The Diddakoi

For Emma

CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

THE DIDDAKOI

Before writing
The Diddakoi
Rumer Godden did a great deal of reading and research; in all her books, whether about India, or ballet, or dolls, or Pekinese dogs (her
favourites), she cared very much about getting the facts right. One important fact concerned the title, and the word ‘Diddakoi’ is explained very early on: it describes someone who is
half gipsy and half of Irish background, like Kizzy, the central character. Kizzy is a passionate, high-spirited girl, who fights against injustice, cruelty and unfairness, the sort of character
Rumer Godden frequently wrote about in her stories; she would say they were very like herself.

Rumer Godden was born in Sussex, in 1907, the second of four daughters, and she lived for much of her childhood in India, in Narayanganj, East Bengal (now Pakistan), where her father worked for
the Navigation Steamer Company. From an early age she wrote stories and poems, hiding them in the hollow of the large cork tree outside the family house.

She thought of herself as ‘different . . . the odd one out . . . the outsider’, and her behaviour at home, and later when sent to school in England, was difficult. She was in her
teens when a strict but understanding teacher guided her towards her future as a writer. Perhaps this teacher was the inspiration behind the sympathetic adult characters in her stories about
children. In
The Diddakoi
, especially, there are Olivia Brooke, Admiral Twiss and his manservant, Peters.

The Diddakoi
was first published in l972. Rumer Godden was surprised when a message came telling her it had won the Children’s Book category of the Whitbread Prize for that year.
One of the judges, Kingsley Amis, said he wished some adult books were as well written.

I first read it that year with my daughter who was ten. This year I reread it with
her
daughter, my granddaughter, growing sad all over again at the death of Kizzy’s grandmother,
and angry at her bullying by the village children, led by the spoilt little horror, Prudence Cuthbert . . . aided by her appalling mother, who sat on committees, and interfered. It is one of the
most memorable books, with changing scenes and situations, lively dialogue, tension and fear, and in the bringing together of a group of people who need each other.

I was privileged to know Rumer Godden and to talk to her about her books, her life and her writing, and to hear, from her, how deeply she cared for her work of storytelling. She died in l998,
and I think she would have been pleased with this new edition of
The Diddakoi
, published to celebrate her centenary.

Anne Harvey

‘If anyone,’ said the teacher, Mrs Blount, in the classroom, ‘any
one
,’ and her eyes looked sternly along the lines of tables filled with boys
and girls, ‘teases or bullies or jeers at Kizzy Lovell, they will answer for it to me.’

Twenty-eight pairs of eyes looked back at Mrs Blount blandly and innocently: ‘As if we would,’ they seemed to say. The twenty-ninth pair, Kizzy’s, looked down at her table; she
had a curious burning in her ears.

‘To me,’ said Mrs Blount. ‘We shall not have such behaviour in this school.’ But they would; silent and small, Kizzy knew that.

‘Kizzy must be short for something.’ Mrs Blount had asked her, ‘What is your real name, dear?’

‘Kizzy.’

Mrs Blount had touched a sore spot; in Kizzy’s family, as in some gypsy clans, a child is given three names: a secret one whispered by its mother the moment it is born and, when it is
grown, whispered again into the child’s ear; a private or ‘wagon’ name which is used only by its own people, and a third open name by which it is known to the world. Kizzy seemed
only to have one, but that was because she was what they called her, a ‘diddakoi’, not all gypsy. ‘We don’t say gypsies now. We say travellers,’ Mrs Blount told the
children. Kizzy’s father, pure Rom, had married an Irish girl, but Kizzy looked gypsy to the children and they were half fascinated, half repelled by her brownness and the little gold rings
in her ears – none of the other girls had golden earrings. There was one boy Kizzy liked, big Clem Oliver. ‘I thought gypsies had black eyes,’ said Clem Oliver. ‘Yours are
dark dark brown. They’re nice – and these are pretty.’ He touched the gold rings and Kizzy glowed and, ‘My Gran has gold sov’reigns for her earrings,’ she told
Clem.

‘Never seen sov’reigns,’ said Clem in awe. Clem made Kizzy feel bigger, not small and frightened, big an’ warm, thought Kizzy. Clem, though, was in an older class; she
only saw him at break times, and the others teased. ‘More than teased,’ said Mrs Blount.

‘But, Mildred, if you forbid people to do something, doesn’t it usually make them want to do it even more?’ asked Miss Olivia Brooke. Pretty Mrs Blount – Mildred –
and her husband, the young Welfare Officer, Mr Blount, who had brought Kizzy to school, were lodging with Miss Brooke in the village until their own new house was built and had told her about
Kizzy. ‘Doesn’t it?’ asked Miss Brooke.

‘These are
children.
’

‘Children are people, Mildred.’

‘Well, what would you have done?’ Mrs Blount’s voice was high; she did not like being told about children; after all, she was college-trained.

‘Could you, perhaps, have interested them in the little girl? Made her romantic. Gypsies—’

‘Travellers,’ corrected Mrs Blount.

‘I like the old name. Gypsies have a romantic side. If, perhaps, you had told them stories . . .’ but Mrs Blount said she preferred to use her own methods and, ‘I want you to
give me your promise,’ she told the class, ‘that there will be no more teasing of Kizzy,’ and she even asked them, child by child, ‘Do you promise?’

‘Mary Jo, do you promise?’

‘Yes, Mrs Blount.’

‘Prudence Cuthbert, do you?’

