If Robert could not hire a barn we would work in a field, with the A-frames for Jack and the girls fixed deep into the wet ground and a mesh of rigging pegging it down to hold it still. It was cold working on the outside but people huddled together and cheered and did not seem to mind. I was mortally tired at the end of a day with two shows, and it was worse when we worked in the open air because I was chilled by the end of the show as well. Preparing the ponies and showing them, changing their harness, and then my two rosinback acts were hard work. I could hand the horses over to Rea for the second half but my trapeze act strained my tired muscles, and always I stiffened in a frenzy of tension while Dandy was working up high. Then I had to force a smile on my face for the historical tableau at the end when Jack and I rode Snow and Sea around the ring at a fast canter and snatched Dandy and Katie up behind us to represent the rape of the Sabine women. The crowd loved that. Katie and Dandy wore their indecent trapeze costumes with a veil over their faces and screamed like banshees. Jack and I wore our breeches and blue shirts with little fez hats. We tried it one time with burnt cork smeared on our faces and it went even better.

We did three shows a day if we were in a barn. Robert would hire lanterns and we would work until the light was going. He would sometimes hire benches and do a gala show for invited local gentry if we were in an area of big houses. Katie and Dandy would be on their mettle then, catching the eye of the local squire.

I used to peep through the door of the barn to see the clothes, to smell the clean perfume smell that came off from them. The clothes were so smooth, the cloth so silky. The colours of the women’s dresses were so pale and so regular – the dyes seemed never to have run streaky. Their collars were always white, and if it got hot in the barn they brought out exquisite painted fans and wafted them gently at their necks where you could not see a line where they had stopped washing.

I used to watch them and long to be one of them. It was a dream as foolish as Dandy’s thought of taking the fancy of one of the young squires. But it was part of my old dream of Wide and I longed for clean sheets and a quiet room. The tick of a well-oiled clock and flowers in a vase. The smell of beeswax and the view from the window of other people bent-backed working on my land.