Power Play. PENNY JORDAN
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a home? Rachel knew very little about these institutions other than the fact that they were held over the heads of hapless gypsy children as a threat of what could happen to them if they misbehaved. Somehow in Rachel’s mind, children’s homes had become confused with prison, and she thought of being sent away to one of them as a form of punishment.
Every day she saw her grandmother fade away a little more. Sometimes when she thought no one was watching her Naomi massaged the outside of her breast. She was in deep pain, Rachel knew that. She also knew that her grandmother had to drink some of the special poppy drug she made to help her sleep at night.
Rachel was frightened, but as with everything else she learned to lock the fear up inside her.
Naomi knew that her time was short. There was pain inside her that ate into her, a gnawing, bitter pain that was destroying her from within. The pain came from the lump she had discovered in her breast, she knew that. She was going to die, and when she did what would become of Rachel?
Winter came and the tribe was once again in the far north, not camping in the tranquil valley on the MacGregor lands this time, but on a barren piece of waste ground outside a small town.
Where once they had commanded a certain amount of respect and fear, gypsies were now almost consistently reviled. The townspeople called them “dirty thieves”, and Rachel was more conscious than ever of the way others looked at them. She had never felt more alien and alone. There was no one she could turn to. Naomi was dying, but Rachel still doggedly hoped that somehow her beloved grandmother would grow well and strong again.
She spent hours searching for special herbs that were supposed to have magic properties to heal her. She saved the choicest pieces of meat for her, but none of it did any good; Naomi was dying.
The spring that Rachel was fifteen they stopped off in the north for the Whitsuntide fairs again. Ann Watts was still at school, but now she was in her last year. Last year’s plumpness had given way to unsightly fat, and she eyed Rachel with spite and bitchiness when she arrived at school.
“I see the gypos are back,” she sneered, giving Rachel a wide berth. “I thought I could smell something bad!”
Blotting out the laughs and jeers, Rachel held her head high and walked into the classroom. She loved the deep tranquillity of its silence almost as much as she hated her fellow pupils. Inside her something was yearning desperately for knowledge, but her lessons were so fragmented that in all her years of schooling she had learned almost nothing.
To the teachers she was just another gypsy brat, who would be gone before she could learn anything worth knowing. She could read and write and add up simple columns of figures, which in a school like the one she was in now was as much as many of their pupils would achieve by the time they were ready to leave.
They had been back in the valley for almost a week when one afternoon Rachel was struck by the knowledge that Naomi needed her. When the class stood up and the teacher left, Rachel darted out after him, taking the short cut to the gypsy camp, along the canal tow path. She ran all the way, and arrived out of breath and scared out of her wits. This was the first time she had felt for herself the power that ran so strongly in the women of her family.
As she had known she would, she found her grandmother close to death. Naomi recognised her, and forced away her pain for long enough to take her hand. She had spent many hours worrying about this child, this changeling who was neither Romany nor gorgio.
Pulling Rachel close to her so that she could whisper in her ear, she told her where she had hidden the small amount of money she had managed to scrape together since she had realised she was ill. She had saved the money with one purpose only in mind, and now she told Rachel what she was to do.
“You must leave here now, before…before I die. You must pretend that you are older than your years. You must get yourself a job and live as a gorgio would, Rachel. The Romany way of life is not for you, and I do not want you to become any man’s whore. Remember always that my spirit goes with you.”
Hot tears fell on her cold hands as she pushed Rachel away from her. Rachel was losing the only person on earth who cared about her, but if she stayed the tribe would reject her, and the school authorities would come and she would be put in a home. Naomi was right…she had to leave.
Alternately shivering and crying, Rachel found the small store of money. She bent down to kiss Naomi’s cheek and murmured the secret Romany words of farewell. She would not be here to see her grandmother’s funeral pyre; she would not be here to wish her spirit well.
Naomi opened her eyes and saw the indecision on her grandchild’s face. Summoning the last of her strength, she took Rachel’s hand in hers. “Go now…go with my blessing, my child…Go now.”
From the moment she had learned to read Rachel had realised that it was education that was the only escape route from poverty, and now she was drawn as countless thousands of others had been drawn before her to the gilded spires of Oxford.
She had passed through the town many times with the tribe. She knew from her reading what it was…but in her ignorance she knew nothing of the taboos and rituals it represented; just as strong and damning as those of her own people.
Rachel reached Oxford in the late summer of 1977, when she was just short of her seventeenth birthday. She travelled mainly on foot, using the ancient Romany paths, carefully eking out the money her grandmother had given her by taking casual work along the way—mostly on farms, but always taking care to choose a farm where she could be sure of being taken under the wing of the farmer’s wife. Rachel had learned enough about the male sex in her short life to make her wary of putting herself into any man’s powers. She still remembered the hated sensation of being touched by male hands, and it was a man who had led to her mother’s rejection by her people. Men of any age were to be avoided.
By the time she reached Oxford she had added to her small hoard of money and had two hundred pounds tucked away in the leather bag she had tied to the inside of her skirt. Her clothes were in rags, too short, too skimpy, augmented here and there by the odd cast-off given to her by kind-hearted farmers’ wives who had taken pity on her.
Where once their pity would have offended her, now she accepted it with a brief smile, because Rachel was realising for the first time in her life the power of freedom. Oh, she missed her grandmother, but she didn’t miss the oppressive disapproval of the tribe, which she was only just beginning to recognise for what it was; nor did she miss the contempt and dislike of the people in whose towns they stayed. Here in the country it was different—she was different, because she no longer wore the hated tag of “gypsy”.
Only now was she coming to realise that she was free; that she had the power to choose what she would be. The farms where she stopped off to work thought she was just another of the itinerant band of teenagers who spent their summers working in the fields; gypsies didn’t travel alone, and her skin was pale enough, her hair dark red enough for her not to be picked out immediately as a member of the Romany people.
She was willing to work hard and she was consequently awarded respect by the farmers’ wives who employed her. Rachel didn’t mind what kind of work she was asked to do, just so long as it didn’t bring her into too much contact with any male members of the households where she stopped, and that too was a point in her favour. Several times she was asked to stay on, but she was slowly coming to realise that there might be more for her in life than the drudgery of such menial tasks.
At one farm where she stayed in prosperous Cheshire she was allowed to sleep in a room which had once belonged to the now adult daughter of the family, and this room came complete with its own television. Several members of the gypsy tribe had had television, of course, but her grandmother had not been among them, and Rachel spent her free time absorbing information via this new source like a desert soaking up rain. She watched all manner of programmes—education, political, cartoons, American cops-and-robbers series, and everything she saw only confirmed to her that there was another form of life out there.
She remembered how her grandmother had always told her that education was the key that unlocked many doors, and how she had believed her. But