Bullen’s Circus 1960
Watercolour
52 x 71 cm
Signed
LITTERATURE
McIntyre, Peter. (1962) The Painted Years. A.H & A.W Reed Ltd, Wellington.
Excerpt from Peter McIntyre’s The Painted Years:
Moving down the coast where the villages and the people look like the earlier Gauguins, I came to Douarnenez where the sardine nets, hung from the mast, make a blue mist across the harbour in the evening sun. A small circus had arrived, splashing the grey blue scene with vermilion, and I thought as I sketched it that every time I had seen a circus I wanted to go with it.
A man in soiled riding clothes came out of a red caravan and went across the square to the dearer café, so I guessed him to be the manager. I found a seat near him and, inviting him to join me in a drink, showed him my sketches of the circus.
‘Very good – very pretty,’ he said warily.
‘I don’t want to sell you the drawings,’ I assured him. ‘I want to travel with your circus.’
‘What can you do?’ he grunted. ‘You are not of the circus.’ He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture that ended the matter and opened up a newspaper.
I had nothing to lose so as I sat I made another circus drawing from my head this time. I drew a trapeze act but left the tights off and quietly slipped it over to him. This time he roared with laughter and slapped his thigh. ‘Keep it,’ I said, and he called for drinks. ‘You can doss in with the roustabouts but you’ll have to help clearing up after the yaks.’
I slept that night amid a smell of garlic, stale wine, and unwashed bodies in a narrow bunk in a horse box – the sort that the French army marks ‘forty men – eight horses’. My companions, the roustabouts, resented me at first, but they slowly came round to a monosyllabic invitation to share a drink or a loaf that for them was graciousness.
Except for the towns where we stayed two to three days, we played a village a day, travelling by night. I lived in a vacuum of tiredness, moving like a sleepwalker from one task to another, itching and dirty. Yet I was entirely happy. The circus, for all its hard physical realities, was so unreal a world, a ritual, an art form centuries old in a tinsel setting that enthralled me the more since nothing in it was familiar. It took me beyond the stolid suburbia of my upbringing. I even developed, from the public, the sea of peasants’ faces around him. I bought a French sailor’s striped shirt and tied a handkerchief round my neck.
With the circus, billed as ‘The English Miss Kitty’ was a woman with a pack of trained dogs who played football, or rather noseball. They would dash after their rubber balloon, bouncing it with their noses from one side of the ring to the other, sending it inevitably at odd intervals into the goals to the naïve amazement of the audience. In Lorient Miss Kitty invited me to share a bottle of wine. She was a fattish woman with hair dyed bright yellow. Her cheeks glowed with rouge in a powder-white face; her heavily-mascared eyes gave her a look of sorrowful indignation. I found that the English Miss Kitty’s English was fairly elementary.
‘I lof everteeng Engleesh. I haf pairfom at Placpool arnd Manchester – ver’ peeootifel city.’ She smiled archly, her mouth a stretching scarlet bow. ‘And I lof Engleeshmans!’
I froze like a pointer. She moved closer.
‘I’m not English, I’m a New Zealander,’ I said.
‘Vas iss dat?’ said the English Miss Kitty, adding suspicion to her usual look of sad ferocity.
‘It’s a place – a country. It’s where I was brought up.’
‘You no Engleesh?’ said Miss Kitty, sticking on her single track. I could see I was beginning to break through.
‘No, not strictly so,’ I explained. ‘You see I’m a colonial.’
She meditated on that for a while in obvious disappointment; then she looked at me closely. ‘Vhy you no black?’ she said.
One of the bigger acts on the circus was a troupe of trick cyclists who were in their French way the most collectively amorous group of people I have ever seen. In the ring they whirled and spun in a melee. Off the sawdust they would match fleetingly, man for girl, but they could never hold their partners, and however regularly they changed it was to the accompaniment of hysteria and quarrels and murderous fights. In cafes and circus caravans, in fairgrounds and village squares, their jealousies and passions would flare into clamour through a caravan stagmating season. Sometimes as the cavalcade of circus wagons wound its way through the Breton countryside, curses would rend the night, and we would stop while they were reshuffled anew and peace was restored; then, amidst love’s silence, we would trundle on our way.
