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

can put a smile on your face too.’ With this, he whisked a large bag from behind his
back. From it he produced a silver tea service that had belonged to his mother and two whole fillets of steak. The whole family dined well that night!
    My father, meanwhile, had been made a despatch rider, which suited him fine. He liked playing about with engines and knew he could always cope with any mechanical emergencies.
Astride his motorbike, he was on his own and free, which is how he liked to be. He was sent to France in 1939, where the British Expeditionary Force were hunkered down ready to repel any German
invasion. Riding from one camp to another delivering messages was a simple and straightforward task – for a while anyway. Nothing much happened for months until, on 10 May 1940, German troops
swept through Belgium and headed for France. British and French forces were unable to hold them back, and by 26 May the British Expeditionary Force were almost surrounded. They managed to hold open
a corridor to the sea at Dunkirk and that’s where the army headed, hoping for evacuation.
    Later, when he came back to England, my father told Mummy of his experiences, and particularly the horrors of Dunkirk. When they got the order to retreat, he was rather better off than the
others, for at least he had his bike, he told her. But he was not so lucky on one particular day. A swooping dive-bomber caused him to skid off the road and, although he was unhurt, his bike was a
total write-off. So he started to walk past the mound of bodies – the men, very often young boys, who had not managed to find shelter in the ditches when the German planes bombed or
machine-gunned them.
    He tried to thumb a lift, but without success. All the trucks on the road were more than packed, often with wounded soldiers, so he resigned himself to the prospect of a long walk. It was
horrifying, trudging along that corpse-lined road, weary to the point of dropping, until the sound of approaching enemy aircraft produced vigour from nowhere, unknown strength to power a dive for
safety.
    It came as a surprise when a slow, grinding truck did stop, without even being thumbed. The truck was loaded with equipment and the driver was a soldier named Jack Whittaker. Anybody who had
offered my father a lift when he was at the point of near exhaustion would have seemed like a bosom friend, but he and Jack really did hit it off. Jack had always been intrigued by Romany life and
was fascinated to find someone who knew all about it.
    They got so involved in their conversation that Jack missed seeing a crater at the edge of the road. The truck’s front wheels dipped into it and, before Jack could wrestle with the wheel
and straighten out, they tipped off the road and collided with a tree. The tree survived; the truck did not. It was yet another writeoff and this time not even the Germans could be blamed.
    So it was back to the foot-slogging again, but for my father, it was not such a long walk as before. Less than a kilometre up the road, he spotted, in a distant field, some French artillery
horses which had been set loose. They were without saddles or harnesses, but that didn’t worry Daddy. Jack, who had often in civilian life pined for the romantic gypsy existence, found
himself being instructed in bareback riding, though in rather less glamorous circumstances than he had ever dreamed about.
    So off they went and they must have been a sight, the two of them, jogging along the road to Dunkirk like a couple of cowboys. They weren’t unaware of the humour of the situation, but
there was a lot that was very unfunny as well. It was getting dark now, but they dared not stop. They had to press on, even if it meant travelling all night. It was pretty clear that the Germans
were not far away, and neither had the slightest fancy to be shot or finish up in a prisoner of war camp.
    My father was obviously much the better horseman, but, he said, it was not Jack’s fault