SPARKY
most extraordinary, highly strung people I had ever met, screaming and
swearing one moment, then laughing and joking the next. The circus was
their life, they were complete workaholics, and they expected no less
from the rest of us.
Working in the ring was wonderful. The clowns entered in a miniature fire
engine, spraying hoses, swinging ladders and tipping buckets of water
over each other. But doing two shows a day was just time off from the
real work. Every morning, the head tentman would bang on the side of the
lorry and yell in a fake German accent "Prisoners will get up!"
This delightful fellow had us at his mercy - painting, cleaning, mucking
out the ponies, he always had a filthy chore up his sleeve. Then there
was the small matter of moving the show every week. How I would dread
Sundays - two shows, then straight into the pull-down, driving through
the night, an hour's sleep if we were lucky, then building up the Big
Top to open again on Monday.
It wasn't all bad. I grew to love the circus family and banging in tent
stakes worked wonders for my physique. But press interviewers always seemed
to ask me about the tears of a clown. Was it true that behind the make-up,
clowns are lonely and sad? If only they knew...
The continual grind began to take its toll. Building up the tent soon
loses its appeal when you are in the pouring rain, knee-deep in mud. I
seemed to be permanently cold, wet and dirty, and there was a persistent
pain in my chest that everyone laughed off as a strained muscle. I had
run out of my combination therapy and there was never a day off to get
back to London for more.
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On one occasion, I did manage to nip into a nearby hospital, but they refused
