There is a moment on an old roller coaster when the climb seems to go on forever.
The carriage slows. The mechanism beneath you clacks and strains. The fairground gets smaller below. The sea appears beyond the rooftops. And for a few suspended seconds, before gravity takes over, you are neither going up nor coming down.
You are simply waiting.
That is the moment at the heart of Helter Skelter, the third poem in Spanish City Slickers.
The poem is inspired by, and written as a tribute to, Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes — a story in which two boys find themselves caught up in the arrival of a dark and mysterious carnival, and in all the fears, temptations and strange transformations that come with growing older.
Bradbury understood something extraordinary about childhood: that growing up can feel every bit as mysterious as the supernatural.
In Helter Skelter, the carnival is Spanish City.
And the boy is running too.
Not from Cooger and Dark.
Not from monsters.
Not even, really, from the fairground.
He is running from adolescence.
Spanish City After Dark
As a child, Spanish City was spectacular in daylight.
But at dusk, it became something else entirely.
The bulbs seemed brighter because the sky was darker. The Waltzer screamed and spun. The Dodgems sparked. The Carousel turned in circles beneath painted horses that seemed destined to chase one another forever. The House of Fun grinned from the shadows.
And towering above it all was the Helter Skelter.
Red and white.
Spiralling upwards.
Visible above the crowds.
As a child, it was simply another ride.
Looking back, it became something more.
The spiral began to feel like a map.
You climb.
You circle.
You come down.
Then someone else takes your place.
That is the idea that gradually took hold while I was writing the poem.
The Figure Eight
At the centre of Helter Skelter is another Spanish City landmark: the old Figure Eight roller coaster.
In the poem, the boy is riding it as the train slowly climbs above the fairground.
Clack.
Clack.
Clack.
Every movement upward becomes another step towards something he does not yet understand.
The poem describes each clack as another rung upon the years, another closing door.
Below him, everything that represents childhood is still there.
The Dodgems.
The Jets.
The Waltzer.
The Carousel.
The House of Fun.
But as he rises, he begins to see them differently.
For the first time, perhaps, the fairground is no longer endless.
Childhood is no longer endless either.
The Boy Walking Away
There is a point near the summit when the poem becomes less about the ride and more about the boy himself.
From high above Spanish City, he sees the sea, the Dome, St Mary’s light and the fading day.
And then he sees something impossible.
The boy he is going to become.
Already walking away.
He does not wave.
He does not turn back.
He simply follows the spiral.
That image is important because adolescence rarely arrives with a trumpet fanfare. Nobody comes downstairs one morning and announces that childhood has officially finished.
It happens quietly.
You stop playing with something.
You become embarrassed by something you loved.
You notice older boys and girls differently.
You begin wanting freedoms you cannot quite name.
And somewhere along the way, without anyone asking permission, the child you were starts walking ahead of you.
Then Over. Down.
Of course, roller coasters are wonderfully unsympathetic to existential reflection.
Eventually, you reach the top.
Then gravity remembers you.
In the poem, the Figure Eight releases and everything accelerates.
The North Sea rushes towards the earth.
The earth rushes towards the sky.
The Dodgems blur.
The Jets take flight.
The Waltzer spins like leaves.
And childhood itself seems to scatter from the boy’s pockets as the train tears through the dark.
That is one of the reasons I wanted the movement of the poem to resemble the ride itself.
It begins slowly.
It climbs.
It hesitates.
Then it falls.
Why the Helter Skelter?
Of all the attractions at Spanish City, the Helter Skelter became the symbol I kept returning to.
Perhaps because it is such a wonderfully strange object.
You climb it slowly.
You come down quickly.
You travel in circles while still moving forwards.
And eventually everyone reaches the bottom.
It is hard not to see a little bit of life in that.
By the end of the poem, the Helter Skelter is no longer just part of the fairground. Its spiral has become something internal — a road every child eventually takes, “a winding ribbon disappearing through the middle of the heart.”
That might sound rather grand for something children once slid down while sitting on coconut mats.
But childhood has a habit of turning ordinary objects into symbols when we look back at them.
Between the Stars and the Sea
Spanish City Slickers is, in many ways, a collection about places that disappear.
The old fairground.
The machines inside the arcade.
The small businesses along the promenade.
But it is also about the selves we leave behind in those places.
That is why Helter Skelter ends not with the fairground roaring, but with it becoming quiet.
The Waltzer slows.
The Dodgems sleep.
The gulls wheel overhead.
And somewhere above the rides is one small boy-shaped shadow, caught for one impossible moment between childhood and whatever comes next.
Between the stars and the sea.
Perhaps that is what growing up really feels like.
Not the moment you reach the bottom.
But the moment at the top when, just for a heartbeat, you realise you are about to fall.
Stephen Watson is the co-founder of Shades4Seasons and manages the day to day operations of the store. As a professional copywriter Stephen manages the store's social media marketing and content creation. Stephen has published long-form articles and blogs extensively on LinkedIn on topics ranging from technology to self-improvement and commercial matters. He is also a published author with his collections of poetry "The Milling Street Tales" and "Spanish City Slickers". You can find out more about Shades4Seasons founders here.
