I found this account of a likely
time-slip in The Northern Rambler of April 1942 ( vol 8 no. 72)
recently:
QUEER TALES OF THE OPEN AIR (IX) THE
GHOST FAIR
“ During the last war I was driving
one evening in a part of Wiltshire which at that time was altogether unknown to
me. It was a wet and cloudy day and my own desire was to arrive as soon as
possible in the hospitable house towards which I was bound. I drove down one of
the avenues of monoliths which I knew from hearsay were the approach to a
well-known prehistoric temple, but which till that day I had not seen. A village
has been built in the actual space originally occupied by the temple and here
since prehistoric days generation after generation of simple country people have
lived, unquestioning and at peace, without overmuch interest in their
predecessors. Historians and archeologists dig and deliberate, whilst the
natives earn their living and enjoy their holidays when they
come.
It was one of these holidays that I
came upon that evening. Of all rural festivities a fair is the gayest and most
spontaneous and here in the middle of a village which itself had grown up, on
the site connected with the life and religion of a race whose very names have
almost been forgotten, the traditional sports were in full swing. If it had not
been raining, I should have jumped out of the car to climb the embankment,and to
run through the crowd to join in the fair. Shooting galleries, cocoa-nut shies,
roundabouts,swingboats,and gingerbread stalls had attracted a small rural crowd
clothed in non-descript garments…a few gipsies added colour to the scene.
Darkness had not yet fallen, but candles or oil lamps already shone through some
of the cottage windows, and the owners of the cockshies had lit their flares.
There was nothing very brilliant about this typical country festival but it was
a completely happy scene. I was sorry to leave it
behind.
Several years later when I visited
the place as a tourist I discovered to my amazement in the inn parlour a local
guidebook which said that no fair had been held there for over fifty years…The
fair which I had watched with such pleasure that evening had no physical
reality. The last to be held was more than half-a-century
before.
Edith Oliver (“Country Life”,
9/1/42)
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