Once wed, there was no choice but to move in with my father’s parents. Housing was at a premium in London and rooms hard to get for a very long time—six years of Luftwaffe attacks had left bombsites where homes used to be, and families needing a roof over their heads were joining a very long list to get one of the temporary prefabs erected to relieve the housing crisis. The 1950s and ’60s urban tower blocks of flats designed to rectify the situation had yet to go up—many have been demolished now, the architect who designed them admitting his error because people aren’t meant to live in anthills.
Living with my grandparents was hard on the newlyweds, and it must have been worse for my mother, who was used to being surrounded by her siblings. Mum and Dad hated the lack of personal privacy, and in particular that my grandmother would linger outside their bedroom with her ear to the door. My grandmother was always the last one in the house to go to bed, because she liked to mop the kitchen floor and make sure everything was tidy to come down to in the morning. It was her habit to put away her mop and bucket and then have a cup of tea and a thick cheese sandwich, a quiet moment to herself before turning off the lights and making her way upstairs. My mother would hear her stop outside their bedroom door, and finally one night could stand it no longer—she nudged my father awake, who said in a very loud voice, “If anyone’s listening outside this door, I’m going to get up and give them a piece of my mind.” They dissolved into giggles when they heard my grandmother scurrying along the landing.
My parents were soon applying for every flat or rooms they saw advertised and still couldn’t find a home of their own. The final straw came when they lost the chance to move into the first-floor rooms of a Victorian house just along the street. The elderly man who lived there had been taken into hospital and was not expected to emerge breathing. Though my mother worried about seeming heartless, ready to move into the old boy’s home before he was cold, she knew that time was of the essence, so she put on her best suit, her best shoes and she went to see the landlord. She explained that she was very sorry about the tenant’s health, but just in case the accommodation became vacant, would he let them have first refusal? The landlord laughed. “Not really, love—there’s thirty names on that list already.”
My mother came home and wept, but soon after the disappointment they saw an advertisement in the classified sales section of the local newspaper that piqued their curiosity: Gypsy caravan for sale. The price was fifty quid. This was their chance to get away. This was their chance to leave the Smoke, put the war and the bombsites behind them and build a different kind of life.
They hadn’t quite enough savings to buy the caravan, so they borrowed the rest from Auntie Dot and Uncle Pete, and wrote to the farmer at Forge Farm, where Dad’s family had picked hops every year. He offered them a place to situate the caravan and the promise of work as and when it came up. If they could get down there before hop-picking, they would have a job to last at least a month, and to follow they’d have more work when apple-picking started. So they packed up and left as soon as they could. They were going to Kent, to an area where at that time of year it would not be unusual to see pubs bearing signs outside warning, No Hoppers, No Travellers or Gypsies. By default, “Hoppers” meant Londoners. My parents already fell into one category and were about to fall into another.
The change was harder for my mother than my father. She was definitely a woman of the town, a city girl. She wore the latest fashions with clothes tailored to her specifications. She was the first young woman in her neighborhood to wear the New Look, with its rationing-be-damned lower calf length hem. She wore good shoes and her long dark chestnut hair was styled in a Rita Hayworth bob. I remember Phyllis Cooke, who ran the shop at the end of the road with her husband, Fred, saying to me, “When I first saw your mum, I thought, ‘She won’t last five minutes in the country.’ But she did—and your mum was a worker. Worked her fingers to the bone.”
Dad was equally dapper, but he was just as happy in old jeans, a leather bomber jacket and Wellington boots. The caravan’s former owner towed their new home down to the farm and they settled in, with my mother embroidering curtains and soft furnishings for their eight-foot-by-five-foot living area, while my father repaired and painted the caravan. They soon procured a tent to attach to the caravan, enlarging their living space. In summer they would pull a mattress into the tent, but in winter they would move back into the van, and the snug heat of the pot-bellied stove. The tent was most likely a traditional “bender tent” of the sort made by Romanies to live in alongside their caravans. Traveling folk would make their tents from six or more lengths of hazel, which were then bent over into a dome shape to support tarps. They were cozy, like igloos made from wood and tarp.
Their caravan had been set close to those of a family of Romany gypsies, and a cordial relationship developed. There was a nod to signal good morning and evening as they passed going to and coming from work. Nowadays the word is more commonly spelled “Romani,” though at the time most of the traveling folk would have preferred “Gypsy” to the other word used to describe them: “pikey,” a term that denotes someone of low birth. In Kent and Sussex, the word “Diddakoi” (or “Diddikoy”) was more likely to be used by local house-dwellers to describe nomadic workers—the derogatory name refers to people of mixed Romany and other Gypsy or traveler blood.
When I delivered the eulogy at my mother’s funeral, I was proud to share the story of my parents’ early days living alongside Romany families, recounting the bond that formed between them. After the service, one of my brother’s old friends approached him, grinning, and said, “I never knew you were a pikey, John.” For a second I thought my six-foot-two-inch brother was going to deck his best friend since childhood, but he just turned away. My parents only ever referred to the family respectfully as “travelers”—in their way they were all travelers, folk living a simple life while making a living from the land.
