The Girl in the Painted Caravan (2 page)

I turn my head and give a triumphant grin to the waiting reporters. ‘Come along, Nathan,’ I say and walk briskly towards the door. Nathan, hot on my heels, firmly shuts the door
behind us.

We are shown into a small room which is normally used as some kind of an office and is filled with photos of the famous faces that have trodden the boards in the Hippodrome. One of the security
men instantly eyes Nathan’s camera bag. ‘Sorry, mate. No cameras.’ I open my mouth to speak, but before I can, he smiles and says, ‘We have our own photographer.’ I
give a sigh of relief, as this is definitely a moment I want recorded for posterity!

George Harrison comes in first. He is bigger than I had imagined and puts me at ease straight away with his pleasant smile and down-to-earth manner. But what will his hand show? I can’t
wait to see.

George gestures for me to sit down and eagerly holds out his hands towards me. ‘I’ve never had me hand read before. I’ve always been curious, though,’ he exclaims. He
raises an eyebrow and looks at me expectantly. He has very strong lines on his hands and I hear myself telling him that he will branch out into other things. The sensible side of me finds it
difficult to believe that someone in the most famous band in the world would
not
stay doing this forever, but I will always tell a client what I see and not just what they want or expect to
hear. His hands are well worn and I find him to be a soft and gentle man who speaks quietly and has great respect for what I do for a living. His interest in all things psychic seems to be a
passion and I tell him this is something he should pursue. After half an hour, I complete my reading and we say our goodbyes.

Next through the door bounds a very lively Paul McCartney. Beaming and full of energy, he throws himself onto the seat and says, ‘Come on then, what have you got to tell me?’

I think he is a little surprised when my reading reveals that Jane Asher, his girlfriend, will not be the one he marries. I tell him that he will meet someone from America and have a very good
marriage to her. Someone very artistic and who does in fact share some of Jane’s qualities. Both are fair in colouring, both are great cooks and independent in their careers. Suddenly there
is a knock at the door. Paul calls out, ‘I’m having my palm read, what do you want?’

‘There’s an urgent phone call for Eva,’ says a young man. Immediately thinking that something is wrong with Mummy, I jump up, head for the door and walk quickly to the phone.
‘Hello,’ I say anxiously.

‘It’s me, I’m back.’

My heart jumps and I can feel a huge smile spreading across my face. It’s my Johnnie. ‘How did you know where I was?’ I splutter.

‘I got Pam to phone your home number and your mother told her you were backstage at the theatre.’

As I say my next words, I can’t believe they are coming out of my mouth. ‘Phone a taxi for me right now and send it to the back door of the theatre.’

My Johnnie is home at last and not even the Beatles are going to keep me away from him for another minute. I go back into the room and Paul is gone. After all, he did have a show to do!

Johnnie is the love of my life and for three years he has continually begged me to marry him. Each time, I said no. I was too scared to make that step, to marry a non-Romany against the wishes
of my family. When he left Brighton five weeks ago, I really thought that this time I had lost him forever. We’d never been apart for such a long time and I had been missing him so much that
something in me clicked – I finally realised he was all I’d ever wanted.

‘John’s back,’ I say to Nathan. ‘I’m leaving.’

The taxi arrives ten minutes later and I jump into it, not giving a second thought to the fact that I have left two of the most famous men of our time with unread hands. Years later, I’m
glad that I didn’t read John Lennon’s palm and so did not foresee the tragic death that awaited him.

As I sit in the back of the taxi, which doesn’t seem to be moving anywhere near fast enough, I run my fingers over the gold sovereigns on my bracelet and think of my grandmother, Alice
Eva. She’s such a strong woman: principled, far-sighted and brave. I’ve always looked up to her and my mother. If I say yes to Johnnie, if I marry someone from a non-Romany background,
what will they think? Will they still be proud of me?

Do I dare take this step?

TWO

The first memory I have is vividly imprinted in my mind. I was looking over the side of a pram, which was being pushed at speed across a field. It was very dark, but the sky
was criss-crossed with search lights. There was a tremendous amount of noise as the antiaircraft guns blazed away at the enemy planes overhead.

