The Girl in the Painted Caravan (18 page)

There were only two other families staying, it being the summer – an old blind lady, the widow of a showman, who would sit outside her caravan all day, and another widow with a couple of
children who could no longer travel. They welcomed us warmly and we soon felt at home, certainly more at home than we had in the middle of Coventry. Both my mother and I hated not having anything
other than housework and child-care to do. She longed to give readings again and I longed to hear the stories unravel.

The Malcolm family, whose house was at the mouth of the field, had two girls roughly the same age as me: Yvonne and Gloria. Yvonne and I hit it off. She had a tendency to boss people around
– and I liked that in her! I was so happy to meet them, thinking I’d have friends at last, but unfortunately the sisters attended a convent boarding school, so they weren’t around
as often as I would have liked.

To my delight, I found there was a library not far from the stopping ground. Travellers didn’t qualify for library tickets because they had no permanent address, but since these were the
only places I could get books, I had started to join libraries wherever we were by using false addresses. Every time, I was scared they’d know I was lying but they never seemed to figure it
out. So I was never short of books, which I always returned before we moved on to another place, another library. But Mr Malcolm had said that I could use his home address, so, together with my
mother, I went in and joined legitimately for the first time. The librarians knew Mr Malcolm and his daughters and were very friendly. I couldn’t believe it; never before had it been so easy
or straightforward to join a library.

This time, I decided to see if there was anything written about the Romany people. I was quite upset and disappointed that the books I did find were terribly inaccurate. I remember one
illustrated book in which the women were pictured wearing low-cut blouses, showing their bosoms, which in our family would never have been allowed, and most of the older women were shown smoking
pipes. The way we were portrayed couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was then that I decided I would one day write my own book, to set the record straight.

If they were remotely approachable, I’d try to make friends of the librarians, and that repaid me on more than one occasion. We would sometimes leave Bedworth for a short trips and would
park up in a country lane. Usually within hours of our arriving there’d be a banging on the door and we’d find a policeman standing there.

‘I’m sorry, you can’t stay here,’ he’d always say. ‘The limit is twenty-four hours, in case of an emergency, and that’s it. You’ll have to move on
tomorrow.’

I was haunting the local library at the time and confided in the librarian. She kindly looked up the local by-laws and told me that so long as we moved on by the length of the caravan we were
within the law to stay. We quoted this at numerous policemen over the years and although I’m not sure the by-laws would have been the same in different parts of the country, no one ever
checked!

As well as visiting Bedworth library, Nathan and I would spend many an afternoon watching cowboy films at the nearby cinema. The cinema’s emergency exit backed onto the field and two other
travelling girls and I would dance up and down the steps of the emergency exit, practising our tap routines; when there was a musical being shown, we would pretend that the music was our very own
orchestra.

One day Mummy said, ‘Eva, go to the shop and get me some steel wool.’

‘Why does she always get to go to the shop? Why can’t I go?’ Nathan immediately whined.

So my mother turned to him, put her hand in her purse and gave him the money. ‘Go on then, Nathan. Get me some steel wool, boy.’

As soon as he was out of the door, I was on my feet and looked at Mummy mischievously. ‘You can follow him,’ she winked, ‘but don’t let him see you.’ Nathan was,
after all, only nine years old.

I dodged in and out of the wagons and cars so that he wouldn’t see me. Although he did glance over his shoulder two or three times, once he’d satisfied himself that he wasn’t
being followed he broke into a run, as did I. Once through the field, the high street, with lots of shops, was to the left.

I saw Nathan shoot into the wool shop and shoot out again and I hid myself in the doorway of the bakery until I saw him run past. Again, I followed him and slipped into the vardo just behind
him, in time to hear him saying, ‘They haven’t got any, Mummy.’

Mummy and I killed ourselves laughing when I told her he’d been to the wool shop to get steel wool! He didn’t realise that steel wool was for cleaning pans and was to be found in a
grocery store. Poor old Nathan’s face was a picture. That was the last time he asked to go to the shops for a while.

