An Irishman's Diary

One of the glories of France - at least if you're touring it with children - is that every self-respecting town has a carousel. It may be the law, for all I know. Perhaps French local authorities are legally bound to provide their citizens with merry-go-rounds, along with sanitation, street lighting, and a reliable supply of fresh bread. At any rate, it's a poor place that doesn't have one.

Driving around the Île d'Oleron one night last week, we stopped at a little town called Le Chateau, which the guide book said was charming. I suppose it was, but mainly it was deserted. The streets were eerily empty, and so was the bar on the square.

But inevitably, there was a fully-functioning carousel: its turntable, organ, and several hundred 15-watt lightbulbs operating - until we arrived - for the benefit of one little girl.

After a few summer holidays in France, you become a connoisseur of these quaint structures, many of them antiques from the Belle Époque, the "beautiful era" between the close of the 19th century and the start of the first World War. I like the big, two-level carousels of the larger towns. The menagerie version in the Jardin Des Plantes, Paris - a nod towards the nearby natural history museum - is fondly remembered too.

But the children's favourite is probably a little one we came across once in a seaside town, which had the added attraction of a competitive element. As the carousel turned, kids had to try and remove the tail of a Mickey Mouse figure, dangling on the end of a rope manipulated by the carousel operator. The next ride was free for whoever caught the tail, something one child was guaranteed to do each time (except when the owner's sadistic teenage son was in charge of the rope).

We didn't know it then, but that mouse's tail was the vestigial remains of a competition once the norm on French carousels. In fact it was their whole raison d'être because, naturally, it turns out that these innocent playthings have military origins. The name "carousel" apparently derives from a term meaning "little war", applied by crusaders to a game played by Turkish horsemen, in which players tossed clay balls filled with perfume at each other and the player who fluffed his catch ended up smelling of roses (but not in a good way).

The game was imported to Europe, and the French gradually expanded the "carousel" to cover a tournament of military equestrianism, including a test of skill in which lance-bearing horsemen, riding at speed, had to remove rings suspended between two poles. By and by, somebody decided that junior aristocrats could practice on toy horses, and the merry-go-round as we know it was born. The dictates of recreational ring-spearing - still a feature on some carousels - meant that in France and Germany, the horses traditionally moved anti-clockwise, so that the rider's right hand was on the outside; whereas in Britain, where ring-spearing never caught on, they went the other way.

I owe all this information to A History of the Carousel, published by the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions (IAAPA). This is so authoritative on the subject that I'm forced to apologise for describing myself earlier as a connoisseur. On the "golden age" of carousels, the writer sounds like an art critic in the Sistine chapel. No review of the great wooden carvers would be complete, he says, without mentioning "the whimsical figures of Salvatore Cernigliaro, the realistic military trappings of Daniel C. Muller, the eye-opening embellishments of Frank Carretta, the spirited carvings of Charles Carmel, and the graceful lines of John Zalar". The golden age was ushered in by the application of steam engines in the 1870s and later the overhead cranking mechanism that allowed the horses go up and down smoothly. Wurlitzer-style organs completed the classic carousel experience. The IAAPA essay implies that the French predilection for including exotic animals was a decadent phase in the art - one that children never accepted - and that 20th-century carvers followed their customers' lead by rejecting lions and elephants in favour of a return to the horse.

Whatever about its own artists, the carousel has not been so kindly treated by cinema. It can look sinister in certain lights, no doubt because so many film-makers have found funfairs, with their dizzying swirl of faces and metallic music, to be the perfect backdrop for cold-war thrillers and murder movies. But it still has a charm, for kids and parents alike, that no other playground attraction matches. A good carousel seems to be frozen in time, not just its own golden age, but the universal golden age when we were all five-and-a-half.

Sadly, Ireland has a major carousel deficit, either because of our litigation culture or because the contrasting reputations of French and Irish for being child-friendly are both in inverse proportion to the reality. I still suspect that a proper, well-situated carousel - in Stephen's Green, ideally - would make a fortune. For anyone interested, there's a US company that specialises in making old-style wooden ones. A small 12-foot-diameter model is a snip at $59,000. But you could buy the de luxe 52-foot version and still have enough change out of a million dollars to pay the first week's insurance.