The Girl in the Painted Caravan (11 page)

‘I couldn’t wait till the next morning,’ Kyra started up again with a wry smile, ‘to tell him why I’d been so long.’ Kyra had, over the years, enhanced this
story, because she loved to watch the faces of those who hadn’t heard it before.

The next day, when he got his present, Kyra’s father realised how he had misjudged her and was terribly upset. But that is Romany life. There is this strong protective instinct against
strangers, the gorger above all.

One of Mummy’s favourite stories concerned the telephone. When it comes to business, Romanies make frequent use of the phone, since this saves the time and embarrassment of trying to find
someone who can write letters. She knew of one old Romany, though, Charlie, a very eccentric old boy, who just did not believe in the telephone. He was from a very well-thought-of family, but his
wife had died, leaving behind her husband and their son Charlie Junior. The son dealt in motor cars and used to make telephone calls all over the place, finding new vehicles or looking for spare
parts. Old Charlie found it very hard to cope with his wife’s departure. They would travel with other families and, at night, old Charlie would take out his bike and go to the nearest public
house. Once, when they were travelling, old Charlie asked young Charlie, ‘What are these red boxes for?’ pointing at a phone box.

Young Charlie explained, ‘They’re telephone boxes, Dad. You put some money in and you can phone people and talk to them, even if they’re a long way away.’

Old Charlie took this with a pinch of salt. ‘Charlie, don’t you try to tell me that with that thing you can talk to someone who’s twenty miles away or more.’ So young
Charlie stopped trying to explain.

Anyway, on this particular night, after getting his fill of whisky at the pub, Old Charlie mounted his bicycle and started to pedal back to where they were camped. Unfortunately, due to his
inebriated state, he ran into a red telephone box and buckled the front wheel. He sat on the grass, trying to work out whether he could walk the distance back to the camp, knowing he wouldn’t
be able to carry the bicycle and couldn’t push it because the wheel was buckled. He sat pondering on this problem and then he looked at the box, went inside and examined the telephone. He
took a tuppenny bit from his pocket, put it into the box and said down the receiver, ‘Charlie, bring the car.’

This is where young Charlie found him when he came to look for him an hour later, worried that his father hadn’t yet come home from the public house. Charlie Senior was sound asleep.
Whether this tale is correct or not, it’s been told many times by Charlie Junior.

Charlie Junior fell in love with a girl called Lisa. She loved him too, but her parents were dead against them even talking to one another, for Charlie’s family was not pure Romany. This
made life difficult for them, to say the least, but Charlie was very persistent. He used to find out what places Lisa’s family was travelling to and then make a point of going there too, just
to see her. The parents realised why he was always there, however, and did everything they could to keep them apart.

One evening, quite late, Lisa’s family arrived at a stopping place and saw that Charlie’s vardo and car were already there. They would have moved on there and then, but they were
tired and the horses needed resting – they still had a horse-drawn vardo – and so they decided to stay but to set off very early the next morning.

Lisa managed to slip away from the vardo for a few minutes and found Charlie waiting for her. They were both frustrated at being kept apart and they decided there and then to elope, in the small
hours of the morning, while her parents were sleeping. She managed to get away all right but, even before it was dawn, some instinct made Lisa’s father get up and check to see if she was
still there. He saw she was missing, guessed what was happening and woke his wife up at once. He knew they would be headed for the nearest town and he immediately hitched up the horses, ready to go
after them.

The scene was set for a colourful drama, with the old Romany wagon hurrying through the half-light of approaching dawn, the horses spurred on by the grim-faced father seated up front, with his
equally anxious wife next to him, worrying whether they would find their lost daughter in time to stop the wedding, which they were both convinced would be disastrous for her.

Lisa, travelling some miles ahead in Charlie’s car, was at the same time worrying about her parents and, before they even got to the town, she begged Charlie to stop and turn around.
‘I want to tell them,’ she said. ‘I want to get married with my family around me and everyone friendly. I’m going to tell them that and, if they won’t agree, then
I’ll marry you anyway.’