Although the people of Bedworth were used to travellers, we did cause much consternation one night. The twins were in bed and Nathan and I were sitting in the vardo when Mummy got up, tied her
new silk headscarf round her head and went outside to fill the kettle from the chromium water tank. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew it away.

‘My scarf!’ she shouted. I jumped up and went to help look for her new piece of finery, but it was too dark and even though the scarf was brightly coloured, it proved impossible to
see where it had gone.

‘I’ll go to the vardo and get a torch,’ she announced. A few minutes later, she came back out. ‘I can’t find one,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got an
idea.’

She rolled up two of my comics (I loved the
Dandy, Beano
and
Eagle)
into batons and then lit them from the campfire. We ran around, searching and screeching to each other:
‘Look over here’ and ‘You check by the hedges’ and ‘Leste dikes the cuver?’ (‘Have you found it?’).

After twenty minutes, the scarf was found and we were both in stitches at how crazy a search it had been.

The next night my father went to the local public house and returned earlier than we’d thought he would. ‘What’s wrong, Eddie?’ my mother said. ‘Did you miss
me?’

‘Not that, Laura,’ he said. ‘I wanted to make sure you hadn’t all been burned at the stake.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ she laughed, with a quizzical look on her face. ‘They stopped doing that to our kind a long time ago, didn’t you hear?’

‘Well, they may begin again if you keep on carrying on like you did last night. I’ve just come from a whole pub of people talking about us. The word is that a load of witches were
seen last night doing a dance and chanting in the dark, waving lighted torches around. They wanted to know who they were putting a spell on.’

My mother started laughing. Who would have thought that a silk scarf could produce so much trouble and scandal?

One night my father arrived back from the pub and announced that he was now the proud owner of a chicken farm, won that evening in a hand of poker.

‘What the hell do you intend to do with that, Eddie?’ my mother snapped.

‘I’m going to sell it, you silly woman.’ Things were always so easy in my father’s world as he never thought about the practicalities of anything.

‘Who’s going to feed the chickens and collect the eggs and clean them?’ my mother yelled, knowing it would be any of us but him.

My father turned round and looked at me, and my heart sank. So, at the age of ten, I became a chicken farmer.

I would go to the local store to buy the chicken feed and a brown powder that you mixed with it and that I later learned was to make the eggs brown. Then I’d walk to the nearby field where
the chickens were kept. I used to see the chickens pluck the worms from the ground and swallow them and, when I collected the eggs, I would think of the little worms inside them. I have never
knowingly touched eggs or chicken since that time, or anything else that flies.

After a couple of weeks, I was attacked by a cockerel, which pecked my leg, making it bleed. I hobbled home, shaking, and after she’d patched me up, my mother said to my father,
‘That’s it, feed your rotten chickens yourself or get someone else to. She’s not going over there anymore.’

My father got rid of the farm pretty quickly after that.

From then on, when my mother used to make cakes and Yorkshire puddings, she’d wink and me and whisper, ‘It’s OK, I’ve made it without any eggs, but don’t tell the
others.’ The liar!

As the summer slipped to autumn, the field started to fill up with vardos. Soon it became a sight for sore eyes, with the show people bustling about, proper show wagons – not gorger ones
– and built-up rides and stalls. I always looked forward to the weekends, when the fairground opened. The music and atmosphere becomes a part of you and there is no other feeling or
experience like it. To watch people’s faces and expressions when they were flung backwards and forwards on the twister or when they won a prize on the hoopla was better than going to the
movies – and I’m sure I learned many words and saw many sights that would have been given an X rating at any cinema. I certainly learned a lot about life from watching all the young
people canoodling right outside my bedroom window!

Mummy would put her boards out on the weekends and would do a little business, but not many people came to the fair, so she was never busy.

As one year slipped into the next, this pattern was repeated. The travellers came and went, but we had to stay. Summer was almost desolate, as our friends were away making their living, bringing
the excitements of the fair to towns around the country. Then, gradually, their wagons and lorries would chug into the stopping ground for the winter months and life and colour would return.