It’s often assumed that “Romany” refers to people from Romania, however that is not the case. Instead it is derived from the Romany word “rom,” which means “head of house” or “husband” or even “king.” Romany travelers were first recorded in the British Isles in the early 1500s in Scotland and England before spreading across into Wales and Ireland, and in each place the language took on elements of local dialect. There is also a distinction between the travelers then and contemporary Roma who have entered Britain from Eastern Europe in recent years.
For most traveling folk the late 1940s and ’50s were a very different time. There were no “big fat Gypsy weddings” in those days, though a funeral was a sight to be seen. You never saw a whole tribe settle on a cricket pitch in very fancy caravans, only to become British tabloid fodder within hours. In fact, you never saw those colorful caravans of children’s tales—instead they were often plain and towed by lorries, though some owners liked gold fittings, or horseshoe embellishments. Many travelers descended from the wave of Romany immigrants who escaped Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, seeking a place of safety in Britain after having been caught up in the anti-Jewish pogroms that bled across the Russian empire and into other parts of Eastern Europe. The same thing happened in World War II when Romany families were rounded up along with Jews and sent to concentration camps.
Romany travelers often had darker skin—possibly a genetic link to the first Romany people, who are believed to originate in the Rajasthan region of India, where there are many similarities in the Urdu spoken there and the Romany language. When the new influx of Romany immigrants entered Britain in the early twentieth century, the women, in particular, seemed exotic, with their jet-black hair tied back by silk scarves. They wore colorful wide skirts, embroidered blouses and shawls, and seemed like a breath of fresh air to a certain strata of privileged young London society. Artists, writers and philosophers who felt constrained by the lingering Victorian mores began to adopt those vibrant colors and what they thought was a freewheeling lifestyle, and as a
result became known as “Bohemians,” reflecting an Eastern European influence. The word had already taken root in France some years earlier among the artists and musicians of Paris. The irony is that no Romany would have tolerated the promiscuity and experimental behavior of those London or Parisian Bohemians—they would have been beyond ashamed and anyone not living by their strict codes would risk exile from their family. I find it interesting that today’s “Boho chic” has its roots in the history of a dispossessed people who traveled far to escape persecution for their way of life.
The winter of 1950 came in frosty and dark, and there was no work. My parents would take on any farm job and walked miles to other farms to earn money, then they came back to Forge Farm. The winter became harder, and at one point they were living on boiled turnips, perhaps a little rabbit if my father borrowed a shotgun. But there would be no returning to London to the echo of both families’ saying, “We told you so.” They had already been omitted from the invitation list for one family wedding because the bride’s parents said they didn’t want any gypsies in the congregation.
It was during one of the cold, dark days of winter that my mother literally worked her fingers to the bone. They were on a woodland job, cutting back something—I’m not sure what, but I know they were using bagging hooks. Maybe they were coppicing, a process in woodland management in which the young shoots are cut away from a tree stump so that in a few years the tree will grow up again. A bagging hook is a fierce looking implement, akin to a scythe with a short handle. You get into a rhythm moving it, one hand taking hold of whatever it is that needs to be cut out, and the other wielding the bagging hook in a low swooping movement. I’ve used a bagging hook, and was always relieved when the job was done and I could clean the tool, rub the edge of the blade with a stone to keep it sharp, apply oil to prevent rust, then wrap it in sackcloth and put the thing away. On this day my mother was working at a pace, doing a job they weren’t familiar with but had to take on because they were broke. Then it happened—she lost her rhythm and sliced into her fingers right down to the bone. She called out to my father, who gave her a large clean white handkerchief, and said, “You’ve got to keep working, love—we need the money.” My mother tried to do more, but couldn’t, so she just walked away toward the long meandering lane that led to the farm. I don’t think my father even saw her go, he was concentrating on the work.
As she walked, the village doctor was coming down the lane on his rounds. He drew his car to a halt and asked Mum if she wanted a lift. She declined, said it was all right, she could walk, her boots were muddy anyway and she could see he was busy. Then he noticed her left hand swaddled in a red handkerchief, blood dripping through and splashing onto her boots, and he realized she was in shock.
“Get in the car now, Joyce.” He opened the passenger door, helped her in, and drove straight to the farmhouse.
The farmer’s wife was probably used to all manner of worker injuries being treated in her kitchen, but it might have been the first time the doctor had performed an operation on the table, injecting my mother with a local anesthetic, then a tetanus shot, before disinfecting the deep cut and finally stitching the flesh. It left a scar, needless to say. When I was born some years later, it was with a small scar across the first two fingers of my left hand, as if the bagging hook’s blade had inserted itself into my mother’s DNA. Or into her soul.
That same winter, while my mother was at home in the caravan and my father had gone to the woods to gather more fuel, the Gypsy matriarch knocked at the door. Her name was May.
“You’ll never get through until spring like that, girl,” she said to my mother, hands on hips. “I know you two are going hungry for want of work. Come with me.”
