Stone Cradle (3 page)

The vicar had started his sermon. I listened with my eyes closed, letting the words float about me. When I felt a bit better I opened them and sat up. It was a small church. I couldn’t see the pulpit but I could hear him all right. He had a lovely voice, did that vicar. I’ve long forgot his name but I’ve remembered his voice: deep and soft, like he was going to be good to you.

‘And so, good members of this parish,’ he was saying, ‘we must never forget that in our own lands we too have a heathen tribe among us …’ It was something like that. ‘Long may we dwell upon the vile hordes that afflict the Holy Land. For it is easier, is it not, to look at our neighbour’s garden and see the weeds and bitter fruit therein than to contemplate our own dandelions?’

He’s got a lovely voice but he doesn’t half talk a load of blether,
I thought to myself, giving a huge yawn and leaning against the pillar. The villagers were restless, too. I could hear them shuffling, up at the front. From where I sat, I could make out the Freemans. I could not see Thomas among them. I felt a sudden yearning for the life of a maiden, the life I had had before Lijah had befallen me, and left me a woman who would always be a mother of a bastard child whatever else happened. Thomas Freeman would sooner spit at me in the street than smile at me now, I thought. How smug his family would feel; how right in their judgement of me.

‘And so I come to the matter in hand …’ the vicar continued. How warm his voice is, I thought, and closed my eyes, ‘… our very own degraded heathens. I speak, of course, of the road-side Arabs, the
gipsies.
’

My eyes snapped open.

‘As you will all know, I consider myself something of an expert on this unfortunate race, as we have in our very own churchyard here our own examples, among whom an innocent child has been born. As I was saying last week …’

Later, I decided that it was that particular phrase that hurt me more than anything.
As
I
was
saying
last
week
… It was not just bad
luck for me to have wandered in there that morning and hear him talk of us in such a way, oh no. He did it all the time.

‘…it is the fate of these unfortunate children which most nearly concerns me, and the charitable trust I advise. Are we really prepared to cast them into the yawning jaws of hell?’ And here, his voice rang like a bell. ‘No, my good Christian fellows!’ At this point, he must have leaned forward or pointed his finger or something, for there was a hush in the church that told me people were actually listening to him. I held my breath. I would have to wait until the next hymn before I crept out, for what should I do if anyone noticed me here?

His voice went back to normal. ‘And so I come to the purpose of today’s collection. You all know well, my friends, my abiding interest in the education of our youth. Before too long, I can report, I will be travelling to the Great Halls of Westminster to give evidence on the necessity of compulsion when it comes to the children of rogues and vagabonds. A truly evangelical mission to raise the monies necessary! As our good Lord himself said when he came upon …’

He was back to the Lord, but I did not need to hear any more.
As I was saying last week
… How long had he been making these plans? He was probably eyeing up my fat belly before Lijah even popped out of it. All the stories Dei and Dadus had told me about
gorjers
stealing our children – I’d always thought it was something grown-ups said just to frighten children into being good.
As I was saying last week
… How long had we got?

I was sweating. It happened when my dugs were full of milk. The back of my neck prickled with it, then felt cold. I was dizzy and leaned against the stone pillar, turning my face to it to cool it. Where had my mother and father taken Lijah? When would they be back? I wanted to be back inside the cottage, but my legs felt weak and I did not trust myself to stand. If I tried to leave now, and fell down, then I would be discovered. My only hope was to wait until they were singing like a bunch of crows and slip out the way
I had come. I wanted my son. I wanted to hold him and hold him and whisper to him that no matter how bad things got for us I would never, never give him over to the
gorjers.

Dei said that by the time they got back to the cottage I was raving like a lunatic. I had our things all packed and bundled up. They’d only just got in the door when I was sobbing how the vicar was going to come and steal our babby and make him live with a
gorjer
family and go to school and be turned into a little
gorjer
boy. And that’s how come we took to the road again, in the middle of the winter, all unprepared and with no proper plan in mind. We upped and left that very morning and I have never since ceased to blame myself for what happened as a consequence.

