Friday 16th September   

I have only once been to a circus, when I must only have been eight I suppose.  It was on Barnes Common if I recall, and though we only went the once, I used to see the posters every year; it may well have been a birthday treat for me.  I was astounded, I had never seen a circus before, or a zoo, and this was pre-television and I had never been to a cinema either.  Children nowadays are often visibly bored when they first see wild animals in a zoo or a circus; they have seen so many clips on the internet or television of cheetahs chasing down antelope, or rhino’s charging, that the reality of rather mangy, bored and docile-looking animals comes as a disappointment.  I had only seen hefalumps as I used to call them in picture books, Babar the elephant was a favourite of mine, but these were line drawings not even photographs.  The shock, can you imagine the shock at seeing real elephants.  My god, they were huge – I had no idea they would be so big. Frightened as I undoubtedly was, I was fascinated too.  And the horses with their plumes and girls turning somersaults on their backs, the ringmaster in his red coat and top hat, the acrobats on the flying trapeze just flying so effortlessly from swing to swing, and there were seals balancing balls on their snouts, and jugglers throwing Indian clubs high into the big top, and flame-throwers putting lighted rag-covered batons into their mouths, and a knife thrower who burst balloons in a circle around a pretty sequin covered woman, and scariest of all there were clowns, with huge flapping feet, baggy trousers, and red noses and big-big painted grins. For some reason, the clowns scared me the most; no matter how hard they fell over and were whacked with planks they always had these big grins on their faces.  They ran around the raised ring, hurtling towards me, coming from both directions towards me, and I hid my face in Grandma’s big woolly cardy.

The elephants had been huge and lumbered roiling round the ring and lifted their huge flat feet high into the air above my head, the horses galloped inches from my face, and the seals honked and clapped their flippers right near to me, but none of this really scared me.  It was the clowns I was frightened of, and I still don’t like them.  I never find them funny, and of course as I grew older and learnt of the sinister history of the eighteenth century Italian Pierrots, and the Commedia Dell Arte it only confirmed my suspicions that anyone who wants to be a clown must be concealing a rather nasty person underneath.

I have never been to a real circus since, although I have seen the French-Canadian Cirque de Soleil; a nice modern take on an old tradition.