Elephant and quote on an arm

The Pemberton Brothers Travelling Show closed its last winter quarters at Hull on Tuesday, and the big top went to a scrap man for eleven pounds. Dolly is still with us. Nobody has the heart to sell an elephant with no circus left to sell her to, so she is wintering in the paddock behind the Crown, eating turnips the landlord pretends not to mind. Every evening she lowers herself onto the cobbles outside the taproom and waits for someone to fetch the tin piano.

Old Gibbs carried that piano for thirty-one years. It has no proper keys left, only the ones he replaced with bent nails. On Thursday I found him in the yard with his cap in his hands, trying to tell her the show was done. She took the hinge of the lid between her teeth, the way she does, and played four bars of "Sweet Lavender" so badly that he laughed until he had to sit on a crate. Then she played them again, properly, as if she had been practising all along.

I am writing because of what you said at the station, that a life spent in other people's tents is no life to build. Maybe it isn't. But Dolly has never once asked whether she was meant for this. She just climbed onto the box every night and made something out of what she had. Gibbs says she has the right idea. I say she has a bad hip and a worse temper, but I will admit she has the right idea.

Come home at Easter if you can. Bring nothing but yourself. We will walk down to the paddock and see if she still remembers the tune.

Yours, Ada