‘Yes, Mrs Blount,’ said Prue.

‘Yes, Mrs Blount . . . Yes, Mrs Blount,’ the answers came back, glib and meek – what Mrs Blount did not know was that every girl said it with her fingers crossed. Kizzy saw that
from her seat at the back of the room and knew, as soon as Mrs Blount was out of the way, it would start again.
Tinker . . . diddakoi . . .
gypsy joker . . . clothes pegs . . . old
clothes . . .

Kizzy had come to school in new clothes, or thought she had. Unlike traveller men who often order fancy suits, traveller women seldom buy new clothes from shops; they make them or beg them or
buy them at country jumble sales, but hers had looked to Kizzy brand new; she loved the tartan skirt and red jersey, the school blue blazer all of them wore, white socks, but, ‘Wearing Prue
Cuthbert’s clothes,’ the girls jeered.

‘They’re mine,’ said Kizzy.

‘Now. They were Prue’s. Prue’s mum gave them for you.’ Prudence Cuthbert was the worst of the girls and that night Kizzy had put the clothes down a hollow in one of the
old apple trees in the orchard, a hollow full of dead leaves and water. Her grandmother had lammed her but Kizzy did not care; no one could wear them after that, and next day she wore her own
clothes for school. It had never occurred to her, or her Gran, that they were peculiar clothes, but they looked most peculiar in class: a limp strawberry-pink cotton dress too long for her –
her vest showed at the top – a brown cardigan that had been a boy’s larger than Kizzy, but if she pushed the sleeves up it was not much too big; some of the buttons had come off but
Gran had found two large safety-pins. Kizzy wore gumboots over bare legs – she had washed the boots, not her legs, but mud still clung to them. ‘Where’s your coat?’ asked
Mrs Blount.

‘Don’t need a coat.’ Kizzy said it gruffly because she did not have a coat and was afraid someone would give her one. She spoiled the look of the school, ‘and those
clothes smell,’ said Prudence, wrinkling up her pretty white nose. They did, but not of dirt. Gran washed them often, hanging them along the hedge, while Kizzy wrapped herself in a blanket;
they smelled of the open air, of wood-smoke and a little of the old horse, Joe, because she often hugged him.

‘You live in a caravan?’ asked Prue and, for the first time, she sounded interested.

‘In a wagon,’ said Kizzy.

‘It’s a caravan. I seen it.’

‘A wagon,’ said Kizzy.

‘In Admiral Twiss’s orchard. He lets you but he’s barmy.’

‘He’s not,’ said Kizzy.

‘He is. Everybody knows it. Barmy. Nuts.’

Prudence doubled up. Kizzy’s hard small fist, hard as any boy’s, had hit her in the middle of her stomach.

He was Admiral Sir Archibald Cunningham Twiss but everyone called him Admiral Twiss – except his man, Peters, and Nat, the groom, who said ‘Admiral Sir’;
Kizzy, in her own mind, called him ‘Sir Admiral’. He lived in the great house of the village, Amberhurst House, as all his family had before him. ‘But they kept a proper big
house,’ said the villagers. ‘Servants and footmen, a coachman, grooms and gardeners.’ Now there were only Admiral Twiss’s man, Peters, who had been with him in the Navy, and
Nat, the bow-legged groom. ‘Not a woman near the place,’ said the village.

‘Thanks be,’ said Peters. Neither he nor Nat held with women and the Admiral was shy of them, shy and wary. ‘Don’t trust ’em,’ said Admiral Twiss.

To see Amberhurst village from the Downs was like looking at a map. ‘Why are they called “downs” when they’re up?’ asked Kizzy. The hills ran green and chalky to
the horizon, the valley wide below; the village did not nestle in it, but stood up clear and plain, its short street leading to the common where a jumble of cottages edged the green. Miss
Brooke’s cottage was the last on the common. The Cuthberts’ new white house stood out at the top of the village street; then came the garage, a market garden, the post
office–bakery shop. The Council estate, with the school on its far side, spread back almost to Amberhurst woods and the House park with its old chestnut trees. The church had once been part
of the park but had its own plot and drive now. The House still crowned the knoll; its yew walk, the lawns and walled kitchen garden could be seen from the Downs with the stables behind; they had a
cupola with a clock and, above the hayloft, a weathercock that, in sunshine, glinted for miles. An avenue of lime trees led to the tall gates where Nat lived alone in the lodge. Though the grass
was creeping up to the huge stone house, ‘and the bell pull often comes off in your hand if you ring it,’ said Mrs Cuthbert, the Admiral still let the villagers play cricket in the
grounds and the pitch was kept rolled and smooth, and there were still horses, high-bred yearlings and two-year-olds at grass in the paddocks. ‘Then they goes to be trained,’ said
Nat.

Admiral Twiss was long and thin with fierce eyes and eyebrows and moustaches that seemed to the village children to bristle at them, but his hands, that were fine and thin too, were gentle
– as any of his horses could have told – and deft. He made models, chiefly of ships, sometimes sail, sometimes steam; he never spoke to the village children, nor they to him –
they were afraid of the eyebrows and moustaches – but he made a model church, big enough for a child to creep into, and every Christmas stood it at the House gates. The church was lit up so
that its stained-glass windows shone, every tiny piece perfect, and from inside came music, carols that Kizzy liked to think were tiny people singing – Prudence would have told her at once it
was a tape – and at midday and midnight, bells would ring a miniature carillon.