The Girl in the Painted Caravan Read Online Free PDF

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.