The Big Top

A Willerby Story

“Why are you all still here?”, Mauve asked, standing at Sally’s door, “It’ll be here any minute!”

“What will?”, Sally said.

“The circus!”, said Mauve, “There’s been posters up for weeks!”

“We thought we should stay away,” Sally said, “because it might be dangerous? You’re always telling us to leave things we don’t understand alone.”

“Dangerous? Who put that silly idea in your head? It isn’t dangerous! It’s marvellous – one of the best things about a Willerby childhood. Who knows when Sammy will get another chance to see it? That train doesn’t follow no timetable. Get him down to the cutting!”

“He’s in the middle of his bath,” Sally said.

“Then get him out!”, Mauve said, “I’ll get together your shoes and it’s too warm for coats anyway. If we don’t get a wiggle on, we’ll miss them arriving and Sammy won’t get to see the train.”

Five minutes later they were running down the street.

In pyjamas and dressing gown Sammy rode Dan piggy-back, with Sally and Mauve jogging along on either side. Sammy’s hair was wet, and his eyes wild with the excitement of an interrupted bedtime and adventures in the night.

He was whooping and hooting the way he did when he was delighted.

“Dan, turn left through Sharp’s Gate and then follow the sheep-track to the station. I can’t keep up but don’t worry about me, I’ll see you there,” Mauve called, breathing hard.

“Station?”, said Sally, “What station?”

“Just get there and you’ll see,” Mauve shouted after them as they sped away

The three of them turned the corner and saw lights shining from a derelict and abandoned cutting that hadn’t seen a train since the Beeching Axe.

They drew nearer and heard it too – talking, laughing, shouting and even singing – a group chorusing “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain” in rough but enthusiastic rounds, slightly slurred, suggesting the singers had spent some time in the Green Man.

The station – when they got there - was small and neat.

Black wrought iron pillars held up sloping green roofs on either side of the track and the single platform was lit by gently hissing gaslights. A bordered black sign saying “Willerby” in foot-high white block capitals hung next to the closed ticket office.

The crowd on the platform was made up their village neighbours. It was a group of these – young men and women in their twenties - who had been singing.

The crowd was drowned out by a whistle from somewhere hidden in the station’s eves.

“She’s here!”, one of the singers shouted.

“Good,” said Mauve, still breathing hard as she moved to stand between Sally and Dan, “I made it! At my age I was worried this might be my last chance to see her arrive.”

They saw its eye first, a beam coming from the East and curving between the shallow rolls of the heartland hills towards them. Then they heard it too – the insistent rhythm of steel wheels over iron rails and its inhalations and exhalations like the breathing of a huge beast.  

Swept back chrome curves gleaming in the station gaslights, smooth and sleek as a bullet, the engine pulled into the station ahead of a train of trucks and carriages that stretched back and back seemingly without end.

It stopped, wreathed in steam, ticking and clicking as it cooled.

Slow and hesitant at first but picking up speed music began – a harmonium playing a polka, both familiar and strange. It put Dan in the mind of sawdust and spotlights, popcorn and hot chips, and the cry of evening seagulls outside arcades in out-of-season seaside towns.

Still hooting. Sammy shifted, craning his neck from left to right so he could see round Dan’s head.

A slim, black-haired woman stepped from the engine’s cab onto the platform emerged from the coal smoke.

She was wearing a scarlet and bejewelled Ring-Master’s coat, and was carrying a silver-topped cane. From a neatly cut hole in the back of her tight moleskin trousers she had a long sleekly furred tail, which swung from side to side as she walked beaming towards the crowd.

“Hello Willerby! It is so good to be back!” she called, pointing at her train, “I’m Ms Pippa Castelli and this is my Big Top Circus.”

The crowd cheered, whooped and stamped its feet.

Still on Dan’s back Sammy joined in.

“To the green!”, shouted Ms Castelli.

…

Almost everyone carried something.

Two huge, bearded and bare-chested chestnut centaurs pulled a wooden cart loaded with brightly painted boxes, and a twenty-foot-tall giant carried more in a wooden-framed back-pack. A troupe of brown-clad knee-high pixies with pointed ears beneath felt caps were carrying a dais with a lamp on a velvet cushion on it, and a masked harlequin in a red-and-black dress trundled a trolly filled with her juggling pins and balls.

A winged and frilled bus length russet dragon brought up the rear. It wasn’t carrying anything, probably because anything on its back would be thrown off as it bucked and gambold its way towards the green.

“Li!” Ms Castelli called at it, “Keep up, leave the sprites alone, and this time do try not to break anything.”

