Little Gypsy: A Life of Freedom, A Time of Secrets by Roxy Freeman

Author:Roxy Freeman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781849833455
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2011-08-17T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Trust

We had been at Thorpe Abbotts for five years and were in the weird position of being almost settled. The police left us alone. No eviction notices were served. The locals didn’t complain about our presence. We even had friends – the Harts and Chris and Jenny, a couple who lived across the way. Dik had built up his network of tinkers and gypsies and we were all growing up and maybe not turning out as badly as he’d feared. We couldn’t help noticing that Dik wasn’t as grumpy as we were used to. He even fooled around and got involved in games with us.

One warm summer’s day Liz Lee dropped me off after a class. As I got out of the car I was suddenly drenched from head to foot with water. I looked around stunned as my dad darted around the corner, chuckling maniacally, his pink silk shirt hanging off him from an earlier dousing. He headed for the pond to refill his bucket. Before I knew what was going on, I was involved in a massive water fight that lasted the entire afternoon and into the evening. Perly and Rollin hid behind the wagon, thick as thieves, chuckling with their water pistols and squirting anyone that walked past. Wanda and Zeta had taken charge of the hosepipe and were spraying it high into the sky. There was no safe territory. At one point Perly and Dulcie ended up marooned on the pond floating inside an inflated tractor tyre, while trying to escape the buckets of water that were coming at them from every angle. By the end of the day the entire family, as well as the Harts, were soaked and exhausted but deliriously happy.

I was dancing constantly, practising and taking classes and exams, and when I wasn’t dancing, I was cooking and cleaning. We seemed to have an ever-increasing flow of residents and guests, all of whom miraculously appeared at mealtimes. People would drift in and out of our lives, sit down for food round the campfire, joke with Dik and absorb the atmosphere. Some of them stayed for a bit and then drifted off, others lingered and became lasting friends.

Gypsies and tinkers would pull up in their vans and beep the horn.

‘Is anyone home?’ they’d ask. If you weren’t male you didn’t count as a person: ‘anyone’ meant Dik or Rollin. I’d noticed a few of the fathers eyeing me up and asking questions about my age and skills. They liked to marry their kids off early and talked about their boys like they were selling a car or a dog: ‘He’s a good worker, my boy, handsome too, he knows how to do a deal and’s good with the harses.’

Dik would take a wicked pleasure in going along with it. Like a cat teasing a bird he’d reel off our talents, even calling us out of the caravan so they could see what pretty, hard-working girls we were; that was how you could tell he was proud of us, even me, although he could never tell us directly.

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