Stone Cradle
Louise Doughty Simon & Schuster, 351pp, £12.99
ISBN 0743220897
Anyone who has followed the furious Guardian online debate in response to Marcel Berlins's thoughtful article about gypsies will know that the "traveller" issue is as contentious as ever. According to folk songs and children's classics, gypsies are a romantic race. But according to the tabloid press and - surprisingly - many Guardian readers, gypsies are thieving idlers who leave mounds of rubbish in their wake: the very last kind of immigrant wanted in these crowded islands.
Louise Doughty's fifth novel plays with both stereotypes, while offering a rich por-trait of a Romany family in 19th-century Britain. The daughter of a Romany herself, Doughty first explored her heritage in Fires in the Dark, about the forgotten gypsy Holocaust. Stone Cradle is a gent-ler and funnier book, which tells of the consuming hatred between Clementina Smith, a Romany traveller, and her "gadjo" daughter-in-law Rose.
Of the two, it is Clementina, her voice rich with Romany "cant", who is more absorbing. (The women narrate alternating sections of the novel.) She describes how, as a teenager, she gave birth to her illegitimate son, Lijah, in the corner of a graveyard. Lijah, "a right bugger from the start", causes the family to fall out with other travellers, and they are lucky to get the use of a cottage for the winter. At first, the locals leave pies on their doorstep, but then both food and coal run out, and Clementina and her relations are forced to set out again. Unable to bear being away from the open sky, the family's life of fruit-picking, hawking, basket-weaving and horse-trading seems idyllic while the summer lasts and Lijah is a boy.
However, to Clementina's horror, the teenage Lijah falls in love with Rose, a farmer's step-daughter: a big, bosomy redhead whom he fancies because he "likes the way her hair looks in the sun". Rose is desperate to escape from her loveless home and, like the lady in the ballad, runs away to marry her gypsy lover, even though her mother-in-law predicts that she will "sup sorrow by the spoonful til the day you die".
What follows is a marvellously comic story of clashing cultures and women. Tiny, fierce Clementina is forced to move in with Lijah and Rose in Cambridge, but loathes living in a "box" as much as Rose hates having her. The object of their mutual passion responds by spending more and more time away from home. Eventually he volunteers for the First World War, leaving the two women to endure each other's company.
Clementina is bossy and superstitious, Rose stubborn and sensible; but some-how they and the children must sink or swim together, even if it means cover- ing all the mirrors with shawls and hav- ing Rose's son named Adolphus rather than Daniel on the register of births.
Despite the poverty, humiliation and racism, this is a story laced with humour and a sense of the wonder of small things. If life on the road does seem more attractive than life in Paradise Street, it is because the travellers have a keener sense of how to survive on little. The passion the two women feel for their children is identical, but it also makes them badly flawed parents. In the end, this warm, wry, wonderfully engaging novel is as much about the familiar fictional territory of motherhood as it is about the challenges of living with another race.
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