As the Big Top went up – faster than should have been possible – a company of dwarves mingled amongst the Willerby crowd handing out hotdogs and drinks – ruby-red foaming ale in dimpled glass mugs to the adults and root-beer and cola to children and those who did not drink.

We didn’t bring any money,” Sally said.

Dan reached into his pockets more out of instinct than expectation and found them full of coins - bronze, brass, silver and gold in odd shapes and different weights with writing and numbers in some languages he recognised and some he didn’t.

One of the dwarves saw him looking at them, “Coin for a hotdog, coin for a drink,” he said, “Any will do.”

Dan counted out eight, then handed round the hot dogs and drinks.

“There’s no need to rush,” the dwarf said, “all food and drink allowed in the Top and plenty more for sale and lots more!”

The Top was bigger on the inside than on the outside, easily a hundred metres from canvas wall to canvas wall. Tiered wooden benches looked down on a black stage scuffed with chalk and flecked with spots of paint.

When everyone sat down there was still room for hundreds more, but the space gradually filled in a way that was hard to understand or explain.

An invisible orchestra struck up, and as it did spotlights played over the walls and roof of the tent, then merged together until the ring glowed in the dark.

From behind the black curtain came Ms Castelli’s voice, high, clear and loud.

“Welcome to my Big Top,” she said, “From nowhere and everywhere. From the ice-islands of Ros 154 to the green deserts of Emerelda, from the jungled hills of Amazonian Maya to the bottomless oceans of Lanneria. From from our last stop ghost-soaked Hookland, to here for one night only, your home, weird-scarred Willerby. Who knows where we’ll go next and when we’ll be back? Welcome – you will be delighted and amazed, the wonders of this multiverse brought here to your front door. The louder you cheer the better we get, so make this the best of starts. Stamp and yell, clap and cheer for our first act, on the trapeze and high wire the astonishing Taylor Twins, Thomas and Theresa!”

She stepped out of sight and the twins stepped out.

Thomas was slim, bespectacled and dressed in a dark three-piece suit with shredded sleeves and trousers. Theresa was short and squat and looked nothing like him. She wore a sleeveless ballgown showing powerfully muscled arms and legs.

In the centre of the ring, Theresa bent at the knees, grabbed Thomas by the ankles, spun him round like an Olympic hammer thrower and hurled him fifty feet in the air.

He tumbled chaotically, over and over with arms and legs whirling.

Then, near the canvas roof he made an impossibly fast tuck and landed both neat feet perfectly on a wire suspended from the eaves of the Big Top. He froze for a moment, then gave an elaborate curtsey.

As Ms Castelli had told them to, the crowd cheered, whooped, stamped and clapped.

For ten minutes it went on like that – Thomas swinging on the trapeze, tumbling, walking on his hands and racing over wires, then jumping off and falling to the ground where Theresa caught him before throwing him back up.

Act followed act; an immense opera singer who sang in harmony with himself, a fire-eater who as her finale breathed out a hail of boiled sweets which the village children ran to fetch, and a clown who used a vast mirror to conjure three dimensional scenes of impossible landscapes. Then the chestnut centaurs threw twinkling knives and shot arrows at smaller and smaller rotating targets and finally, just at the point Sally and Dan began to worry about Sammy who was nodding in his seat, Li the dragon took the stage surrounded by all the preceding acts who started an overhand clap that the crowd quickly took up.

Li danced to a medley of modern pop songs, swinging his giant head, and thrashing his tail, spinning, whirling and roaring with infectious joy. He went on for longer than the other acts – easily twenty minutes- and in the end only stopped because Ms Castelli, laughing as she did so, gradually quietened the music until he was dancing to only the rhythm of stamping feet and clapping hands.

“Li!”, she said to him and to the audience too, “Enough! That’s enough! We’re tired and need to eat and drink. The Green Man calls!”

After the circus had taken its final bow and the lights went up on the tent, Sammy began to cry.

“Don’t want it to end!” he said, “I never want it to end.”

He sat down on the sawdust floor, disconsolate and weeping. “Won’t go,” he said, “Won’t go.”

He was still there quarter of an hour later when the tent was empty.

Sally sat down cross-legged and put her arms around him, and Dan stood behind them with his hands on his shoulders not knowing what to do. Part of what made Sammy, Sammy, was this – his emotions ran deep and ran strong. When he felt them, they were all-consuming. It had once taken them an hour to get him out of the primary school pantomime and he’d cried the whole drive home.

“Oh, we can’t have this!”, Ms Castelli said, walking from the ring towards them, out of her circus clothes and wearing a tailored evening suit and top hat, “Whatever is the matter?”

