land, men were swallowing swords, setting themselves on fire, being bundled into sacks and thrown into the sea. Women were tying themselves in knots, having knives thrown at them and, in any time they had left over, juggling budgerigars.

  If you were unusually tall or short or ugly, or had bits missing or, indeed, had supplementary bits, then there was money to be made – if not necessarily by you, then on your behalf. If you happened to be a woman with a beard or a cleft palate, or a fellow with a good-sized goitre or especially scaly skin then the general public would queue up outside your allotted tent and hand over their hard-earned money to have a closer look at you.

  And just as the public would queue to see unusual-looking humans, they also liked nothing better than to see wild animals strut and stroll just like one of us. So there were learned pigs, and dogs dressed as infants and monkey-acrobats. There were mathematical horses, seal-musicians and, inevitably, there were performing bears.

  Roughly forty bears were employed in England’s fairs and circuses. No one could quite recall, or frankly cared, where they originated. The bears themselves had no strong opinion on the matter. Any memory of their ancestral home had been shaken out of them as they clung to a horse as it galloped round the ring’s perimeter, or been burnt away in the heat of the spotlight as they prepared to step out onto the high-wire. Whatever variety of bear they had once been was now irrelevant. Their masters saw them only as circus bears and, in truth, that was how most of the bears saw themselves.

  It was a hard life but earlier bears had had it harder. Generally speaking, circus bears were not too frequently beaten, and only killed if they’d behaved especially badly or reached the age when they were of no further use. The odd hank of meat was tossed into their cages most evenings. And some bears developed quite a powerful bond with those men and women who looked after them.

  Frank Boswell was the animal trainer with a small touring circus and, as such, had in his charge a rather crotchety old bear called Mr Fowler. Frank Boswell was not a well man. To put it bluntly, Frank was a drunk. He had always taken his drinking more seriously than other people, but in recent years had hit the bottle so early in the morning and carried on so late after the show that it was hard to tell when one day’s drinking ended and the next day’s boozing began.

  Late one night Mr Fowler woke to find old Frank peering in through the bars of his cage. Mr Fowler had the feeling that he’d been there for quite some time. As Mr Fowler watched, Boswell took his keys and undid the cage’s padlock. Then he led the old bear out into the night.

  Mr Fowler wasn’t sure what was happening. To be fair, the old bear was still half-asleep. It was too late in the day, the bear reasoned, to be learning a new routine. Too late in the day in all sorts of ways. Frank brought a finger up to his lips and led him between the caravans and out into
a meadow. It was summer and the air was warm and still. Frank stared out over the moonlit fields. Mr Fowler studied his trainer with not the slightest idea what was going on inside of him. He seemed to have drifted off into some drunken reverie. When he finally re-surfaced the old man turned and looked up at Mr Fowler, then began undoing the bear’s remaining chains.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ old Frank insisted. He might have been crying. ‘I should’ve done this years ago.’

  The bear rubbed his wrists and looked about him. And for a while, man and bear just stood beside each other in the warm summer’s night. Mr Fowler didn’t seem to properly appreciate what was expected of him and after a minute or so Frank was obliged to give him a gentle push, to set him on his way. The bear took a single, hesitant step. He wasn’t used to being out at such an hour. The bear was baffled. His trainer pointed across the meadow towards the trees in the distance. The bear began to shuffle off in that direction, then stopped and looked back at the man who’d been his constant companion for all these years. Frank pointed again, to encourage the beast to get a move-on. But something was stopping the bear. It dropped its head and shuffled back over to Frank – towered over him. Slipped both paws around his shoulders and drew the old man into him.

  ‘I shall miss you, Mr Fowler,’ Frank told the bear. ‘You have been like a friend to me.’

  The bear continued to embrace him, as if, now that he was on the verge of freedom, he was in two minds as to whether he had the courage to go.

  ‘Mr Fowler,’ the old trainer whispered. ‘You’re … hurting … me.’

  But Mr Fowler just kept on squeezing – kept on squeezing until, one by one, the trainer’s ribs began to pop. The bear kept on. Couldn’t help itself. Kept on squeezing until the last of Frank’s drunken breath was gone. When it finally released its grip Frank Boswell dropped to the ground like a sack of potatoes. Mr Fowler stood and looked down at him for a while. Then he turned and headed across the meadows. As he went, he glanced up at the night sky. By Mr Fowler’s reckoning, he still had a good three or four hours before dawn.

  The authorities finally caught up with Mr Fowler late the following morning and promptly hanged him. Just threw a rope up into the nearest tree capable of taking a bear’s weight and strung him up for all the world to see. This was a little unnecessary, considering the bear had been knocked down and killed by a carriage a good three hours earlier. Hanging him was a sort of belated retribution for the death of Frank Boswell. It was also, in its way, intended as a warning to other bears.

  And word certainly got around the other circuses. People who’d barely heard of Boswell suddenly claimed to have been on the most intimate terms with him, and the few qualities he’d had to recommend him became so wildly exaggerated that overnight he was transformed into such a paragon of honour and decency that those folk who really did know him thought that people must have been talking about somebody else. But the repercussions of Frank’s death were also felt in human–bear relations. And there’s no doubt that bear welfare (which wasn’t of the highest standard to begin with) suffered a significant dip.

  The bears were already deeply disgruntled at all the extra risks being incorporated into their performance. It was no longer sufficient for a bear to walk the high-wire with an open umbrella. They were now obliged to carry a suitcase and wear a two-piece suit as well. The suit was specially tailored for them, with buttons down both sides for easy fitting and removal, but it was still an added hindrance. Bears in one touring circus were regularly kitted out in skirts and dresses, with bonnets tied to their head. There was even talk of training bears in some of the trapeze work. The bears did not like the sound of that at all.

