The Diddakoi (2 page)

In the wagon Kizzy could hear them and knew it was Christmas. Admiral Twiss, too, always sent Kizzy’s Gran a cockerel for Christmas, some oranges and dates, and a bag of oats for Joe.
Sometimes Kizzy thought the oranges and dates were for her; sometimes she thought the Admiral did not know that she existed.

He used to come down at sunset and stand looking at his horses just before Nat took them in; they came to the Admiral for sugar and Kizzy used to hide behind the wagon wheels to watch. If he saw
Gran he would lift his tweed hat and say, ‘Good evening, Mrs Lovell.’ He never called her ‘Granny’,‘as some do,’ said Gran, and spat. ‘He has
manners.’

He had put aside the orchard for the travellers and laid on water, a tap and a trough for them, though the village did not approve. ‘It’s my land,’ said Admiral Twiss.
‘They don’t do any harm,’ – in the orchard they kept his rule of no litter – ‘Besides, they like my horses.’ The paddocks ran along the back of the orchard
where, on the other side of the hedge, the gypsies’ rough horses used to be tethered; they were gone now; the caravans were towed by cars or lorries or were mechanized themselves.

The only horse was Gran’s and Kizzy’s Joe, who was the last of the many horses who had once drawn the wagon, plodding along the roads to meadows and commons all over England, grazing
on the road verges where, though even then there was plenty of traffic, the grass was still sweet, not so petrol-tainted and strewn with litter, and travellers could pull in to camp almost anywhere
if the farmers and landowners were willing. ‘There was smoke in the lanes then,’ Gran used to say, from many a campfire. The horses spent the winter with the family in some site like
the Admiral’s, coming close to the campfire that smelt of apple or cherry wood branches to get warm, and had, like most of the humans, a sack across their backs. Joe was the only one left now
– most of the sites set apart for travellers would not let a horse in – but Joe still grazed close to his wagon, which was one of the few horse-caravans still lived in. Though its
wheels were rotten and its axles rusty so that it could not be moved, its paint shabby, the brass was still bright, the lace curtains at its windows stiff with starch; it was gay with Gran’s
good china and photographs, a bunch of plastic roses Kizzy had bought for her, saucepans and a frying pan. Kizzy had been born in the wagon.

‘Does your mother wash?’ they asked her at school. If she had said ‘Yes’, Kizzy knew they would say, ‘She’s a washerwoman’; if she answered
‘No’, they said, ‘Then she’s a dirty sow’, but Kizzy did not have to say either; her mother was dead, and her father. ‘Who d’you live with then?’

‘I live with my Gran.’

Gran was not Kizzy’s Gran but her Gran-Gran-Gran, her great-great-grandmother. If she had told that to the children at school, they might have been impressed, but Kizzy told nothing, not
to Gran about school, nor at school about Gran who might have been a hundred. ‘Yes, perhaps a hundred years old,’ Mr Blount told his wife and Miss Brooke. ‘A true old-fashioned
traveller.’ Gran smoked a clay pipe; her face was dark and wrinkled by wind and fire smoke, as were her clothes; she had long ago lost her teeth, ‘but it’s a fine proud
face,’ said Mr Blount. ‘They say she’s lived there in Admiral Twiss’s orchard for the past twenty years, perhaps more.’

Living alone with her Gran, some of those hundred years had rubbed off on Kizzy, who seemed far older than her size. It was Kizzy who took the shabby bag to Rye, the small nearby town, for
shopping, Kizzy who went to the corn merchants to beg the spillings out of the bins or sacks for Joe – even if Gran and Kizzy went short, the old horse had corn in his nosebag once a day and,
if Gran could get beer, she gave half to him. In spring Gran warmed bunches of pussy willow at the fire to make the buds come out and Kizzy took them, not to the village but to Rye, and sold them
from house to house: palm and the first sticky-buds. Gran made baskets of willow twigs that bend easily and planted the baskets with primrose roots in moss and Kizzy sold those too; they were so
dainty people would buy them – and perhaps Kizzy’s brown eyes that Clem Oliver liked made a difference. In winter she sold mistletoe and holly.

Gran could not make holly wreaths now, her hands were too shaky Kizzy’s too small, but they lived happily in the orchard. Gran kept the caravan while Kizzy was away and went
stick-gathering for the fire they lit and kept protected by a shelter of two sheets of corrugated iron, with sacks to keep out the wind. No one could build a fire like Gran; she sat on a bench, a
plank across two piles of bricks; Kizzy had a fish-box that had
McPhail and Son, Aberdeen
stencilled on its side, but it was sturdy, the right size for Kizzy, and when it grew warm from the
heat of the fire it gave out a sweet resin smell. They would eat their breakfast or supper there, sometimes a stew, but more often nowadays bread and butter, perhaps a spread of dripping.
Kizzy’s grandfather and father would have snared rabbits, sometimes a hare, even a pheasant to put in the pot; she had a dim remembrance of eating hedgehog – ‘hotchi-witchi’
Gran called it – but they had to manage without such things now though sometimes they had pan cake – cake fried in the frying pan. The black kettle sang on its hook, Gran’s
kittle-iron, and presently they would have a mug of strong tea, drinking it in the firelight, their backs protected with a sack and Joe tearing up grass, keeping as close to them as he could
get.