Lijah knew nothing of what was going on, of course. My innocent son was but a few weeks old.

Yes, well, like I said, he was trouble from the start.

I
f there is one thing I have always been afraid of, it is being shut away. I am so afraid of it that thinking of it makes me go almost mad. And then I fall to reasoning how that’s what madness is. It is like you’re shutting
yourself
up
,
inside yourself, and the more frightened you get the madder you get and the madder you get the more afeared you are. And there is something round and round about this that makes me want to put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes – to shut myself away from the thought of being shut away. And then I see all too easy how a person could fall to screaming for no reason. It is like all the bad things in your life start spinning round and round you until they are like a wall you can’t see past, and then you are finished,
oh dordy
, you are finished right enough. Not to think on’t, is the only way.

My Lijah, when he was an old man and me even older and still around to see it, was fond of trapping wasps in jam jars and tapping the jar and shouting
garn wi’d yer
! and laughing and would never understand why it upset me so. We were living together
then, in our little house in Peterborough, him an old widower, and me an even older widow. I could never sleep unless the door was propped open. I used a conch shell that I made shiny with shoe polish. And Lijah always said how it was all those years of Travelling made me not like closed doors and I never told him it was more than that.

I have thought on my fear of being shut away and happened across two reasons for it. (Living for as long as I have gives you the time to come up with the reasons for almost anything.) One is the thing that happened when we took to the road that winter. We would never have done such a foolish thing were it not for my ravings after I heard the vicar’s sermon, and I have cursed for ever since that I had the bad luck to go into the church that day and listen when I was not quite of my right mind anyway, being a nursing girl and therefore sorry in the head. It was losing my wits that Sunday in Werrington that led to the awful thing that happened as we crossed the Fens, the thing that took Dei from us.

The other reason is, I met a madman once, a real one, and the meeting of him left such an impression on me that it is the thing I remember mostly from my childhood.

I am not sure how old I was, seven or eight or nine, thereabouts. The years of things are difficult for me to recall as I had no reading or writing and do not know even the year in which I was born.

Anyroad, when I was nobbut a little
chai,
Dadus sent me across the fields one day to see if I could find the tents where my cousins were camped. We were stopped at a big camp at Stibbington and were expecting them to join us, when we were all going down to Corby for the Onion Fair. After a day or two and they had not come, a cattle drover passed by that Dadus was friendly with and he told him there were bender tents over at Yarwell.

‘Lemmy,’ my Dadus says to me, ‘Go over the fields and see if it’s
your cousins, and if it’s not, asks them whereabouts they’ve been and if they’ve news of them.’ He was thinking we might have to put the word out we had gone to Corby. The folk we were stopped with wouldn’t tarry.

So I set off across the fields and I was happy as a little lark because it had got me out of butter.

We had the use of a milch cow at that time, a fine roan-coloured one, as I remember, and Dei was making butter that day. It took sixteen buckets of water for each churning and guess who had to fetch them sixteen buckets from the village well?

I was halfway there when I realised I had the carrot in my apron pocket. This was unfortunate.

We had finished off the carrots last night, when we had had dumplings and a bit of warmed-up gravy. As she dished up, Dei had passed me a piece of carrot and said, ‘Put that in your pocket and keep it safe, it’s for the butter.’ You got a much better yellow with a bit of carrot added. I had forgotten all about it in my haste to get off and now I did not know what to do. Dei would be wanting that piece of carrot for the churning. I stopped and looked behind me. I had gone so far it was a bit late to turn back.

I was stood in the middle of the field. It was one of those fields that had a rise to it, as if the earth was breathing. I was right on the top of the rise and could see in all directions: the dip and lift of the world around me, distant trees looking grey and green and smoky and not a soul in sight. Before me, the ridges and furrows of the fallow earth tumbled and clambered. If I stopped still, then rocked on my heels, it looked as if the field was moving. It was a warm day, but with a breeze, a lovely day for walking to try and find your cousins. I looked up at the sky, closing my eyes to squint at the sun, as if there might be answers up there and something should happen to tell me whether to go on or go back.

