For this chapter we have another guest narrator: our friend who runs the rest home, Mrs Locke:

‘I want to tell you about the main attraction at the travelling fair that’s been coming here every Easter Monday for as long as most of us can remember. This is neither the merry-go-round, with its colourful horses, of which I used to like the cream one with the lilac tack the most (he was the smallest and no one else would ride him, so I thought of him as mine), nor the gaudy, honking dodgems, nor the grand and root-a-tooting organ, nor the shooting gallery, where patrons can make a moose’s antlers spin round, or provoke a cuckoo to spring out of its horological nest, or cause a hillbilly to slap his thigh and crease up in wheezing laughter, nor the Haunted House with its swing doors and cobwebs, nor the giant Ferris wheel from which one can look down on it all, but a gentleman who calls himself “Mikuláš the Marvel-Maker”.

Even when I used to go when I was at school he was always one of the highlights for my friends and me, right up there with Madame Décolletée, the clairvoyant (I still love all that sort of thing –the dimly lit tent, the crystal ball...) and, in my case, a gorgeous young man on the hook-a-duck stall who was the subject of my first infatuation. Not even the Whiplash, a horrific-looking machine, the fiercest of all the rides there (yet too “cissy” for us young heroes, particularly the boys, who never came off it) could create the same thrill as watching Mikuláš the Marvel-Maker.

I couldn’t say when his career began; all I know is that when I first saw him I thought he must have been over fifty, mainly because of his bushy white beard, which gave him an air of gravitas. I now realise that that beard was fake. But we did not know that then.