That’s all she said. She took my mother to her own warm caravan—her “vardo,” in the Romany tongue—and she taught her how to make flowers from tissue paper and wire, how to gather them into vibrant bouquets and place them in a large wicker basket to sell door to door. Soon my mother was wearing gold hoop earrings, her hair protected by a colorful scarf. She’d already perfected her neighbor’s dialect, and became fluent, using both Romany words and the inflections of speech when conversing in English. It was not a stretch, as many Romany words had been adopted by working class Londoners over the years, because travelers often wintered in London’s parks when work on the land tailed off, so there was an intermixing of language. But all traces of my mother the city girl vanished for as long as it took to sell a basket of paper flowers.
A life on the move meant that many travelers could not read or write, and as my parents became trusted friends, so my mother would be brought official letters received via the farm to read out and advise on what to do next, which often meant writing letters on behalf of the families. She helped children with their reading and enchanted them with her own stories, and found herself in demand when, after she permed her own long dark hair into a mass of curls, a group of teen girls begged her to perm their hair in just the same way. Knowing that traveler parents were very strict with their daughters, she told the girls she would not do a thing to their hair unless their fathers came to the van to give permission. She earned a good deal of respect for sending the girls packing back to their parents before she would touch a hair on their heads.
Life began to look up. Then, to add to their fortunes, along came Bess, the lurcher.
The lurcher—known as the “Gypsy’s dog”—was originally a first cross between a sighthound, perhaps a greyhound or whippet, and a collie. Not a purebred Border collie, but a collie of the type you found in the country then—a sandy brown long-haired dog that was a bit of this and a bit of that, all those bits herder and retriever of one sort or another. Today the lurcher has become a trendy dog, often bred from lurcher to lurcher, and not the whelping of a first cross between two different breeds. They may also have been infiltrated by an “oodle” of some sort. You’ll see them featured in magazines for city folk who go to the country in their Range Rovers at weekends and wear green Hunter wellies—minus the mud—to ivy-clad gastro pubs with Michelin-starred chefs. The true lurcher had all the speed of a greyhound along with the smarts and nose of a collie. “Lur” is the word for thief in the Romany language.
Bess was the lurcher my father found tied to the back of a vardo on another farm. Her bones were sticking out and there was hunger in her eyes, so without being seen, my father began sharing his sandwich with her each day. If she was untied, she’d run off to find him. Wherever he was, anywhere on the farm, she would seek out my father. She had chosen him and he had chosen her, finally giving up a hard-earned few bob to buy her after her owner had told him, “You might as well take that thing off my hands—she’s no good to me.”
Bess would go out with Dad every evening to find their dinner—she could catch a pheasant as easily as a rabbit, without him even lifting his gun. In time, Bess had garnered a reputation for being a great hunting dog. Travelers and farmworkers alike came to the caravan wanting to buy her, but my father’s answer was always the same. Pointing to the sky, he would say, “When you can buy that moon up there, you can buy my dog.” Albert Winspear loved his dog and she loved him back until the day she left home to die alone. Dad searched for her for days that became weeks, tramping through woodland and across fields for miles upon miles calling her name. But in his heart he knew that Bess, too, was a Gypsy and she’d decided it was her time. My parents had other dogs over the years, but there was never an equal to Bess. Even in his later years Dad talked about hunting with her as if it were yesterday. “She’d see the rabbits across the field, and off she’d go, like the wind,” he would say. “The rabbits would run under the fence wire, but before she reached it, Bess would go over on her side—” He would slice the air with his right hand. He had knobby hands, worker’s hands that my brother and I have inherited. “She’d slide under the wire, and the next thing you know, she’d be up on her feet again with a rabbit in her mouth. She’d bring me
back our dinner, that dog, but we never left the field until we had one in the bag for her too.”
I created a canine character, “Jook,” based upon Bess for my novel An Incomplete Revenge. The dog’s name was a twist on one of the Romany words for dog, which is “jukel.” It was a delight to watch my father read that book and his smile as he came upon the part about the lurcher, the Gypsy’s dog.
It’s only when I think again about those stories of the caravan, of the traveler family they held in high regard, of Bess and the farms they worked, that I remember just how young they were, my father sometimes foolhardy and my mother tempestuous. If I look at photos taken of that time—small square black-and-white images taken with a Brownie Box camera—it appears that the more “Gypsy” my mother became, perming her hair so she had a cascade of mahogany curls, wearing colorful clothing far removed from those city girl suits, so her carefree attitude to life grew with the sheer space living on the farm afforded her.
As a child, listening to those stories, I could feel the wildness in them—there was a lack of boundaries I didn’t recognize from the tight rules laid down for me, and though I was mesmerized by the telling, the sheer craziness sometimes scared me. To be fair, I think our London relatives probably thought my brother and I were like children raised by wolves, for as soon as I’d finished my after-school jobs in the house—and I always had a lot of jobs in the house—we were free to wander across the fields to build camps in the woods, or dams across streams, or to fish for sticklebacks, or gather wildflowers to bring home, where they would be placed in jam jars to grace the table. Sometimes I look back and think it always felt like summer, even when snow was falling.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 6