I usually find that if you ask the sky to tell you something, it answers back, sharpish.

I had just dropped my gaze from the sky when I saw it. In the near distance, something was moving against the hedge. At first, I thought my sight was maybe a little squinty on account of the sun, so I closed my eyes and opened them again. I was right, something was moving to and fro in the hedge no more than thirty yards ahead of me.

At this I began to feel a little afraid, as I could tell it was an animal of some sort, yet it was too large for a dog, too small for a cow and too nimble for a sheep.

A terrible thought came to me. What if it was
Bafedo
Bawlo,
the Ghost Pig? (That is the thing I am most afeared of next to being locked up and will tell you about some other time.)

Whatever it was, it was moving restlessly from side to side along the hedge, as if it was looking for something in the undergrowth. I thought maybe I should just turn and run but whatever it was must be able to see me plain as I was standing right there in the centre of an empty field and I reckoned most animals could probably catch me in a chase. I did not want to approach it, neither, so I took a middle course and started to walk to the corner of the field that was to its right. This way I was a-signalling that I was no threat to it but was not afraid of it neither.

Then a heart-stopping thing happened. It started to lollop alongside the hedge so that it would catch up with me at the corner. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around but there was no help for miles around and I knew I must find out what this thing was. So I walked calmly, keeping my eyes on it, until after a few paces it became the shape of a man.

I say a man: it was as much beast as man. It was on all fours, but crouching on its haunches and using its knuckles to walk itself along. It was dressed in a shabby shirt and trousers of the same colour, which should have warned me of something. It had no shoes upon its feet and there was soil in its beard and on its hat. It was nothing but a tramp, a poor, filthy mumper come on hard
times, and I did my best to take pity on it as I approached while wanting nothing to do with it if I could.

It was clear that the mumper was determined to speak with me, but men as I neared him he crouched down and flopped both arms over his head and shoulders, as if to protect himself from a beating. I stopped and stared at him. He raised his head suddenly and I saw his face.

He was an old man. His eyes were big and watery – the lines on his face dark grooves. He had a few days’ growth of beard that was grey. It was the face of someone in great pain.

We stared at each other for a while, then he threw his head back and gave a short bark of a laugh. This startled me and I went to continue on but he held out his hand and said pleadingly, ‘No, child, child, stay a minute.’

I stopped and we stared at each other again. ‘Pray, child, tell me,’ he said, ‘are you a member of the sooty crew?’

Who’s he calling sooty? I thought indignantly. Has he looked in a puddle lately?

‘I mean, are you part of the lawless clan? I think you have that look about you, and I cannot tell you what joy that is for me. Are you a child of Tyso, perhaps? You resemble him somewhat. Is he hereabouts?’

At this I began to wonder if he could be a
Romani chal
,
but I could not believe that one of us could ever sink to such a state of degradation. I knew not what to do.

‘I must be on my way, sir, I am expected,’ I said gently, giving a little bob of a curtsey, Lord knows why.

He pointed across the field and said with pride, ‘’Twas in yonder brook I came across a sizeable gudgeon.’ There was no brook anywhere nearby that I could see.

It was at this point I had the misfortune to notice that his trousers were unbuttoned. I gave a start, for I had never seen such a thing on a grown man. A sizeable gudgeon indeed. I was now becoming
fearful again because my mother had always told me three things about mad people: they feel neither heat nor cold; they undress themselves at any moment; and they do not realise you are a person at all because they are mad and do not even know what people are.

I realised that the man in front of me was truly mad and so might do anything. He seemed to have forgotten my presence, for he was staring at the earth and muttering, ‘Ah, the marshy fen … the marshy fen …’ Then he fell to saying, ‘Marshy, marshy,
marshy
…’ as if there was something in the sound of the word that upset him.

