Free The Girl in the Painted Caravan by Eva Petulengro Page A

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