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can be no contentment greater than this, the open sky. What is it about potatoes cooked under the sky, do you think? Can it be the summer air gets into them?’
    ‘My mother used a bit of the fresh butter,’ I said.
    ‘Ah …’ he said.
    I was enjoying this small, normal conversation, and was thinking about asking him some questions about his life and how he came to be a lunatic. Then, suddenly, he started smacking the side of his head with the flat of his hand, as if there was something in the other ear he was trying to dislodge. ‘Gone! Gone! Gone!’ he groaned. I felt a rush of disappointment, for I had persuaded myself that with enough fresh air and potatoes, he might be brought sane, then I would have the pleasure of telling people I had cured a madman once. But I saw my own folly at once.
    He muttered into the ground, as if he had forgotten me. Then he lifted his head and glared at me. ‘That blackguard Taylor! I’d like to take a stick and knock his hat off!’ His shook his fist at me, and I rose without a word and ran back to the safety of the camp, leaving his empty plate and spoon on the ground.
    *
    The men came two days later. They entered the camp as gorjers do, marching around like they own the earth and can go anywhere whenever they like. As they strode up to our vardo, the men and boys gathered round, at a discreet distance but watching carefully, in case they had come for one of us. My Dadus raised his hand in a signal that it was naught to bother about, for he knew why they’d come right enough.
    The lunatic was sitting cross-legged by our vardo, and my Dadus pointed him out. I thought the men would go and speak to him, but they said not a word. They went over and grabbed him, one arm each, and hauled him to his feet, then dragged him across the camp, to the edge of the common. I ran after them, and Dei and Dadus followed behind.
    The lunatic had begun to struggle and whimper like a baby. It wasn’t mad crying out, it was moaning in fear. It was horrible how not-mad it was. As they reached the edge of the common, he broke one arm free and began to flail it about. At this, the men lost their tempers and pushed him face down in the dirt. One sat astride the lunatic’s back and pulled his arms behind him. He cried out in pain, his face pressed to the dirt. The other had a bit of rope and he began to wind it round the lunatic’s wrists to bind them, cursing as he did.
    I tugged at Dadus’s sleeve and he understood me right enough. ‘I think you may be gentle with the old fella,’ he said to the men, ‘he was ill when my daughter found him and has not fully recovered. He told her he had walked from Essex.’
    One of the men gave an unpleasant, disbelieving sound. ‘Essex, my arse. He’s escaped from Northampton General Lunatic Asylum.’ He stood and hauled my lunatic to his feet. ‘Come on, John,’ he said, ‘that’s the last you’ll be bothering folk for a while.’ His tone was not unkind, more casual, which somehow upset me all the more.
    I followed to the start of the lane. Parked by the verge was a small wagon with a flat roof. It was so tiny that the whole of the back of it was the door, and they lifted my lunatic up and into it and it was then he began to cry. They slammed the door shut behind him and bolted it and there was a small barred window in the back and he stared at me through it.
    The look he gave me as they pulled the wagon away will stay with me until the day I die.
    My Dadus came and rested his hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s what they do with folks that lose their wits,’ he said gently. ‘They are chained up and beaten like dogs and the more they howl the more witless they are thought to be.’ He shook his head and then turned back to the camp.
    I realised I was crying too and wiped my face with the back of my sleeve. My mother came and gave me a gentle cuff about the head. ‘Here,’ she said, and thrust a handkerchief at me to wipe my face. ‘That’s how it