It was May 1941 and my mother and I were living in a field behind Weldon’s car park in Spalding, Lincolnshire, where my father had arranged for us to stay before he left to join the army.
There were around a dozen caravans occupied by gorger (non-Romany) people on the other side of the field from where we were parked. A short walk away was the Red Lion, a beautiful old inn in the
marketplace, and it was behind there that my grandmother and the rest of the family had their wagons, or vardos, as we called them.

It had been raining and there was thick mud on the ground as my mother struggled across the field, pushing the pram with me and her most precious belongings crammed into it. When she got to the
gate, she found that it was locked. There was a high mesh fence all round the field because, in the summer months, it was used as a sports ground. Fairs were also held there and, during the winter,
travelling people were allowed to stay on the site for a modest rent.

My mother picked me up, along with whatever else she could carry, and managed to climb over the high gate. Then she ran towards my grandmother’s vardo, while bombs were dropping on the
town and the guns were pounding away, spraying shrapnel everywhere.

We were almost there but some instinct told her not to try to complete her journey. She threw us both under the nearest caravan and we lay there, feeling the ground shudder from the bombs’
impact.

Then it quietened. The planes went away and the sound of the guns receded. My mother found, just two inches away from my head, a lump of jagged metal, still red-hot, which would have sliced
through my skull like butter. She kept that piece of shrapnel as a stark reminder of how precious life is.

Pulling me out into the open, Mummy picked me up again and made her way shakily to Granny’s vardo. Shutters on the windows acted as blackout curtains, keeping any light from showing, but
we could just make out Granny on her steps, peering out into the darkness, no doubt looking to see where the bombs might have fallen.

‘Laura, is that you? Oh thank God,’ she said. ‘Get inside.’

The caravan was warm and cosy in the lamplight. I remember my muddy coat and shoes being stripped from my body and a warm blanket being tucked around me. After that, I must have fallen
asleep.

Spalding is a quaint place, built along the River Welland. Running from the main high street were little narrow footpaths heading to the medieval priory. Little bits of history could be seen
everywhere: the White Hart inn, opposite the Red Lion in the market square, was built in the fourteenth century and once housed Mary Queen of Scots, while the rest of the square was dominated by
pretty Georgian buildings. But this lovely little country town, which had managed to survive hundreds of years untouched, had been badly damaged in a matter of minutes.

I assume Spalding had air-raid shelters, but none of my family would have gone into them. I don’t know of any Romanies who ever used them – the fear of being enclosed, trapped
underground, was too great. When the buzz bombs came along later in the war, I think our people believed they stood a sporting chance if they could run fast enough – foolish maybe, but this
is the way the Romany mind works. We have always lived in open spaces and are used to our freedom. To be locked in and not be able to get out would feel like a death sentence to a Romany.

Obviously, out there in Lincolnshire, we were usually well away from the terrible bombings that the towns and cities had to put up with, but there was still plenty of evidence that the war was
on. We were on one of the main flight paths to London and so we actually saw the Germans come and go on their bombing missions. One night, my mother’s sister Vera came banging on the door.
She rushed in saying, ‘Bring Eva and come over to my vardo. There’s a German who’s bailed out of his plane and is on the loose.’ As Mummy hesitated, Aunt Vera said,
‘Come on, let’s go! It’s getting dark.’

My mother grabbed her big iron frying pan from the cupboard and swung it round her head. ‘I’ll be fine. If he tries to come into my vardo, he’ll get more than he bargained
for.’

‘If you don’t come with me, I’m staying here,’ Aunt Vera said, sitting down and folding her arms.

‘You can’t leave your children, Vera. Don’t be silly.’

In the end, my aunt won and we went back to her vardo for the night. I was put in bed with my cousins Daisy, who is my age, and her big sister Honour, who is three years older. Their father, my
uncle Cardy (so called because as a boy he was ‘quite a card’), sang to us to calm us down and get us to sleep. The lyrics went something like this: ‘Toffee, chocolate, lollipops
and ice cream . . .’ and went on to list all the nice things to eat, including cakes, biscuits and strawberries.

Mummy was sharing Vera’s bed, so Uncle Cardy went off to bed down with his brothers-in-law Nathan and Alger in their old vardo. We heard the next day that some men working in the fields
had found the airman asleep under a hedge.

