The Girl in the Painted Caravan (4 page)

If this makes Naughty sound like a strict parent, well, he was, but not as strict as Alice who, with so many children to look after, had to let them know who was in control. One glance from her
was enough to make the culprit of a misdemeanour own up, or make one of the children finish a job they should have done but hadn’t. But Granny told me once that although she and Naughty would
put on a stern face at some of the children’s antics, they would often go into the vardo, out of sight, and laugh until they both cried. Granny used to say that the reason she and my
grandfather had such a wonderful relationship was because they had laughed together since they were children.

Their third son, Walter, was a shy boy who never liked to leave his father’s side. Walter and his father could not have looked more different, yet they fitted together like two peas in a
pod and were always very close.

Lena came next. Tall and willowy, she had a husky voice and seemed to always be laughing. She was followed by Adeline in 1912 (a date easy to remember as it was the same year the
Titanic
sank), who looked very much like her sisters, but had the most amazing eyes, a stunning green-brown that seemed to change colour every time you looked at her. She was a feisty girl, dominant in her
opinions and quite haughty. Everyone in the family used to laugh about how obvious it was that she would grow into a woman who could take care of herself.

Laura Eva, my mother, was born around 1914 – another year easily remembered, coinciding as it did with the outbreak of the First World War. She only spoke when she had something to say,
but her family would always stop what they were doing whenever they saw she was about to speak. She had a sense of humour that would make a cat laugh. My mother was the gentlest soul I’ve
ever known, with the most wonderful glass-half-full outlook on life. Petite and pretty, she could easily have stepped off the pages of a beauty magazine.

Vera came next, shorter than her sisters and curvier, almost cherub-like in comparison to their skinny frames. She had big, round eyes with lashes that swept her cheeks. She insisted on looking
different from the other girls and, as a teenager, begged for her long, curly hair to be cut into a bob. With the curls refusing to be tamed, this simply led to her looking more jolly than
sophisticated.

The final girl, Shunty, was a late child, probably born in 1928. Although she was warm-hearted and kind most of the time, she was no pushover either and could be sharp-tongued when the occasion
demanded it.

As the girls grew older, they would often debate about their ages. The conversation would be repeated again and again by my aunts over the years and it went like this: Vera would say to my
mother, ‘Now, I’m eighteen months younger than you.’ My mother would say to Vera, ‘Well, Adeline is two years older than me, so how old is Cissie?’ And so it would go
on. Never having had birth certificates (Romany babies were more often than not delivered by female family members), there was no official record they could refer to. Whereas nowadays women often
lie about their age and start counting backwards from the age of about thirty-five, my aunts really weren’t sure how old they actually were, but found this more funny than distressing.

A family of eleven makes for overcrowding, especially for someone like Alice who liked to keep her homes spotless. So when they had stopped somewhere, Naughty would make rod
tents, known as benders. In appearance they’re not unlike igloos. The supports are made from fine, young, supple willow which has been soaked overnight to make it more flexible and is then
bent to shape and allowed to season. These tents were quite simple for Naughty to dismantle and reassemble. The covering was a waterproof woven material, ordered specially from a large mill, held
together by sharpened hawthorn pins. Four people could sleep easily in each vardo, but when there were more, a bender would be used.

Tarpaulin covered the floor of the tent, which was then topped by a huge Persian carpet. During the day the tent served as a big dining room, and in the middle would be a table covered with the
most beautiful starched, white lace tablecloths. In the winter, when the weather was too fierce to build a fire outside, Naughty and his sons would build a fire inside the tent, the smoke escaping
from a hole in the top and spiralling into the cold night air. The family would sit around the fire and talk and eat, and after dinner they would sing and play their instruments. Alice was a gifted
musician on the violin and accordion, and all the children had their own special instruments. Naughty would also lay down his bench, a trestle table with fold-down legs, on top of which he would
teach the children new tap steps. The bench would also be used as a table for preparing food on outside the vardo.

Alice always said that her husband reminded her of Dan Leno, a famous music-hall clog-dancer in the late nineteenth century, and this was never truer than when he was tapping away on his boards
for her. It’s a saying in our family that it would have broken Dan Leno’s heart if he ever saw Naughty dance as my grandfather was so much better than him!

The tent was also used by the children when it was too cold to play outside, and at night it was turned into a bedroom and used for extra sleeping space. Even with snow thick on the ground, they
were the snuggest and warmest of children in that bender tent.

I have photographs of some of my aunts and uncles as teens, posing outside the bender tent in the 1920s. They had caught the eye of a photographer, who took numerous pictures of them dressed in
their best clothes. When I heard my family talking about him, I asked what his name was. ‘Old Tit’ was the reply, with much laughter. He had a slight speech impediment, so when he was
ready to take his picture and would command them to ‘Hold it!’ it always came out as ‘Old Tit’.

When spring came, the family would travel around Norfolk and Lincolnshire, wherever their fancy took them. Since the end of the First World War, there were more and more cars on the roads, and
the roads themselves were gradually being tarmacked by the Irish who were coming over to work in England at that time. For the Romany, it made it harder to leave a ‘pukkering cosh’, a
clod or a bunch of sticks used as a sign. In the old days, when a group of Romanies were all heading in the same direction and some were leaving later than others, it was always agreed that when
coming to a fork in the road, those who knew the route best would pull a big clod of earth from the side of the road and throw it into the middle of the lane that they were going to take. Now that
cars were taking over the roads, it was not possible to leave a clear signal for fellow travellers to follow. It was a small thing, but perhaps the first sign that their heritage was being taken
away from them.

