"You must be stupid because you work in the circus."
"You probably can't even read."
"I bet you've never been to school."
All things that I have heard time and time again. The common misconception that if you are from the circus it must therefore mean that you are uneducated.
In actual fact the reality is far from it.
Growing up in the circus does mean that you probably won't have a standard education but it doesn't mean that it will be a poor one. On shows where there are many children there will often be a resident teacher who travels along with the circus. I grew up on a show in the UK which at the time did not have many children travelling with the circus year round, so my friends and I used to attend a new school every single week. This used to be arranged by an organisation that was funded by the council to help travelling children access education in the UK. We would supply them with a list of our locations and they would then go on to find a suitable school who would take us on for the week. If for some reason they were unable to find us a school they would send out a teacher to work with us for the duration of our stay in that particular town.
Growing up I didn't realise just how lucky I was to have this experience, I only fully appreciate it now. At the time for me it was just normal, that's just how my life was. I got to travel the country up and down, make new friends every week and if I didn't like a particular school well I only had to stay there for a few days.
After school I would come home, get changed as fast as I could and then I would be outside messing around with my fellow circus friends until dark. I absolutely loved it, we were allowed to go anywhere we wanted within the confines of the circus, a game of hide and seek could last for hours when you were hiding in the cabs of lorries and climbing up the tent poles.
We also had many responsibilities growing up and not just with helping out with home chores, at the age of seven I first started selling. I remember at the time in the stockroom there was a big old box of plastic souvenir flags and after begging my mum to give me a job, she gave me a bag of change and 10 flags at a time I started selling them off for 50p each. I used to get 5% commission for each flag I sold, and it wasn't long before I came to my mum with the idea that we should raise the price to £1. My theory was that with a higher price the potential customer would think that the product was of a higher quality so they would be more likely to purchase the item. My mother allowed me to test my theory out, and not only were my profits higher per item sold but I also had an overall increase in sales. Soon I had sold the entire box of flags and was then promoted to selling candyfloss buckets and souvenir brochures...
When it came round to the time of thinking about high school, my parents wanted me to have an education of a higher standard so I sat the 11+ exam and was accepted into an all girls grammar school. This meant that I wasn't travelling full time anymore, and this is something I struggled with immensely. But I understood the importance of a good education, so I learnt to balance the circus world with school and homework. Most weekends my parents and I were away travelling and any school I missed I just had to catch up on and manage in my own time.
When I was twelve years old my mother decided it was time to start teaching me her job so that I could help her out with her overflowing workload. This at the time meant learning how to process UK visa applications for foreign artists coming to the UK to perform. I remember I often spent my lunchtimes at school sitting quietly in the corner of the library processing visa applications.
I must admit that I was often seen as an alien in my school, although everyone was highly intelligent the majority of my peers had barely any life experience. I struggled to maintain friendships as I found my classmates boring and childish. Most of my friends were much older than me but they were all working in different places across the world. Because of this I often felt lonely and stuck, so I poured myself into practising my tightrope walking, preparing myself for the day I would start performing.
Every evening I would make myself train even for just half an hour. My summer holidays I spent in Moscow training with some of the best wirewalkers and it wasn't long before my hard work started paying off. My first performance on the wire was at the age of fourteen and I loved it, from that point on I was desperate to be onstage any moment I could. To make it work with school I often spent my time backstage revising for exams. The way I see it, if you want something enough then you can make it work. If you say you don't have enough time it means you don't want it enough.
So yeah overall I have had a really varied education but was it bad one? I don't think so, no it is not for everyone, and I must iterate that it was 100% my choice to continue my life in the circus. In fact my parents tried their hardest to dissuade me from it. But no, I chose to continue in this line of work, however if I had chosen to go into another field I would have had every opportunity to do so, because my background does not hold me back.
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