There was nothing for it, I bobbed another curtsey, turned on my heel and began walking back the way I had come.

I only realised he was following me as he was almost upon me. I heard his breath close behind and turned on him. He had been running but at once dropped on all floors and bowed his head again.

‘You can’t come home with me, sir,’ I said firmly, although my heart was knocking in my chest. ‘My mother and father would not like it.’
Dei, I’ve come back with the carrot, oh, and I found a lunatic in a field and I’ve brought him back with me, too.
I had a sudden image of the lunatic spinning and bumping inside the butter churn.

Then he did something most alarming. He grabbed my hand. He kept his head bowed, though, and said, ‘I am knocked up and foot foundered, Mary. I have walked from Essex. If you do not take me in, I will surely die.’

Well, he’s not one of us, just a common vagrant, I thought, but I can’t leave him in the field. I’ll have to take him back to Dei and Dadus.

‘Come back with me to the place where we are stopped,’ I said, trying to sound as high and mighty as was possible. ‘And you can speak to my father.’

I could think of nothing else to do. I could hardly turn up at my cousin’s tents with a lunatic in tow.

He was good as gold after that, following behind me at a respectful distance, not speaking, only humming to himself now and then.

You should have seen the look on Dei’s face when she saw me walking back towards the camp, my very own lunatic following close behind.

Later that day, the men held a meeting. There was a big clunch pit on the edge of the camp and they would walk around it to the far side and sit behind the bushes, so that they had their privateness from the rest of the camp. I did something I had never dared to do in my whole life before, or since. I followed my Dadus, at a safe distance, mind, then peeled off and went down into and up the other side of the pit, so’s I could hide behind the bushes and listen to what they said.

It was a wicked thing to do, as I was naught but a girl, and I knew’d if I was caught listening to the men talking the talk I would be beaten to blazes. But I was passionate about the lunatic then, in the same way that my cousin Elias was passionate about the mongrel puppy he had bought off the farmer the week before. The lunatic was a
gorjer,
that much was certain, but he was my
gorjer.
I think I had somehow got the idea that I could feed him bread soaked in milk, like Elias did his puppy, and bring him back to health. I think it was due to me not having had any little brothers or sisters and not having enough things to look after. There were plenty of babies in our camp – we were in a big camp then – but there were lots of young girls as well and I only got jobs like cleaning and butter churning and I think I thought I was big enough for more than that.

The meeting was a great disappointment, as they rambled on about men’s stuff – the horses and the metal-working – and I couldn’t for the life of me think why it was always such a big secret when they went off to talk for it’s not as if the rest of us would be interested anyway.

Then it came to my lunatic. My Dadus said how he thought it might be useful to have the mumper around for a bit, as he could be put to work fetching and carrying and how we could leave him when we moved on to Corby. And one of the other men said how my Dadus would have to be responsible and Dadus agreed and that was the end of it.

And before they had finished talking I slithered back down into the clunch pit and scrambled up the other side and got my clothes all chalky but I didn’t care as I ran back to our camp across the fields because I couldn’t wait to see my lunatic.

And so it was, the very next day, I had him carrying sixteen buckets of water to and from the well, while I walked behind him. And he was as quiet and biddable as a lamb, and the other girls crowded round me asking me how I had tamed him so quick and I could see in their eyes that they were right jealous and wanted to go out in the fields and get their own lunatic.

I was only a
biti
chai,
otherwise I would have realised that someone in the village would have seen him going to and from the well with me and said something to someone else.

That evening, I took my lunatic a plate of potatoes and a cup of buttermilk. He was sitting on the edge of the camp, cross-legged, seeming to understand how he mustn’t go too close to anyone’s
vardo
or interfere with anything. I carried the tin plate over, heaped with potatoes and onions all fried up nice and brown, and a spoon to go with and the cup in the other hand, and he looked up at me with shining eyes as he took it all from me.

I sat down next to him, at a little distance, and watched him feast. He ate and drank with great purpose, like a man who could not think of anything else until it was done.