There are places in life one stumbles into not by choice but by coercion – fraternal coercion, in this case, which is the worst kind, often dressed up as protection and delivered with the smug authority of an older sibling. That’s how I came to find myself, some years ago now, inside The House That Jack Built – not a real house, mind, but one of those garish, gravity-defying attractions you find at travelling fairs, dreamt up by someone with a carpenter’s eye and a sadist’s sense of humour.
The place was a cubist purgatory – three storeys of angled insanity where floors tilted like a failing marriage and walls bent like parliamentary promises. There was no true vertical, no honest horizontal. Even with one’s hands braced against the plywood like a wounded animal clinging to a tree in a storm, one could barely stand upright. Close your eyes and you’d swear you were in your nan’s living room. Open them, and the room became a Dali painting of a nervous breakdown.
I had preferred the Helter Skelter – a quaint and honest British invention: climb up, slide down, bruise your arse, have a laugh. Simple pleasures for simpler times. But no – at the plaintive behest of my brother (who swore blind he’d “look after me” – a phrase as reassuring as a manifesto pledge), I was ushered inside this domestic Escher sketch.
He made off, of course, like a dog with a string of sausages, leaving me to wander the funhouse alone, bewildered, like Dante in the Inferno but with fewer signposts and more neon. I stumbled through the crooked corridors as the existential nausea of the thing took hold – a child lost not just in space but in meaning. Kierkegaard would have had a field day.
Eventually – via sheer panic and the blind instinct of the desperate – I escaped the lunatic maze and staggered outside, blinking into the fairground glare. The world offered no balm. Garish pop music blared in Doppler waves, mingling with the dissonant racket of machinery, hawkers, and other children shrieking with delight or horror (hard to say which). Candy floss, toffee apples, gaudy teddy bears, and plastic cowboy hats mocked my dismay. The promised joys of modern childhood: commodified, sticky, and entirely hollow.
And there I stood – face streaked with tears, clutching the hand of a perfect stranger, whose intentions were no doubt kind but whose grip was that of bureaucratic concern rather than maternal comfort. I might as well have been held by the state – firm, directional, and entirely unmoved by my pleas for release. “Where is my mother?” I cried silently, not unlike the Psalmist – Why hast thou forsaken me? (Psalm 22:1). Or as Isaiah more reassuringly promises: Fear not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God (Isaiah 41:10). But at that moment, I felt forsaken by heaven, earth, and my bloody brother.
Then came the chance – a loosening of the hand, a moment of grace. I bolted, a miniature fugitive, and ran straight into Mum – a collision of tears and elbows that nearly winded her and all but resurrected me. She had been there all along, at the very exit of the House That Jack Built, giving some poor attendant a right earful. I had escaped into chaos while she had remained rooted in reason, right where I’d left her – waiting for me.
And the stranger? Gone. Perhaps he never was. Perhaps he was simply some anxious Samaritan who vanished like grace at the end of a good sermon.
Still, years on – and with the world now resembling a much larger version of that topsy-turvy house – I sometimes find myself wishing I could reach out and hold that steadying hand again. Not the stranger’s, but the idea of it: some benign, guiding grip in a place where nothing is level, and every corridor leads somewhere more absurd.
Because let’s be honest – we now live in the house that someone else built: the ideological architects of chaos, armed with glue guns and theory degrees, plastering their postmodern wallpaper over the load-bearing walls of tradition. The funhouse has become the statehouse. Gravity is “problematic,” truth is subjective, and small children are led through mazes by strangers with slogans on their lanyards.
And somewhere in the midst of it all – like a lost child clutching at doctrine – I’m still praying: Lord, let me find the exit… or at least someone who knows where the bloody door is.
Wording 