Pauline begged and begged her mother to go with her on a Sunday afternoon; finally, extremely reluctantly, Mrs O’Brien agreed as long as they didn’t tell Ronald. It was September and there was a chill, crisp feeling in the air and the leaves in Greenwich Park were just turning colour and dropping on to the concrete paths up by the Observatory.

‘This is probably a mistake,’ said Mrs O’Brien for about the tenth time as they walked up the hill and Pauline caught the familiar scent of Tweed perfume and brandy, mixed. They walked with the chattering excited crowds towards the Big Top, children running, calling, looking back impatiently at their slow parents. The childhood smell of sawdust and animals and canvas engulfed them as they entered the huge tent and Pauline’s heart now beat so fast she thought she would faint: my father’s circus my father’s circus, the words kept running round and round her head, my father’s circus, as she stared up at the trapeze wires stretched above them across the high canvas roof. Drums rolled, white horses pranced, Pauline wanted her father to open the circus with the crack of a whip, to dance across the trapeze wires, to enter the lion’s cage, to ride a one-wheeled bicycle.

‘I’ll poke you when he comes on, if he comes on,’ said Mrs O’Brien crossly.

The ringmaster, the trapeze artists, the chimpanzees, the clowns all ran around the ring and still Pauline wasn’t poked. An elephant sheered nervously on to a ramp, the lions were wheeled on in their cages, the lion-tamer – a woman – opened the cage door as the drums rolled. Trapezes swooped and rose in the heat and the excitement, children screamed and hid their faces and laughed and looked again.

‘He’s nowhere there,’ said Mrs O’Brien, flatly, finally. In the middle of the horses’ dance, white horses carrying red-dressed ladies and trotting through flaming hoops as the whip cracked on the sawdust, Pauline O’Brien began to cry.

Afterwards she dragged her mother, who had a headache, to the trailers at the back of the Big Top, pushing past little boys trying to catch sight of the elephants, finally stopping a woman in blue sequins and black tights at the door of a caravan.

‘Excuse me,’ said Pauline tremulously, ‘do you know where I might find Roger Popham?’

The sequinned lady was a Russian and smiled at them in incomprehension but, seeing Pauline’s beautiful tearstained face, called to a small man nearby who was still partly in his clown costume and still made up. They had seen him riding a one-wheeled bicycle and falling flat on his face in the sawdust.

‘Zarko, Zarko,’ the woman called.

Zarko came up to the women and bowed, pulling at his bright green braces, his pink lips smiling politely through the huge red painted smile on his face. It looked very strange, close up.