The Girl in the Painted Caravan (8 page)

BOOK: The Girl in the Painted Caravan
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‘I’ll have a whisky please,’ he said, in as confident a voice as he could muster.

‘You’ll have a beer like the rest of my sons!’ Granny snorted.

My father knew then that, even though there was still a stern inquisition ahead, he had been accepted into the family. He followed meekly when Granny beckoned him inside the vardo, where he was
interrogated about himself, his people, what he’d done and what he was intending to do. The cross-examination ended with a grim warning that if he ill-treated his wife, he would be a dead
man. And on that cheerful note, they became friends.

Then came the Romany wedding ceremony. In this, the couple mingled blood by pricking their thumbs with a pin or a needle, as Indians do when they become blood brothers. Daddy was made to jump
over fire and water, which seemed like child’s play compared to the interrogation he had just been subjected to. This was to signify that he would go through any dangers for his new bride.
All of this was accompanied by heavy drinking and a great deal of hilarity, though Romanies take the meaning of the ceremony with great seriousness.

Since my parents had not eloped, they had to do so now. While the party and the toasts were proceeding merrily, they slipped away to Daddy’s small flat on the other side of town. At last
they could start married life, even though they had now been legally married for over six weeks!

They can’t have ever really talked about what they thought their married life would be like. I know Mummy assumed that they would live as Romanies, and they only lived in my father’s
flat for a couple of weeks before they borrowed Granny’s old wooden vardo which would be their home for a number of years. I suspect it was all an adventure to begin with for my father, who
was very impulsive. Perhaps he didn’t understand what he was taking on – a large family with close ties, a way of life that existed alongside but separate from his own society, with
strict rules of behaviour. When I was older, I always sensed he felt out of place with Romany men, who tended to talk obsessively about their horses and the next horse fair, neither of which held
any interest for my father.

I was born on 18 March 1939, in Granny’s painted caravan, in the same bed my mother had been born in. That month Hitler invaded what was left of Czechoslovakia, and Britain and France
promised to support Poland should Germany turn its greedy eyes in that direction. On 1 September 1939 Germany did indeed invade Poland. Britain and France demanded they withdraw and when their
ultimatum was rejected, on 3 September, we declared war.

It was inevitable that men of fighting age would soon be conscripted into the army. Many Romany men didn’t feel part of British society. They asked for nothing and took nothing, but, as
they saw it, they exchanged their talents for money and paid their own way. They didn’t want to join the army and fight for a cause they did not see as their own. As they travelled around so
much, my uncles had become somewhat untraceable – and didn’t have birth certificates anyway – so they weren’t conscripted as some Romanies were.

But, of course, my father was not a Romany. It may be that he was patriotic, or it may be that, at the age of twenty-six, he saw war as another adventure, a chance to escape his life. I will
never know. But before he could be conscripted, my father went ahead and enlisted. My mother couldn’t understand why he was so eager to volunteer for the army, and to leave behind both her
and his baby girl.

EIGHT

Cowboys in Dunkirk

Daddy wanted to take my mother and me to Nottingham, to be near his family while he was away. She refused because she wanted to be near her own family in Spalding and in the
end Daddy reluctantly agreed. But he insisted that Mummy’s vardo should stay in Weldon’s car park, rather than behind the Red Lion with Granny and the others. My mother couldn’t
understand why he wanted this, but it seemed a small price to pay.

After Daddy had left, a travelling man that my parents knew well came to see Mummy at their vardo in Spalding, to see if she could stop him being sick.

‘You have to help me,’ he said. ‘It’s my stomach – the cramps, the pain. It’s terrible. I just can’t bear it anymore.’

‘I can help you,’ she said, ‘if you tell me what you’ve taken.’

‘Nothing,’ he moaned, his hands gripping his shirt tightly.

‘OK,’ said Mummy, ‘then I’m afraid you’ll have to go and see a doctor in the town, as there is nothing I can do for you if you won’t tell me the truth.’
She turned on her heels and headed back up the steps to the vardo.

