I remember my first trip to Giffords at Stadhampton in Oxfordshire. I was immediately entranced. Like many middle-aged women I still held childhood dreams of running away to the circus and Nell was someone who actually had. I had to meet her.
I asked her, husband Toti, and the entire troupe for tea, then we began a conversation of like minds and indeed like imaginations that really only finished this last week. The conversation has been about 14 years long.
At that first meeting we realised we had a crucial thing in common: both our parents had suffered brain injury. Nell’s mother at 52 had fallen off a horse with horrific consequences and my father at 50 had suffered a post-operative stroke that had rendered him half paralysed and unable to see. Nell and I were both in our teens at the time.
Our reactions were somewhat similar – Nell ran away to the circus. I phoned up an agent and became an actor. I think we were both fired by a stubbornness to remain undaunted by random catastrophe and a need to author our own reality. If nightmares could come true, so could dreams.
Giffords Circus has been, for 14 years, a beacon in my year. A sort of summer Christmas. Particularly the bit at the end when the troupe invite the audience into the ring to dance. I always try to bottle that feeling to last me for the year.
In between the summer shows life continued. She had much longed for babies. I remember my daughter Nell (semi named after Nell) bathing Nell’s twins, Red and Cecil, in tin baths on the lawns outside the caravans (me marvelling how could Nell have twins and run a circus). She wasn’t normal, I concluded.
And rather like our lives had started, in some ways we continued on similar parallel paths. We both had devastating-to-the-heart divorces, had summit meetings on how best to navigate with grace and discussed the complicated practicalities. How to stage-manage life – inside the ring and out.
We both had depressions, and treacherous passages of divorce grief and we talked from our separate beds – hers in Gloucestershire and mine in London – about how to take the next step in the dark. In short we held hands when stumbling. We developed our own “how to survive life” shorthand, such as “horizontal it”, ie when you can, go to bed.
When she became ill, Nell installed a day-bed behind the circus where I gave instructions for her to remain. I joined her whenever I visited.
We had dreams. Main plan: I was going to join the circus for a season (forgetting my children).
Almost happened plan: my brother and I were going to take over the circus for a surprise birthday present for my mum. Nell designed a moon I could sit on while singing a song on the ukulele and a trapeze act in which I hung off it in a tomato onesie. Possibly upside down.
The thing is, though, that with Nell dreams actually came true. I have no doubt that had she been given a bit more time we would have done both of the above.
And then she became ill. It was so long ago now, we should really have got used to the fact that she would die but for those who had the luck to know her she really was a superwoman. She wasn’t made to end. She was extraordinary. No one did chemotherapy like she did. I know no one else who would be flat out on her bed one moment and then on a horse in front of an audience the next, all smiling and in hopeful bridal white.
In the last few weeks of her life she went to Cuba – with her children, her own strongman Pozo and beautiful Nancy – scuba dived, then went to Switzerland looking for horses to buy. She was an engine of creativity – painting, writing, Instagramming a cancer diary, being a mum and running the circus.
Never was there another who lived so vividly. What I loved and found rare about Nell and why she’s a true heroine is that she never avoided, or minimised pain.
She was a true warrior, a poet, a magician. Like Frida Kahlo she took her pain and out of that messy crucible forged art and wonder – she went to battle daily. I always thought she’d look good in a suit of armour!
I didn’t see her enough to get irritated by her and perhaps I’m in danger of canonising her now. But she was a living legend and now she’s done the uncharacteristic thing of actually dying she deserves a little canonisation. St Nellie in her armour on a horse. But she’d hate that. What she’d like as a memorial is for us all to continue going on as she so strove to, in search of the wonder, marking but not ignoring the mess and cruelty of life. She squeezed every drop from life and now we must do so for her sake – as well as occasionally doing a horizontal.
Rest my beautiful spirit, you are free. Free to dance.