Naughty obviously never thought the Romany way of life would change. His mind could not grasp the idea that caravans would soon no longer need horses to pull them – that this job would be
done by motorcars. Cars were a gorger means of transport. Romanies lived under the stars and their horses were a central part of their lives. Romanies travelled where their whims led them. They
were no part of the gorger society; they took nothing from it and asked nothing of it, except perhaps tolerance, the right to live their lives the way Romanies had done for centuries.

This was always Naughty’s philosophy. But how could he know that the time would come when his bright canopy of stars would be rolled up like the backcloth of a travelling show, that the
costumes and the scenery would all be packed away, that the play would be over? It would not be long before the traditional Romany way of life, the only life Naughty and Alice Eva had ever known,
would change beyond all recognition.

But in 1920 they weren’t worried about this. They were able to travel without being harassed. In fact, when they arrived in a new town, people were actually pleased to see them and many of
the farmers and their families looked forward to the seasons when they knew they might return. They knew Naughty was skilled at treating their animals, horses especially, and Alice had many herbal
remedies for their ailments. More than that, Alice had a gift for clairvoyance.

FOUR

‘My husband is having an affair,’ the woman blurted out, before Alice could even start her reading.

‘Are you sure?’ Alice asked gently.

‘He doesn’t spend any time with me and when he does come home he smells of another woman’s perfume. The other day, I even found lipstick on his collar as I was washing one of
his shirts.’

Alice didn’t have to be a clairvoyant to know that this was someone who clearly wasn’t loved and probably never had been. The man in question had married her to do his housework, no
more, no less. Just by looking around, she could see the woman kept a marvellous house, very clean and tidy, but there was no feeling of love there.

‘This isn’t his first affair though, is it?’ she asked.

‘No,’ the woman admitted, tears falling from her eyes and hitting her apron.

‘Here’s what I want you to do,’ began Alice. ‘I want you to pack up his shirts and give them to him. Tell him that his fancy woman can wash his shirts from now on. You
run a perfect house and you have a lot to give someone who will love you back. You have good family.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she replied, ‘but I haven’t seen them in a long time.’

‘They will comfort you,’ Alice said. ‘Oh, and don’t forget to put his smalls in the package too!’ she added with a smile and a twinkle in her eye. With this, the
woman started giggling and the tears began to dry.

My aunt Cissie, who was about fourteen at the time, was sitting quietly during the reading. Alice would often take her to visit clients who were not too far away. The time the two spent
travelling together in Alice’s smart pony and trap was very precious to them. On this particular day, Cissie realised that not all relationships were as full of love and support as her
parents’. It also opened up her eyes to the fact that her mother was not as closed a book as she may have seemed. With her mother’s upbeat view of life and her knack of making people
laugh, she could help even when a person had particularly unhappy problems to deal with.

Alice was training Cissie in palm-reading and clairvoyance, as she would go on to do with all her daughters. This was very traditional in Romany families, where the men would work with horses
and the women would read people’s hands. People often wonder why Romanies have a special gift for clairvoyance and I believe it is because our race is taught from birth to say how we feel and
to keep an open mind. We didn’t go to school and were not taught to place limitations on ourselves. Granny used to say that gorgers had their heads filled with world affairs, history,
geography and so on at school, but Romanies had room in their brains to allow their natural instincts to develop. We all have these instincts – how many times have you picked the phone up
before it rang, made extra food and had someone unexpectedly turn up for dinner, or told yourself ‘I knew that would happen’? The gift of being able to predict the future of others is
something that has run in our bloodline for centuries. Girls as young as five and six would be taught to recognise the meaning of the lines on a person’s hands and as they got older they were
taught how to interpret them.

Alice was a skilled clairvoyant with many regular clients, from farmers’ wives to royalty. One of her most treasured possessions was a crystal ball presented to her by Princess Marie
Louise, one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, which I inherited eventually. When, many years later, I was invited to read hands at a ball thrown by Prince Edward at the Grosvenor House
Hotel in London in 1987 and was asked if I could donate anything to the charity auction, I gave them the crystal ball – since it came from royalty and the auction was on behalf of royalty, I
felt Granny wouldn’t mind. It was Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, who bid for and won it.

Each year when the family travelled, they would stop on the outskirts of Wainfleet, a pretty market town five miles inland from Skegness in Lincolnshire. The town was (and is) known for its
famous Batemans beers and ales, which Naughty always made the most of. In fact, he was such a familiar sight at the pub that the black mongrel who lived there would often follow him home at night.
Alice would laugh that he was making sure Naughty got home all right. Who knows, perhaps she was right!

During their stay, a big chauffeur-driven car would be sent to take Alice to Petwood House, the home of Sir Archibald and Lady Weigall. One year Alice was invited to attend a garden tea party at
Petwood and the girls were particularly excited, as they knew their mother would receive large tips and a promise of glamorous clothes from the ladies attending. These ladies and their children
only wore an outfit once or twice, and my mother and aunts knew that in a few days’ time they’d be very well dressed in expensive cast-offs. ‘First up, best dressed,’ as
Alice would say to them when they argued about who got to wear what.

When the day of the party came, Alice dressed herself in all her finery and waited by the roadside for the grand car to arrive and take her to the even grander house. She knew she’d be
smuggled into the party by the back entrance, but this didn’t bother her. When she arrived she was taken to a back room, where she immediately began a long day of work as the ladies attending
all took it in turns to go and see her. It was all very hush hush and the men were unaware that their wives and daughters were visiting this Romany clairvoyant and palmist in a back room of the
splendid house. Nor, Alice thought to herself, did they know that some of their children were not their true next of kin but conceived by some misadventure, and nor were these men aware that some
of their wives did not love them but had married them simply to be free of their parents or to get out of debt. Alice would keep these secrets; she always did, of course. But she told me once that
it made her wonder how so many people could live a life that didn’t truly make them happy. Sure, she and Naughty had hard times, many of them. But she wouldn’t change what she had for
all the tea in China.