By November 2015, I’d been working in circus arts for 10 years. I’d had some minor injuries; I fell off a tightrope once and sprained my ankle, but that’s all a part of working in circus.

On this occasion, I drove from London to a show in Manchester with two of my fellow performers. We always allow plenty of time for travel, but there was an accident and roadworks so we ended up running late. The venue was a huge park and finding where we had to be took ages. When we finally got there, we had only 10 minutes to get changed, put on our makeup and set up our equipment for our fire show, a process that usually takes about an hour.

Normally, we set up our own fire equipment, but other performers were helping because we had such little time. We set up our safety equipment – wet blankets and fire extinguishers. Despite the rush, we were all pretty chilled – I’d done this show many times before.

In the finale I use a fire whip, a long, tapered rope that lights up when soaked in paraffin and lit, and creates an explosion when cracked. But I hadn’t prepared the whip myself. When I do it, I quickly run it through the paraffin so it’s wet but not soaked. Unfortunately, the performer who prepared it didn’t know how to, so it was soaked with paraffin.

I didn’t realise anything was wrong when I first picked up the whip – it might have been slightly heavier, but it’s not something you’d necessarily notice. I spun the whip above my head and some drops of flaming paraffin fell on to the back of my shirt. One of the other performers gave me a look to say “Something is wrong”, and I realised my shirt was on fire. We use a professional flame-retardant on all our costumes, but it only makes things flame resistant – nothing is ever fireproof. I patted the flames down, dropped the whip and thought that I’d put the fire out, but then my shirt roared back into flames. Normally we brief event staff before a show so that one of them can be waiting by the stage with a wet blanket just in case, but on this occasion we hadn’t had time.

At that point, I ran off the stage and rolled on the wet blankets we had laid out. Extinguishing the fire only took about 10 seconds, but that was enough to give me severe burns from my waist up to my neck. There was an intense aching all over my back and it felt like the pain was encompassing my whole body.

There were lots of children in the audience, so I felt a duty to come back on stage. We finished the minute or so that was left, using the fire whip but being careful not to do any overhead moves, then we took a bow. I waved to the audience with a smile and a shrug to show these things happen, but I was in an overwhelming amount of pain.

We had some basic first aid by the stage, so I took off my shirt, but bits of it were stuck to my back. I was taken to an ambulance and when we got to A&E I found out I had first-, second- and third-degree burns over most of my back. The pain was so great, I thought I would pass out.

They gave me morphine, and cleaned and dressed the wound, and I had a month of treatment to heal the skin and prevent infection. Despite the pain, I was back performing with fire three days after the accident. I was careful, and actually it’s easy to suck it up and get through short bursts of activity; it was more painful sitting in the car travelling to the events. I used Bio-Oil for several months after the accident, so the scarring isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

Although this accident was caused by us being rushed, it’s ultimately the safety measures we did take – laying out wet blankets and treating our clothes – that prevented something that could have been much worse.

Following the incident, I won’t perform unless I’m 100% happy that all of our safety requirements have been met to my satisfaction. It would be nice to think you could avoid every accident, but the truth is, if it wasn’t dangerous, it wouldn’t be circus.





• As told to Katie Antoniou

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