“Endings are hard for him, Ms Castelli” said Sally, “Especially when he’s loved anything half as much as he’s loved tonight. It’s the way he’s made.”

“Call me Pippa, please,” She smiled, “And I know how that feels. It was the way I felt at the end of my first circus when I was just about your age. It’s why I set up my own.”

She knelt to bring her face level with Sammy’s. “Darling,” she said, “It’s not over yet. Let’s go to the pub, I bet you like it there. And I think a ride on one of my centaurs might make you feel better.”

…

“Sammy is different,” said Sally, drinking cider at a corner table in the Green Man’s snug, “The doctor say he has things missing. He lives just as he is, in the moment. He doesn’t know there is danger in the world, and he finds some things harder to do.”

Pippa looked over to the other side of the pub where Sammy was singing with the opera singer to the centaurs who were called Alexander and Kyros. “There doesn’t look like there’s anything missing to me,” she said, “It looks like he knows exactly how best he should live.”

Dan nodded at her, “That’s the way we see it too – we wouldn’t have him any different and while he’s our child we don’t worry. We don’t worry here either – everyone knows him, and he’s looked after wherever he goes. But outside, too many people don’t see him the way he really is. And we worry about what will become of him once we can’t be there for him. When we’re old, then gone, what will become of him if he must leave Willerby.”

Pippa sipped her wine.

“That’s years and years away,” she said, but I know that’ll be no comfort to you in the middle of the night. You know, it doesn’t have to be the way it is here.

There are many places and times where they’d see him the way we do. But that’ll be no comfort to you either because he lives in this one.”

…

The party in the Green Man lasted the whole night.

Sally and Dan got merry and hardly saw Sammy, which was fine, because whether he was with giants or dwarves, pixies or creatures they knew no word for he was happy and safe. Sammy did find some things hard, but this was not one of them – a gift of his was to fit in and charm and he saw nothing strange about new friends looking different to the ones he knew well.

Late – or early depending on perspective - dawn lined the horizon and the party evolved from high spirits and boisterous laughter to introspection and quiet meditation. Sammy settled to sleep under a crocheted blanket on an overstuffed Chesterton sofa the twins had thoughtfully pulled from the snug and into the pub office where it was quieter.

Pippa, sitting again with Sally and Dan in the snug, sighed happily and stretched. “Almost time for us to go,” she said, “And time to sleep on the train.”

“Where are you going next?”, asked Dan.

Pippa shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m letting the train decide” she said, “But before we go, I have a gift for Sammy. It’s rare and it’s precious and it can’t be replaced, so you must keep it safe. Safe from air, earth, fire and water. And from people. You must keep it secret, because in its way it is the most valuable thing in the whole world.”

She reached into the top pocket of her suit and fetched out an ordinary looking train ticket with perforated edges where it had been torn from a roll.

“This is for Sammy,” she said, “It will get him on the train. It’s not for now. He won’t need it for years and maybe not ever. But if you two and he – and he must think this too – feel this world can’t be the place for him he’s to go to the cutting where the station is now. You or anyone else can take him to where it is but he must stand on the platform alone, and if he does, the train will come.”

Dan took the ticket and turned it over, “It says one-way.”

Pippa met his eyes, then nodded slowly, “Yes,” she said, “There’s no coming back, so he must be sure, and him too, so you need to make sure he understands what it means if it ever comes to it. And you two must understand too. You can’t ride the train and although if you stay in Willerby or find somewhere else like it then you might see him again, you can’t count on it.”

Sally shifted in her chair, now so tired everything felt like a dream. After she slept and woke, she knew it would seem even more that way. “Will he be safe?”, she asked.

“No,” said Pippa, softly, “The circus life isn’t safe. The train goes places beyond all dreams and nightmares. But the circus life is a life, and it can be his, one he belongs in. There’ll be work for him to do – in a circus there always is. Most important of all, whatever danger he is in, he will never be alone.”

…

They didn’t go with the crowd of villagers to see the train off from the station.

Instead, Dan and Sally thought it best to put Sammy down in his own room, so when he woke it was to the menagerie of stuffed animals that shared his bed. 

He slept well and late, and so did they.

When they woke – at almost ten – the day was already bright and warm, with just a single pale whisp of cloud hanging over the cutting.

As they’d been told Dan and Sally kept the ticket safe with their marriage certificate and passports in the firebox in the cupboard under the stairs.

Sometimes they thought about destroying it because it just being there made some decisions harder.  

But they never did.

“It doesn’t belong to us,” Sally always said, “It’s Sammy’s. He might need it.”

And many, many years later – for better or worse- it was important they did not.

But that is Sammy’s story and not this one.