THE ICE JUGGLER

17th January 2024

Sixteenth Century London was cold, very cold. In fact the whole of Britain, from John O’ Groats to Land’s End was, by the end of the century, in the grip of a mini ice-age. Only London, though, could boast being the home of the ‘Ice Juggler’.  The city was very likely the abode of many ice jugglers, but there was one in particular who stood out from the rest.  His days were spent juggling on the frozen river and since the Thames regularly froze over during that period of history, it became a hive of fascinating activity.  Market sellers did their business there and all kinds of weird and wonderful events took place on the surface of the ice.  People lit huge fires over the river to keep warm, and allow them to work, eat, drink and socialize on the ice.  In fact with the fires and body-warmth,  it was warmer on the ice than in the dark, cold, desolate streets. 

The Ice Juggler had no chance to socialize though.  Poor man, he was kept constantly busy, juggling, having so many faces to juggle with.  They all wanted to be juggled.  Some felt being juggled was a useful thing to do.  Others knew the Ice Juggler would hold a huge feast every so often over large roaring fires for the ‘recently juggled’  where they could feed to their hearts’ content.  Still others succumbed because the alternative to being juggled was not being juggled and not being juggled was a challenge in itself.  A percentage saw being juggled as a new and exciting experience.  Many pretended they wanted to be juggled in order to slip away on the ice and sneak into the stalls of the Thames Ice Fair, for which they would otherwise have to pay an entrance fee. None of the categories described possessed much patience.  Rather they expected on the spot service from the poor entertainer. This meant him being obliged to drop everything for them, so attending to them without delay, despite the fact that dropping everything for the Ice Juggler had far more serious implications than most everyday sacrifices would have for most everyday people.   But the Ice Juggler was smart.  He never dropped everything at once.  He had honed his skills perfectly and always kept at least two faces on the go, even while organizing one of his huge feasts. The truth is, he was the most skilled juggler in London, in fact in all of Britain and probably throughout the world.  

Day after day he juggled.  Face after face after face.  All he saw were people’s faces spinning in the air, looking customarily pale, dizzy and sick.  So many faces, all different, but curiously, in many ways all the same. The faster he juggled them, the more the faces all took on the same white, haunted appearance.  Each individual face would lose its features and become lost in the sea of faces surrounding the juggler’s aura.

Disaster had to strike, and it did. One foggy Tuesday,  in December 1578, the ice cracked without any warning and the Ice Juggler fell through.  Nobody seemed to know how many faces he had been juggling at the time or who they might have been, nor whether they were underneath the ice with him.  That morning the unlucky entertainer had forgotten to write the names of his faces down in the ‘Ice Juggling Book’, in which he kept a record of all those who had ever been juggled by him.  Unfortunately he had been furiously juggling with so many faces at once that he had been unable to reach his book to write the names down.  It was anybody’s guess who may have gone down with him.  People skated from every direction to help pull the Ice Juggler out of the freezing water, but the huge rush caused the ice to crack in more places and a considerable multitude went down under the surface.  Gut-wrenching screaming could be heard and mass panic set in. A large number of fair-goers fled the ice, swearing they would never return.  But one brave sole had spotted the Ice Juggler’s shocked, bluish face, streaked with his own hair, strands of which were drifting into his open mouth. The eyes were already turning to glass, although the ice above him concealed this fact.  Two men, balanced on an island of ice, ripped up their own shirts and knotted them together to make a rope.  Another man took off his breeches and tied one leg to make a sling, in which he placed a bottle of gin he had stolen from the black ice market.  They tied the makeshift rope to the sling and dropped the bottle into the water.  In a last desperate bid for life, the ice juggler managed to grab the bottle. He was thus hauled back up onto the ice and carried off to safety.  

But no juggled faces turned up and it was unfortunate that the deprivation of oxygen that the poor entertainer had suffered, caused him brain damage, leading to a certain amount of memory loss.   Tragically he could not remember who he had been juggling that fateful day.  But across London, many people had gone missing, far more people than usually went missing in one winter day. Hordes of  anonymous faces, who had been in the process of being juggled, lost their lives.  Those that did not lose their lives lost their confidence in the ice altogether.  They never stepped upon it again.  Many of the dead had drowned slowly, others had managed to swim a little in the freezing water before dying of cold and exhaustion.  Some didn’t care anyway, they wanted to die and in their last breaths gave thanks to the Ice Juggler for giving them the excuse to let go.  

Regrettably, the ice juggler lost his job.  It was incredibly sad.  His brain damage meant he could no longer remember which hand had just thrown and which was about to catch,  so he could never juggle again. This story does not have a happy ending. Even the Ice Juggler died that day, in spirit.  He lost his will to juggle and with his loss of memory, had little motivation to get his will back.  His body however, did carry on for a while.  He got another job further up the Thames, but only in the summer time,  as a lock keeper, enabling boats to pass through a narrow canal near Little Wittenham.  He had no problem with getting work.  His glowing references told of his amazing skills, juggling so many tasks at once and dealing with so many people at one time, without help.  They boasted of the amount of names he managed to squeeze into his book each day and his noble efforts never to let anyone down who wanted to be included.  His references also pointed out that the ice on which he had had to skate was often thin and they emphasised how anybody attempting to do such a job in such conditions would eventually find themselves under water.  In one way or another.

  But there was another ice juggler who took up the role on the Thames at a later date.  He did things differently and never took on more than three faces at one time.  He even found that when he juggled these faces, he could see into their eyes and have some understanding of where they were coming from and what they actually needed.  Because of this skill he sometimes managed to spot in their expression that being juggled was in fact the last thing in the world that they needed.  Cases like those he would gently put down and point in the right direction.  Unlike the first ice juggler he was not concerned with impressing people, but rather with giving people a rich and vivid experience that would add meaning to their lives. This entertainer lasted a lifetime and many of his clients stayed with him or came back to him. Some even sent their children and grandchildren to be juggled.   This had sadly not been the case with the original ice juggler, who had never seen the same face on the ice twice.  

One evening, just after operating the canal lock to let a party boat through, the original ice juggler slipped and fell into the river once again.   He had never learned to swim,  but his splashes and cries could be heard by a barman on the boat who was busy mixing cocktails and thus unable to help. A woman also heard the cries from the bank.  Unfortunately her phone had just bleeped announcing an important text.  She had to send a text back before she had a chance to call for help for the drowning man.  

By the time help arrived, the old ice juggler had long ceased gasping for air and had disappeared under the water. The boat and the barman were a fair distance down river and the female witness had left the riverbank as she had been on her way to work.  

No-one jumped in after the poor man this time.  It was noted that a report had been made of a person drowning in the River Thames, but the case was closed.  It was simply concluded that  the report could only have been yet another sighting of the spirit known as the ‘Black Ice Ghost’ whose eerie cries had been heard at different spots along the length of the  river, on countless nights since that fateful winter’s day back in 1578.