The weatherman had breezily predicted a fine, warm, spring day — and it was. We were on the road early, my grandson sitting beside me on his booster seat, keenly searching the unfolding scenery with his pellucid blue eyes for notable things to report. At three and a half years old his speech and understanding have taken a Great Leap Forward. His days of vacuous innocence are behind him. He has become garrulous and vivacious and imbued with a fervent desire for knowledge and experience. And what better thing could there be to satisfy that desire than to spend a day with his grandfather at the Devon County Show.
His life to date has been limited and parochial. It was safe to say that this would be a day of firsts. It was his first time on a motorway, for one thing. Also his first time stuck in traffic on a motorway. He enjoyed it. There was so much to see: a police helicopter circling beneath a half moon, a crow gallantly mobbing what it thought was an enormous hawk, but was in fact a tethered, hawk-shaped kite. And that was just the sky. The traffic was comprised of some incredibly exciting items: a gleaming steel milk tanker, open-topped sports cars with amiable drivers who waved back, 1,000 cc motorbikes weaving mazily between the lines, hefty juggernauts powered by glamorous tractor units tricked out with chrome. And for several minutes we were stationary beside a car parked on the hard shoulder in which the lady driver sat weeping. She was staring unseeingly out of the window, tears pearling down her cheeks. If she’d wound down her window we could have reached out and dabbed them with a tissue. There was so much to see.
Finally we parked with a thousand other cars in a field of long grass. The nearest entrance to the showground was Gate Orange. We handed our ticket to a courteous old gentleman. Gate Orange stood on an eminence. The county show was laid out below us as various, alive and unexpected as Xanadu, the thoroughfares black with people. I hoisted him up on my shoulders and we plunged in.
We hadn’t got far when we were intercepted by a woman with a clipboard who asked me if I’d made a will. I told her I owned nothing worth leaving, and she offered to enter me in the prize draw for a green funeral if I wrote down my name and telephone number on her clipboard.
Further on a frenzy of clanging metal drew our attention to a tent in which a row of six horses were being shod against the clock by six young blacksmiths under the grave and watchful eye of an elderly judge in a brown stock coat. We insinuated ourselves into the line of spectators and observed. The sight, smell and sound were a violent assault on the senses, and rather a lot to take in all at once. When we finally moved on, our new knowledge that horses were patient creatures who wore metal shoes was quite enough to be going on with.
Next we came to a showjumping ring. A dozen or so horses and their riders were circling and successively jumping over a pole jump. We lingered, fascinated. That a human being could mount a beast as large and as dignified as a horse, and then persuade it to leap repeatedly over a striped pole for no good reason whatsoever, and to do so with such unexpected neatness and sprightliness, again gave us much food for thought. Indeed, the implications of it for our outlook and incipient philosophy were so great it was beyond the reach of our vocabulary, for the moment, to comment either adequately or pertinently on what we were seeing. The horses passed by near enough for us to savour the pungent smell of horse and leather, and hear the harness creak, and closely examine the texture of the froth oozing from the horses’ lips.
After that we saw an Australian man on a stage cheerleading a troupe of dancing sheep. Then we came upon another dancing troupe, this time of line-dancing JCB diggers driven by pirates. And after that, as we sat in what we thought was a quiet spot for a drink of orange juice, a procession of 50 vintage farm tractors went by so close to us that we had to tuck our feet in.
And as excavators and farm tractors are our favourite thing in all the world at the moment, but something so far encountered mostly in picture books, you can perhaps forgive us (what with heat now greater even than the weatherman had predicted, and the denseness of the crowds, and not finding a public toilet low enough for a three-year-old to pee into) if we became a little overwrought at this point, and started to cry.
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