  When they’d started out the bears had carried the pole across their chest, just like any high-wire walker. The trainer’s only objective had been to get them across without incident. But as soon as the bears were competent, the pole was removed and ever since there seemed to have been an unspoken policy to have the bears appear more and more ridiculous.

  Only six months earlier, a bear had taken a tumble. It had been dressed up like a mountain climber, with a coil of rope across one shoulder and a canvas rucksack on its back. One of the boys had pulled the straps too tight when fitting the rucksack and, halfway over, the bear had twisted its shoulder, just to loosen it off a bit. It lost its footing and fell fifty feet onto the sawdust. For ten long minutes it just lay there, writhing and groaning, until someone managed to track down Bob Welland, who was known to own a rifle and he finally arrived and put the creature out of its misery. There was a cursory effort to sanitise proceedings by having a few lads hold up blankets. But there was no mistaking the gunshot when it rang out.

  A day or two later, one of the broom boys claimed to have caught a pair of bears ‘communicating’ late at night, through the bars of their cages. As he passed by, he said, the bears suddenly fell silent and just watched him until he was out of the way. Even then, it was suggested, seeds of dissent had been sown and the whiff of conspiracy was in the air.

  *

  Horace Maddigan liked to set himself apart from the hoi polloi in all sorts of ways, but one or two in particular. Professionally, Maddigan’s Family Butchers had earned him a seat at the top table of Bristol’s Chamber of Commerce, and privately Horace had a bit of a thing for circuses. Like everyone else, he delighted in the apparent barely controlled chaos, but he also had romantic ideas about the exotic company and the rough-and-ready way of life. Falling asleep at night, he liked to pretend that he was tucked up in a caravan, with a long day’s drive ahead of him and an acrobatic wife at his side who, with a little encouragement, was capable of putting both ankles behind her neck.

  One Tuesday evening, after a meeting of local businessmen, and for the only time in his life Horace allowed the personal to get tangled up with the professional when he got to talking with a couple of other fellows about his dream of staging the country’s first circus convention. And through a combination of rare Scotch whiskies and tales of wild goings-on involving circus women, he somehow managed to infect his companions’ addled minds with his own delusions, and to such a profound degree, that the three of them made a pact, there and then, and over the next eighteen months devoted their every spare hour to plotting and scheming until they managed to drag Horace Maddigan’s dream into reality.

  For the whole of May the fields out by Ashton Court were packed with big tops. Many of the circus workers and performers were well acquainted. Some were old friends, which led to some serious drinking sessions, one or two of which got out of hand and necessitated the calling out of the local constabulary. There were also a few long-standing rivalries and instances of bad blood, which occasionally boiled-over and necessitated calling out the constabulary again. But on the whole the houses were full, or near enough, and it seemed that the people of Bristol and the surrounding villages were only too willing to hike up the hill and pay to see a different circus every night of the week.

  The whole event was due to finish on the last Saturday of May and the organisers were quietly confident of turning a decent profit. But the events on the Wednesday saw to that …

  In the main tent the evening had started out quite promisingly with some bare-backed horse-riding, a little clowning and tumbling and plenty of crashing of cymbals and other musical distractions to cover up the cracks. Then the MC stepped into the follow-spot, did a little patter and threw out his left arm. And the light swung around and flooded the tunnel, as the bear came hurtling into the ring.

  The bear’s entrance was greeted with unanimous approval. Most of the audience had never seen a live bear before and the fact that it was pedalling a tricycle, just like some big fellow strapped into a bear-suit, had the crowd in stitches and slapping their thighs with delight. It was ridiculous. In all sorts of ways it was ridiculous. Down at the front, some young boy watched, bewildered. ‘That bear’s too big for that bicycle,’ he thought to himself.

  But the tiny wheels only made the bear pedal that much
faster. The poor bear was pedalling like billy-o. On a typical night he would do a couple of circuits, jump off his bike, have his gown removed by an assistant and, with only the occasional prod of encouragement from his trainer, make his way over to the ladder and up to the wire. But the bear just kept on pedalling. He did an extra circuit, then another one on top of that. Up in the band, the trumpet-player looked over at the drummer. The two of them just shrugged and, like the bear, went around again. By now, even some members of the audience sensed that something was the matter. This bear-on-a-tricycle lark was running out of steam. One fellow was thinking to himself, ‘He should jump off his bike and maybe do some juggling. Or grab some lady from the audience and shake her up a bit.’

  But the bear persisted with the pedalling. In fact, it appeared to be pedalling even harder than before. Then, suddenly, it dropped its shoulder, leaned to the left and headed for the tunnel. The spotlight followed him and picked out the MC in the shadows, having a drag on a cigarillo. He shielded his eyes as the light engulfed him and before he even saw it, the bear was past him and carrying on its way.

  Outside on the grass, a couple of strongmen were having a natter whilst oiling their biceps.

  ‘Stop him,’ someone shouted from the big top. ‘Stop the bear.’

  They only had a couple of moments in which to make a decision but it was long enough to detect something unforgiving in the bear’s attitude, and despite all their collective muscle they ultimately chose to skip out of the way.

  All around the tent stood a six-foot fence, obliging the bear to head for the gate beside the ticket office where a few young lads were hanging around. They heard a bit of a commotion and turned in time to see the bear come hammering towards them, with the MC and the strongmen jogging along behind. But when the bear was no more than four or five yards from them, he bared his teeth and let out an almighty roar. And in that instant the way was made clear and the bear flew past them and pedalled out into the crowd.