The Girl in the Painted Caravan by Eva Petulengro

Author:Eva Petulengro [Petulengro, Eva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447200130
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

SIXTEEN

Bombsites and Babies

We had mainly travelled around Lincolnshire in the first couple of years after my father’s return and Mummy was desperate to get back to Spalding to be near the family again. But in 1948 my father wanted to see what other parts of the country were like. So, with Mummy’s feelings pushed to one side for my father’s, we made our way to the Midlands and found ourselves in Coventry, the city of the three spires. It must have been a beautiful place before the bombings. There were still elegant buildings, but few of them were whole. Mostly, they draped like torn fabric, ragged and blackened at the edges. Great gaping holes torn by the bombs gave the city a toothless smile.

Some of the travellers had told my parents that there was a piece of ground, known as the bombsite, where they were allowed to pull in. The ruins of the bombed buildings had been cleared away and levelled off and a few travelling people had discovered this to be a useful caravan park. The city council let them stay there, which was common sense, as the ravaged land was not much use for anything else.

Over on the other side of the bombsite, away from the vardos, there were lots of bushes, plants and flowers, including lupins of a glorious pinky-purple colour and rosebay willowherb, which was nicknamed bombweed in those days, as it seemed to be the first plant to return to the bombsites. There were also raspberry bushes, from which we would later gather the fruit to make jam. There must have originally been a concreted area, because there was a lot of broken concrete and long grass, as well as a huge hole in the ground which was now a pond and had obviously been made by a bomb. There were also hundreds of frogs and grasshoppers in the long grass – horrible little things. They were everywhere. All you could hear all day and night was that buzzing noise they make. The main sights I remember were the ladybirds and the large number of beautiful butterflies. There must have been about ten different varieties, including Red Admirals, Painted Ladies and Clouded Yellows. Their velvet-like wings had beautiful colours and patterns, and I would watch them fluttering about for hours. Nathan would catch the grasshoppers and put them in a jar, but, however much I hated them, I would insist that he let them out. We would have terrible fights about this because he wanted to take them back to the caravan, which neither Mummy nor I approved of.

I was nine years old and had no idea that my mother was about to give birth, or even that she was pregnant! Pregnancy was not something Romany women would discuss openly, and certainly not with children. Apparently, the plan had been that we would travel to Skegness to be near the family for ‘the event’, but she could feel that her time was near and that she wouldn’t be able to make the journey.

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