I was born in March 1939, so my memories of those early war years come in fragments. I do recall my baby brother Nathan being born in 1942 and named after my mother’s father, Nathaniel.
Before, Mummy had been able to leave me in the care of Shunty, her younger sister, who lived with Granny, but she would not leave a baby as young as Nathan. This meant that it was difficult for her
to go out and work – she read palms and had a loyal circle of clients.

She was still able to dukker (palm-read) occasionally, though, as some of her clients would visit our vardo. There was one regular, a doctor’s wife, who arranged to come along for a
reading and to see the new baby. I was under strict instructions to behave myself and I had a new dress for the occasion, in pink Viyella with a matching smock. I knew I’d be placed on the
steps of the vardo and told to stay there until Mummy had finished attending to the client, under threat of dire punishment if I moved a step away. I couldn’t stay still for more than a few
minutes at a time and I knew it would feel like hours on those steps, so before the client arrived, I looked around the vardo for something to take with me to help the time pass. What I found was a
pack of Craven A cigarettes and a box of matches, left behind by some relatives who had visited us the previous evening.

I remember finding it fascinating to watch grownups puffing away at those funny white sticks, blowing out clouds of smoke, or sometimes, magically, ring upon ring, reaching up to the roof of the
vardo. It was something I had always wanted to try for myself and so I sneaked a cigarette out of the packet and secreted the box of matches. When the client arrived, I waited for Mummy to close
the door to the vardo before tiptoeing quietly down the steps and sauntering innocently towards my secret hiding place under the grandstand, on the far side of the field.

There, crouched on my haunches, I surveyed the cigarette before placing it in my mouth, feeling incredibly grown up and sophisticated. I remember vividly how the taste of the cigarette soaked
into my lips and I squirmed a little at the bitterness. I struck a match and lit it, drawing in with all of my breath, just as I had seen the grown-ups do. The smoke that I inhaled quickly made its
way down the back of my throat like a furnace being lit. I not only choked, but spat everything out as a coughing fit overtook me. The red-hot ash fell into my lap, turning to orange and then grey.
Watching in horror, I saw a hole begin to appear in my new dress. As soon as I managed to get my breath back, I crawled guiltily from my hiding place and ran back to the vardo, knowing that I would
be in hot water if I was missing for too long. I stopped halfway back and looked down at my dress. There was not just one hole – the dress was covered in them. I wanted to run away, but where
to?

‘Eva!’ I heard a voice call. My heart was in my mouth. If I didn’t come, I knew I would be in trouble, yet I also knew I would be in deep trouble when she saw me. I started
rubbing violently at the holes, which only seemed to make them more obvious. My eyes stung from the smoke and hot tears were now running down my face.

‘Eva, come here now,’ shouted Mummy. ‘Where are you, child?’

Slowly putting one foot in front of the other, I started to walk towards the vardo. The steps that led up to it, right at this moment, seemed to be the steps of doom. When my mother saw me,
bedraggled and mucky, she screamed in horror and pointed speechlessly at my dress.

That was the first time my mother spanked me, and it is a spanking I shall never forget. Maybe she was also relieved that I hadn’t managed to set fire to myself in the process.

I was a feisty child, and a bloody nuisance. Unable to sit still for two minutes, I was always up to something and was very adventurous. One Christmas I almost learned how to perform on a
trapeze. Some circus people had set up winter quarters near to us in Spalding and I used to watch them working out their new routines and practising.

I’d stare with horror at the fire-eaters, who’d douse cotton wool with methylated spirits, set fire to it, then put this flaming bundle in their mouths. Every time I saw it I was
terrified they’d burn themselves – though of course they never did.

The trapeze artists were teaching their own children and, because I was always there watching, they taught me a few tricks too. Whether they were just being kind, I don’t know, but they
said that I was quite supple and doing very well. Suddenly I had visions of myself on the high wire, all beautifully made up and dressed in spangles, with the spotlight turned on me as all the
other lights in the Big Top dimmed and the huge audience hushed while I tested the ropes before sailing into some death-defying triple somersault without a safety net. Actually, I never got more
than about two feet above the ground, and then my mother found out where I had been disappearing to and that was the end of my ambition to become a circus performer!