Charlie was persuaded and he turned the car round and headed back. But he had not travelled far before, rounding a bend, he saw a Romany vardo overturned in a ditch, and then Lisa’s father
pinned under one of the wagon wheels. Lisa’s mother was frantically trying to free him and, as Charlie got out of the car and ran up to her, she cried out to him to help her get her man out.
Charlie managed to lever up the wheel and they pulled him out, but it was too late – he was crushed so badly that he died before he reached the hospital.

Lisa and Charlie married shortly afterwards, with her mother present, and then they went to Scotland, to keep away from the rest of the family, who blamed them both for the tragedy. The last
that was heard of them was that they were happily married and had seven children.

This is a tale I’ve heard told many times, sitting round the fire with the women.

Later the men would return and the women would get up and give them bread, cheese, pickles and jugs of ale. The men would take over, singing, dancing and playing instruments long into the
night.

ELEVEN

‘Daddy’s coming home for a visit,’ Mummy said brightly to Nathan and me. He’d sent a telegram and she’d found someone to read it for her. But
Nathan was too young to be excited by the news, and I was determined not to build up my hopes this time.

My father was stationed outside London now, at Sunbury, in charge of the cookhouse at a prisoner of war camp. The camp itself was on the Kempton Park racecourse, which now had a thick barbed
wire fence all round it and guard towers. Daddy’s quarters were situated under the stands. But just outside the main entrance to the course there was a plot of land, the ideal resting place
for a caravan! Discipline in the camp was fairly slack, so he decided he could get away with moving us there.

By the winter of 1944 it was generally felt that the war was at last coming to an end, though the south of England was still a target for German bombs. Towards the end of the war, we had these
pilotless ‘buzz bombs’, so-called because of the eerie buzzing noise they would make as they flew overhead. They had inbuilt timing devices, and when the timers ran out, the buzzing
would stop and the bomb would fall to the ground, killing anyone and everyone in the near vicinity. People used to fall to the ground when they heard one stop overhead, but by then of course they
knew it was too late. I get that same sickening feeling now, in a clairvoyant sense, when I realise I can see something bad in the future but know I can do nothing to change it, for it is already
cast.

When he arrived home, Daddy told us to pack our tools – which is how we refer to our vardos and equipment – because he was going to take us with him when he went back. He and my
mother talked it over and realised that, with time so short, it was going to be impossible for the horse to haul the vardo all the way to Sunbury and they decided instead to buy a car. Cars were
very cheap during the war, since everyone had laid them up.

In fact, the war years completely changed the traveller’s way of life. The horse was soon to be a thing of the past as more and more Romanies began to switch to aluminium caravans that
could be towed by cars. It probably didn’t seem such a drastic step at the time, but we were actually beginning to leave the past and much of our heritage behind.

I remember the journey to Sunbury in the car, which didn’t seem to take long at all compared to being pulled by a horse. The journey felt like such a great adventure, especially for us
children. When we arrived and pitched the vardo, we must have raised a few eyebrows. It was certainly a strange place to park up and we must have looked an odd sight, our trailer jacked up right in
the middle of this little wilderness, just outside the gates of a huge prison camp.

Daddy had told Mummy what she had to say if anyone tried to move us on and, although this was what she expected to happen, it never did. I imagine the army was unsure whether this was part of
the property they had taken over, while everyone else assumed the vardo belonged to the army. Obviously no one thought that a Romany family would dare just set up there without permission, but that
is exactly what we did and no one bothered us.

In the evening, his duties completed, Daddy would sneak quietly out of the camp and come and stay with us. In fact, he had things very well organised in the camp and seemed to be able to do
pretty much what he wanted. He looked after his superior officers well and they, in turn, looked after him. Needless to say, his family did all right as well. There was no shortage of labour, with
thousands of prisoners there, and he saw that all our odd jobs were done by them, which they seemed more than pleased to do.