Kizzy did not have toys, except an old skipping-rope that Gran had bought with some jumble – travellers are forever buying and selling things. Kizzy did not need toys when she had Joe. She
combed him with an old curry-comb and brushed his mane and tail; she would sit beside him in the grass, giving him buttercups, of which he was fond; if she lay down beside him he would sometimes
push her with his nose; the breath from his nostrils was warm, and now and again he would gently lick her face. A horse’s lick is clean to a traveller. ‘Well, they only drinks clean
water,’ Gran said. ‘Not like dogs’ – travellers keep their dogs apart – ‘Not let come into the wagons like “they” lets ’em into rooms –
covering everything in hair.’ To Gran, ‘they’ were ‘gorgios’, people who were not gypsy. Gran had no dog now, but Joe moved his big hairy feet carefully round the
campfire, always coming to see what they had for supper, always getting a crust of bread. Sometimes Kizzy climbed on the fence and called him and got on his back; it was so broad she could lie down
there too and feel him swaying, rippling his muscles as he moved, munching, across the grass. When the apples were ripe she would stand up on his back and reach him an apple; Admiral Twiss would
not mind: he kept apples in his pockets for his own satin-skinned colts and fillies. They were beautiful, ‘Yet I wouldn’ change you,’ Kizzy whispered to Joe, ‘not
ever.’ But there is never an ‘ever’; that February, getting off the bus, Kizzy had had two bunches of early palm and catkins left; Prudence Cuthbert’s house was near the bus
stop and Kizzy had knocked at the back door. She only wanted to sell her bunches; she had not met Mrs Cuthbert then – nor Prue.

Mrs Cuthbert was a busy lady busy doing good to people, ‘whether they likes it or not,’ said the Admiral’s Peters. He knew Mrs Cuthbert well: ‘Always coming to the front
door to ask for this or that: flowers for the altar, vegetables for the Women’s Institute stall. Would Sir Archibald open the gardens for the Horticultural Society Week?’‘Nothing
to see,’ said Peters. ‘Will he lend the park for the Fête?’ ‘An’ upset the horses,’ said Nat, ‘and ruin the cricket pitch,’ said Peters.
‘The village would thank you for that.’ ‘Will you do this, do that, lend this, give that?’ mocked Peters. Mrs Cuthbert was a churchwarden and on the PCC (the Parochial
Church Council). She was on the School Board, in the WI and the WVS. ‘Wouldn’t it be better, my dear,’ Mr Cuthbert, Prudence’s father, had once asked, ‘to – er
– work for one thing at a time?’ Mrs Cuthbert managed to work for them all, and the NSPCC, and the RSPCA. ‘RIP. That’s what I wish,’ said Peters, which is usually said
when people are dead. ‘Hush. She means well,’ said Admiral Twiss.

Mrs Cuthbert had opened the door to Kizzy and when Kizzy saw her white overall, her neatly-banded fair hair and the sparklingly clean kitchen beyond, she had nearly turned tail. She had half
expected Mrs Cuthbert to say, as many people did, ‘No gypsies,’ but Mrs Cuthbert would never have said that; instead her blue eyes looked Kizzy over and, ‘You ought to be in
school,’ she said.

Kizzy mutely held up her bunches but Mrs Cuthbert was not to be deflected. ‘Why are you not in school?’

‘Because I don’t go to school,’ but Kizzy did not say it. She said nothing, only offered her bunches.

Mrs Cuthbert had not bought one. She gave Kizzy a piece of delicious hot gingerbread – she was an excellent cook – but she had still asked questions.

‘How old are you? You must be six or seven.’

Kizzy did not know Gran always said such things were not important. ‘You’re as old as you are,’ said Gran, and that was the answer Kizzy innocently gave, ‘I’m as
old as I am.’

To her surprise Mrs Cuthbert seemed to swell like a puff adder – Kizzy had seen adders. ‘You’re an impertinent little girl!’ she said with venom and shut the door.

She must have told about Kizzy; two days later Mr Blount had come to the orchard with a Schools Inspector and asked the same question – gorgios, Kizzy was to find, continuously asked
questions. ‘But surely you know how old she is,’ the Inspector had said.

‘She must have been registered when she was born,’ said Mr Blount.

‘Don’t hold with such things,’ said Gran.