‘Wait,’ shouted the man. ‘Help me.’

‘Like I said,’ Mummy replied, ‘I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you’ve taken.’

She was no fool and had seen enough illnesses in her time to know that this one was self-inflicted. She also knew that if he hadn’t taken something, he would have gone to the local
hospital and not come to her vardo begging for mercy. She shut the top door to the vardo with a bang.

‘All right,’ the man groaned. ‘I did take something.’

With a creak, the vardo door opened again. ‘Sit down,’ Mummy said, gently but firmly. She went into the wagon and returned with her Uncle Walter’s trin mixture.
‘Trin’ is the Romany word for three, and the mixture was made up of three ingredients. What those ingredients were, I was never told.

‘I just couldn’t go to war, you see. I couldn’t face leaving my wife. She’s sick and can’t take care of our daughter on her own. Now I can’t even take care of
myself, let alone my family.’ Mummy had been hearing tales like this since conscription began.

‘What did they tell you it would do to you if you took it?’ she asked calmly.

‘They said it would make my heart race, so that I wouldn’t pass the medical. It did, it worked, but I was so nervous, I took more than they told me to, and now . . . and now . .
.’ The man bent over and let out a shriek of pain. If he hadn’t been of the male gender, it would have appeared that he was having labour pains.

‘You’re lucky,’ smiled Mummy, brandishing the bottle of trin mixture. ‘We have just about enough left to sort you out, young man.’

A few days later, she had a visitor. It was a very smartly dressed young man who, had he not looked so chipper and happy, would have reminded her of the bent-up man on her steps a few days
before. One more glance and she could see that it was, in fact, the very same man.

‘Good morning,’ he said, with a large grin on his face.

‘Well, good morning to you too,’ said Mummy. ‘You sure do look a lot better than you did a few days ago.’

‘I feel it too,’ he said, with relief in his voice. ‘Now I’ve come to see if I can put a smile on your face too.’ With this, he whisked a large bag from behind his
back. From it he produced a silver tea service that had belonged to his mother and two whole fillets of steak. The whole family dined well that night!

My father, meanwhile, had been made a despatch rider, which suited him fine. He liked playing about with engines and knew he could always cope with any mechanical emergencies.
Astride his motorbike, he was on his own and free, which is how he liked to be. He was sent to France in 1939, where the British Expeditionary Force were hunkered down ready to repel any German
invasion. Riding from one camp to another delivering messages was a simple and straightforward task – for a while anyway. Nothing much happened for months until, on 10 May 1940, German troops
swept through Belgium and headed for France. British and French forces were unable to hold them back, and by 26 May the British Expeditionary Force were almost surrounded. They managed to hold open
a corridor to the sea at Dunkirk and that’s where the army headed, hoping for evacuation.

Later, when he came back to England, my father told Mummy of his experiences, and particularly the horrors of Dunkirk. When they got the order to retreat, he was rather better off than the
others, for at least he had his bike, he told her. But he was not so lucky on one particular day. A swooping dive-bomber caused him to skid off the road and, although he was unhurt, his bike was a
total write-off. So he started to walk past the mound of bodies – the men, very often young boys, who had not managed to find shelter in the ditches when the German planes bombed or
machine-gunned them.

He tried to thumb a lift, but without success. All the trucks on the road were more than packed, often with wounded soldiers, so he resigned himself to the prospect of a long walk. It was
horrifying, trudging along that corpse-lined road, weary to the point of dropping, until the sound of approaching enemy aircraft produced vigour from nowhere, unknown strength to power a dive for
safety.

It came as a surprise when a slow, grinding truck did stop, without even being thumbed. The truck was loaded with equipment and the driver was a soldier named Jack Whittaker. Anybody who had
offered my father a lift when he was at the point of near exhaustion would have seemed like a bosom friend, but he and Jack really did hit it off. Jack had always been intrigued by Romany life and
was fascinated to find someone who knew all about it.