Our water supply was carried over by a young Dutch man. Mummy could vaguely understand why the Germans were held prisoner, but she could not see why the Dutch boy should be. She turned to Daddy
one day and said, ‘Why should the cheri chore [poor boy] have to be held prisoner, Eddie?’

‘Laura,’ he said in a condescending tone, ‘he’s a collaborator.’

He thought he had explained very clearly why the boy should be in prison, but Mummy just looked back at him with a puzzled expression.

‘He was due to have been shot for his crimes as a spy. He’s better off in a POW camp than dead,’ he went on.

Mummy was horrified that this young boy might have been killed. She didn’t understand the gorger way of life or what went on in the war. It was all very puzzling to her.

We soon got used to the strange sight of men held captive behind barbed wire and Nathan and I would play on our little patch of land, adjacent to the fence, without taking much notice of it. The
men used to smile and wave at us and we would wave back. They were always, all of them, very nice to Mummy and us. Perhaps, in some way, the sight of children playing cheered them up. In another
way, though, I suppose it was a tremendously sad experience for them. It was late December 1944 and the prisoners must have been hoping, desperately, that they would never have to spend another
Christmas fenced in like farm animals.

On Christmas Day, I received the most beautiful dolls house I had ever seen. It was absolutely perfect and was fitted out properly, to the tiniest detail, with curtains at the windows and tiny
carpets on the floors and furniture, all built precisely to scale. It also had little dolls carved out of wood with arms and legs that actually moved. The prisoners had made it for me. For Nathan,
they had made a lovely German sausage dog, a wooden dachshund, with four legs that moved and made it seem to scamper along when pushed; it even had a little wagging tail. We were very happy with
our toys, but Mummy was still sad at the injustice of it all, at how wasteful and useless it was that these men should be hemmed in, as she supposed tens of thousands of English prisoners were in
Germany. It all seemed so senseless.

Although we had a wonderful Christmas, we were very isolated where we were. Nathan and I would entertain each other, as we didn’t have anyone else to play with. One day Mummy came out of
the vardo beaming. ‘I’ve made you a telephone,’ she announced. This comprised of two tin cans tied together with a piece of string. It was about eight foot long and if I talked
into the can, Nathan could hear me by putting his can to his ear. We spent many an hour talking to each other on this fine contraption.

I’m not sure how long we stayed outside the camp. Mummy must have hated it after a while, with no friends or family near and no way to earn a living, and my father was aware that the camp
authorities could only turn a blind eye for so long. But before it became an issue, my father was demobbed and we found ourselves on our way back to Lincolnshire.

TWELVE

‘We won the war!’ ‘The war’s over!’ Voices were shouting round me, as hundreds of people converged on Spalding’s marketplace. I was only six
years old so my uncle Nathan hauled me onto his shoulders, my hands tightly gripped in his as I looked over the jostling crowd.

It was 8 May 1945 and Germany had finally surrendered.

A large bonfire had been lit in the middle of the main road and every shop, business and hotel had its doors and windows wide open, lights illuminating the pavements and road. Some people were
laughing; others were crying. Children were running around cheering and hooting. Drinks were flowing, but no one wanted to sit in the bars; instead, they spilled out onto the streets, looking for
friends and family to celebrate with. The elation of that night stayed with me for a very long time. Mummy was crying with joy and relief, as were the wives and mothers of men away fighting.

It also meant more freedom for us children as our mothers could finally relax without the constant threat of bombing raids. That summer I had not only my cousin Daisy to play with, but also Aunt
Lena’s daughter Vera, who was the same age as us.

Once our chores were done, we’d be sent out to fetch herbs for our mothers – dandelions to make tea and coffee were top of the list – but we spent most of our time looking for
four-leaf clovers.

One day, as we made our way into the fields, Daisy pushed past me shouting, ‘Can’t catch me, can’t catch me! Come on, Eva, come on, Vera. You two are soooo slow.’

Very quickly, she came to a halt. ‘Ow!’ we heard her shout. I stomached a hearty laugh as I knew exactly what had happened. I’d been out into the field with Mummy the day
before and had also been stung, probably by the very same nettles.