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A circus of my own

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Nell Gifford at Folly Farm (James Waddell)


When I see a show I don’t want to just be amused or moved – I want to cry. I think that a good circus should make you cry. Furthermore, a good circus, a circus that is doing its job, should somehow feel like a moment of crisis, like it is on the very brink of extinction, as if a moment of excess and  brilliance has been reached and over reached. A good circus is a sublimely existential thing, living acutely and only for the golden present moment. This is what I have discovered.

I feel that I am always at the moment of being extinguished, that the thing is going to vanish, and yet it doesn’t. It keeps opening up, there is always another bend in the road that I can’t see around; when I get further, I find more circuses, and all I can see is that; more shows, more circuses, or something that was a circus but is now somehow different and yet more of a circus than I could ever have wished for, a circus that I did dream of, a circus to make a pilgrimage for: Giffords Circus. I can’t get away from it, it chases me and I chase it, and I love it.

I am going to try and start at the beginning. I am 18 years old and I am in a circus in America. I am the guest of my brother’s brother-in-law, Gerald Balding. I am very beautiful but have no idea of this and I am a very shy teenager. Back home in England my mother is in a coma following a catastrophic riding accident, and the memories of the lovely home that we lived in, filled with all the sweet furnishings of a happy childhood, are being slowly rubbed out forever. In the circus in America I saw a vision of the future, a happy place, cared for and loved, where children and animals played together in the sunshine and the workplace was a huge candy-striped tent, full of music.

This was my childhood. My dad is a film director and much younger than my mum. I have two older sisters, an older brother and a younger sister. First we lived in Oxford and then we lived in Wiltshire. Big houses, not much money, non-stop fun – friends, family, books, paintings – a threadbare,  beautiful Bohemian life. That was what stopped when my mother’s terrible tragedy happened. A broken life, cracks that will run relentlessly into the future, tearing us all apart, the ground falling away as we try to walk forward, valleys and gullies of pain streaming between us as we desperately try to clasp hands and hearts.

When you lose your mother you lose yourself. The distinct person that you are to your mother you are to no one else. So that person has to be quiet then, forever, because no one else but your mother will hear them. When I came back from working in America at Circus Flora I went to New College at the University of Oxford to read English. I had by this point decided that I wanted to run my own circus. The situation at home became more desperate as my mother made no signs at all of recovery and I fell into a dark place. I took a razor to my blonde curls and dressed in heavy boys’ clothes. I felt as if I broke everything that I came into contact with. I had no idea what to do, how to relate to people or who I was.

After finishing my final exams I bought an old van from an auction and joined the first circus that came to town, which was, if nothing else, a job and a shaky step towards what felt like an insurmountable dream. For the next few years I worked on many different circus shows. I can’t say that crawling through the mud in the middle of the night rolling up rubber stable mats, my throat burning with the fumes of elephant pee, was exactly what I had in mind, but it gave me something to do – a track, a path – and that path nonetheless made sense to me. And in a world of remorseless hard living, mud, wheels, metal stakes, ropes and roads, there was nothing to break except myself.


Giffords Circus


This is an extract from Giffords Circus: The First Ten Years by Nell Gifford which is available now. 


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