‘When’s your birthday, then?’ they asked Kizzy at school. Mrs Blount wrote the class birthdays down on the calendar; a boy had a buttonhole, a girl a wreath of flowers, and the
others marched round them singing ‘Happy birthday to you,’ but there was another side to birthdays Mrs Blount did not know; the girls got you by your arms and legs and bumped you on the
asphalt playground, once for every year, and they pulled your hair for the number of them with extra tugs ‘to make your hair grow,’ and ‘for luck’. Kizzy could not say when
her birthday was because she did not know – it had never occurred to her and Gran that people had them. ‘Well, we’d better bump you every day in case we miss it,’ said Prue,
but they did not like to touch her dirty boots so they tugged her hair instead, handfuls of her mop of dark curls. Kizzy had red patches on her scalp every day now and they ached at night:
‘Why didn’t you just say a day?’ said Clem Oliver.

‘I don’t know a day.’

‘Any day would do,’ suggested Clem. ‘You could pretend,’ but Kizzy did not know how to pretend. Since she had come to school, she sometimes thought she did not know
anything. For instance, she was not used to sitting on a chair – there was a chair in the wagon but that was Gran’s – and the hours in the classroom seemed long and stuffy to her.
Then there was the loo: ‘I’m not going to sit on that!’ Kizzy had cried when Mrs Blount showed it to her.

‘But Admiral Twiss built you a privy in the orchard,’ said Mrs Blount.

‘It hadn’t water.’ Kizzy had gasped when Mrs Blount pulled the plug with its terrifying gush, ‘And I didn’t like that either.’

‘So?’

‘I walked off,’ said Kizzy, which was a traveller’s way of saying she went apart and did it behind a bush.

Kizzy walked off at school, among the gooseberry bushes, and Prudence caught her.

Then Mrs Blount had to insist on Kizzy using the loo and Prudence, creeping up to spy – Kizzy had not realized she could lock the door – found her sitting face to the wall and called
the other girls to look. ‘Think you’re sittin’ on a horse?’ they jeered.

When Kizzy could not bear it any more she ran home. There was a hole in the playground hedge; the hedge was holly and the prickles tore but Kizzy got through to save being seen going out of the
gate; then, her dress more ragged than ever, her hot cheeks scratched, her curly hair full of holly leaves, she ran down the lane, her old boots splashing in the puddles, until she reached home,
the wagon in the orchard and Gran: the wagon, Gran and Joe – Joe – Joe. Mrs Blount let her go but Kizzy always knew that in the morning she would have to go back.

‘Admiral Twiss sends his compliments and I have come for the little girl.’

It was a cold March afternoon with flurries of snow outside the window, but the classroom was warm and the children had been quietly, almost sleepily, painting in their places; every head jerked
wide awake when Peters came stumping in.

Peters was so short and small he was like a barrel on short legs; neither he nor Nat, who had been a jockey and seemed to be made of wire covered with old parched leather, reached to the
Admiral’s shoulder. ‘Twiss’s two gnomes,’ the Doctor and Vicar called them and, like gnomes, invisible for all the village saw of them, they tended him. No one would have
guessed Peters had been in the Navy, except that he liked things ‘shipshape’ as he said; he was a dapper little man with a fresh rosy complexion and country blue eyes. He walked with a
roll but that was because he had a bad leg. ‘Shot in a battle,’ the village boys liked to think but it had been crushed in a train accident; nor was he tattooed but not even Clem could
say Peters was not a proper sailor.

The boys and girls gazed at Peters as he handed Mrs Blount a note. ‘Mr Fraser told me, Ma’am, to give you this.’ Mr Fraser was the headmaster. When she had read it Mrs Blount
got up and came down through the tables to Kizzy Lovell, bent and put an arm round her. ‘Kizzy,’ she said gently, ‘you are to go with Mr Peters,’ and when Peters had taken
Kizzy away, Mrs Blount told the children that Kizzy’s grandmother was dead.

Admiral Twiss had found her late that morning lying underneath the wagon and had guessed at once what had happened. Travellers are laid in the open air when they are dying; they do not like to
die inside, not even in their wagons; and Gran was peaceful on the frozen grass with Joe quietly cropping tufts alongside. The Admiral had called Nat and they carried her into the wagon and laid
her carefully on her bunk; then Nat had gone to find the Smiths and Does, travellers the Admiral knew were in a camp not far away – the Does were Gran’s cousins’ cousins. Admiral
Twiss had stayed with Gran until the Does’ lorry and trailer came bumping in to the orchard; the Smiths were not far behind. They built a fire and made a strong brew of tea; he drank a cup
with them, then walked up to the House with Lumas Doe to telephone the doctor and find a letter the Admiral had written long ago at Gran’s dictation and kept for her. ‘So they will know
what to do,’ she had said. He gave the letter to Lumas. It was only then that they had thought of Kizzy.