I’d find the time in between my chores to go out and play with the other travelling children. There was one particular game we loved to play. All our lighting and cooking was by Calor gas
and the empty tanks were great for walking on. We would all start in a row and see who could walk the furthest on top of them before falling off.

Our radios were run with accumulators which had to be taken to the hardware shop to be charged up – we had four, and two would be charging up while we used the other two. Every other day
we children had to go and exchange the accumulators. But we found something far more fun to do with them. On the top of the accumulators was a kind of black tar-like substance and we used to pick
this off and chew it instead of chewing gum – it didn’t particularly taste of anything, as far as I can recall. It was from here on in that I became a tomboy, chewing my black tar and
playing cricket and football with the boys.

I would rather do this than sit around with the girls, who would talk about make-up and boys; this didn’t interest me in the least yet. My only girly passion was knitting, and I would
often knit the twins cardigans and sweaters in the evenings, once it had got dark outside.

NINETEEN

As was the usual pattern, the longer we were at Bedworth, the less we began to see of my father. He would leave for work early in the morning, then come home to us for his tea
most evenings, have a wash and a shave, put on a clean shirt and go over to the local pub. We were used to it and didn’t miss him. Mummy would ask me to watch the children some evenings while
she went to the phone box to call her family – they would call each other at pre-arranged times so they could stay in touch. It filled the time a bit, but also reminded her of the life she
had lost.

We did manage one trip to Whaplode, in 1953, to see the family. Although Granny was in her sixties by now, she had never been to the cinema. I was desperate to go and she was finally persuaded
to come with Mummy and me one evening – it felt like we were all on a date as we got dressed up. We asked one of my uncles to give us a lift to Spalding, and Granny settled down between us in
the cinema. We chose to watch
Knights of the Round Table,
and Granny stared at the screen in awe as the story unfolded. In one scene, a horse was injured in a fight and fell to the ground,
where it lay dead.

‘Isn’t that horse a good actor,’ I whispered to Mummy.

‘Don’t be silly, child,’ Granny laughed. ‘That’s not a real horse; it’s only a film.’

She was very wise, but also very innocent.

One day while we were in Bedworth, I was on my way back from the shops when I noticed a beautiful antique desk on the ground near our caravan. It was made of dark oak that still smelled faintly
of beeswax polish. The front folded down to make the writing ledge, and there were lots of little drawers at the back that fascinated me.

It was standing on the ground next to Siddy Roper’s lorry. The Roper family had settled almost next door to us, as they had daughters of my age and our parents thought we would be good
company for each other. Siddy was a fairground traveller with several stalls. A giant of a man, tall with broad shoulders, he was extremely strong. Most nights he’d knock on our vardo’s
door to go to the pub with my father. On his way home, full of beer, he would bend a lamppost almost to the ground, and on his way to the pub the following day he would bend it back up! This was a
source of great amusement to the travelling people.

Siddy knew I loved to read so he waved at me and called me over, telling me to have a rummage through the books he’d picked up alongside the desk – he must have been to a house
clearance, I think. But at first I was more interested in pulling open those little drawers, all of which were empty. Or so I thought. I was fiddling around with the desk when a secret drawer came
out, full of letters.

‘You can’t read those,’ Siddy said. ‘They’re probably love letters. Give them to me. But if you want any of these books, just take them. They’re no good to us
– none of us can read.’

Mummy picked up a book called
Come and Be Killed.
‘I’m going to read it one day,’ she said, and indeed she kept it for years. She never did learn to read it though.

One book seemed to speak to me, so I picked it up. It was a biography of a pianist called Eileen Joyce who was very popular, as popular as Vera Lynn at that time. I was about fourteen and it was
the first grown-up book I’d ever read. It was hard, but her life gripped my imagination. She was born in a tent in a mining town in Tasmania, to a Spanish mother and Irish father. As a
teenager, about my age, she moved to Leipzig to study the piano, and then went to London. She was very beautiful, but tragically her husband was killed in the war. Reading that made me cry.
Whenever I had any time to myself, I’d curl up and lose myself in her story.