They got so involved in their conversation that Jack missed seeing a crater at the edge of the road. The truck’s front wheels dipped into it and, before Jack could wrestle with the wheel
and straighten out, they tipped off the road and collided with a tree. The tree survived; the truck did not. It was yet another writeoff and this time not even the Germans could be blamed.

So it was back to the foot-slogging again, but for my father, it was not such a long walk as before. Less than a kilometre up the road, he spotted, in a distant field, some French artillery
horses which had been set loose. They were without saddles or harnesses, but that didn’t worry Daddy. Jack, who had often in civilian life pined for the romantic gypsy existence, found
himself being instructed in bareback riding, though in rather less glamorous circumstances than he had ever dreamed about.

So off they went and they must have been a sight, the two of them, jogging along the road to Dunkirk like a couple of cowboys. They weren’t unaware of the humour of the situation, but
there was a lot that was very unfunny as well. It was getting dark now, but they dared not stop. They had to press on, even if it meant travelling all night. It was pretty clear that the Germans
were not far away, and neither had the slightest fancy to be shot or finish up in a prisoner of war camp.

My father was obviously much the better horseman, but, he said, it was not Jack’s fault when his horse slithered and lost its footing, then rolled into a ditch with Jack still on its
back.

Jack was all right, but the horse was screaming and my father knew immediately that the poor creature had broken a leg. His own mount was panicking now and becoming quite hysterical, so they
both knew there was only one thing to do. He shot the two horses and would always be haunted by the expression in those poor animals’ eyes, even more than by the memory of the blind eyes of
the dead men who lined that road to Dunkirk.

Back on foot, the two of them stumbled on through the dark until their next misfortune, when my father tripped over something on the verge of the road and fell head-first into a water-logged
ditch. Jack jumped in to help him and they clambered out, but both of them were soaked through to the skin. It was incredibly cold, which left only one course open to them and, although they felt
like scavengers, they had to take it. They searched around, found some corpses of about the right build and took clothes from them. A French officer provided my father with a pair of trousers, but
there was a huge hole in the back of the tunic. Nearby, however, he found an overcoat on a British major who was sadly long past feeling the cold of the night.

Dry at last in their new clothes, but weary almost to the point of exhaustion, they trudged on till they got to a NAAFI base. There was plenty of food and drink there, but all they wanted to do
was sleep and they practically collapsed on the spot.

At daylight, when they woke, they were eager to continue on their journey, but they took advantage of their situation by loading up with as many cigarettes as they could reasonably carry. When
they got back onto the main Dunkirk road, there was the usual sight of battle-weary troops beating their bedraggled way towards the coast and, out of pity for them, my father and Jack stood at the
side of the road and handed out cigarettes from their plentiful store. To my father’s surprise, all the men saluted him, although he was not looking for more than a word of thanks. It took
him quite a while before he realised, to his and Jack’s amusement, that it was, of course, the major’s overcoat they were saluting.

At least they felt they were giving their fellow Tommies a bit of heart, as they travelled on their dismal route. But later that same day they witnessed an incident which really gave a new lease
of life to those footsore and dispirited soldiers. The Scots Guards had been through just as much as all the other troops, but they decided that they were going to set an example of how to retreat
with dignity. When they marched to Dunkirk, their uniforms were smart, the soldiers clean and shaved. They marched like guardsmen and ahead of them was their band, in full dress uniform, playing
their bagpipes. It must have seemed like a mirage to some of those men but, as an example, it certainly worked. Bearded and grubby soldiers, even the most cynical among them, raised a cheer for the
Scotsmen and then, with new heart, joined in the march towards Dunkirk. Retreating or not, they were doing it with pride.

When they got to the beach of embarkation, their problems were not over by any means. Indeed, it seemed as though they were just beginning. The dive-bombers were coming in regularly and the
thousands of British soldiers, herded onto the beach like cattle, were easy pickings for them. Although just about everything that could sail, from tiny dinghies to cross-Channel steamers, had put
out from England, as well as the navy’s own ships, there was still the enormous task of getting everyone on board while under heavy fire, and particularly of getting the wounded away
first.

BOOK: The Girl in the Painted Caravan
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