The Diddakoi Read online

  For Emma

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  THE DIDDAKOI

  Before writing The Diddakoi Rumer Godden did a great deal of reading and research; in all her books, whether about India, or ballet, or dolls, or Pekinese dogs (her favourites), she cared very much about getting the facts right. One important fact concerned the title, and the word ‘Diddakoi’ is explained very early on: it describes someone who is half gipsy and half of Irish background, like Kizzy, the central character. Kizzy is a passionate, high-spirited girl, who fights against injustice, cruelty and unfairness, the sort of character Rumer Godden frequently wrote about in her stories; she would say they were very like herself.

  Rumer Godden was born in Sussex, in 1907, the second of four daughters, and she lived for much of her childhood in India, in Narayanganj, East Bengal (now Pakistan), where her father worked for the Navigation Steamer Company. From an early age she wrote stories and poems, hiding them in the hollow of the large cork tree outside the family house.

  She thought of herself as ‘different . . . the odd one out . . . the outsider’, and her behaviour at home, and later when sent to school in England, was difficult. She was in her teens when a strict but understanding teacher guided her towards her future as a writer. Perhaps this teacher was the inspiration behind the sympathetic adult characters in her stories about children. In The Diddakoi, especially, there are Olivia Brooke, Admiral Twiss and his manservant, Peters.

  The Diddakoi was first published in l972. Rumer Godden was surprised when a message came telling her it had won the Children’s Book category of the Whitbread Prize for that year. One of the judges, Kingsley Amis, said he wished some adult books were as well written.

  I first read it that year with my daughter who was ten. This year I reread it with her daughter, my granddaughter, growing sad all over again at the death of Kizzy’s grandmother, and angry at her bullying by the village children, led by the spoilt little horror, Prudence Cuthbert . . . aided by her appalling mother, who sat on committees, and interfered. It is one of the most memorable books, with changing scenes and situations, lively dialogue, tension and fear, and in the bringing together of a group of people who need each other.

  I was privileged to know Rumer Godden and to talk to her about her books, her life and her writing, and to hear, from her, how deeply she cared for her work of storytelling. She died in l998, and I think she would have been pleased with this new edition of The Diddakoi, published to celebrate her centenary.

  Anne Harvey

  Chapter One

  Diddakoi.

  Tinker.

  Tinkety-tink.

  Gypsy, gypsy joker, get a red hot poker

  Rags an’ tags.

  Clothes pegs. Who’ll buy my clothes-pegs?

  – only they said ‘cloes-pegs’.

  Who’ll buy my flowers?

  – only they said ‘flahrs’.

  Diddakoi.

  ‘If anyone,’ said the teacher, Mrs Blount, in the classroom, ‘any one,’ and her eyes looked sternly along the lines of tables filled with boys and girls, ‘teases or bullies or jeers at Kizzy Lovell, they will answer for it to me.’

  Twenty-eight pairs of eyes looked back at Mrs Blount blandly and innocently: ‘As if we would,’ they seemed to say. The twenty-ninth pair, Kizzy’s, looked down at her table; she had a curious burning in her ears.

  ‘To me,’ said Mrs Blount. ‘We shall not have such behaviour in this school.’ But they would; silent and small, Kizzy knew that.

  ‘Kizzy must be short for something.’ Mrs Blount had asked her, ‘What is your real name, dear?’

  ‘Kizzy.’

  Mrs Blount had touched a sore spot; in Kizzy’s family, as in some gypsy clans, a child is given three names: a secret one whispered by its mother the moment it is born and, when it is grown, whispered again into the child’s ear; a private or ‘wagon’ name which is used only by its own people, and a third open name by which it is known to the world. Kizzy seemed only to have one, but that was because she was what they called her, a ‘diddakoi’, not all gypsy. ‘We don’t say gypsies now. We say travellers,’ Mrs Blount told the children. Kizzy’s father, pure Rom, had married an Irish girl, but Kizzy looked gypsy to the children and they were half fascinated, half repelled by her brownness and the little gold rings in her ears – none of the other girls had golden earrings. There was one boy Kizzy liked, big Clem Oliver. ‘I thought gypsies had black eyes,’ said Clem Oliver. ‘Yours are dark dark brown. They’re nice – and these are pretty.’ He touched the gold rings and Kizzy glowed and, ‘My Gran has gold sov’reigns for her earrings,’ she told Clem.

  ‘Never seen sov’reigns,’ said Clem in awe. Clem made Kizzy feel bigger, not small and frightened, big an’ warm, thought Kizzy. Clem, though, was in an older class; she only saw him at break times, and the others teased. ‘More than teased,’ said Mrs Blount.

  ‘But, Mildred, if you forbid people to do something, doesn’t it usually make them want to do it even more?’ asked Miss Olivia Brooke. Pretty Mrs Blount – Mildred – and her husband, the young Welfare Officer, Mr Blount, who had brought Kizzy to school, were lodging with Miss Brooke in the village until their own new house was built and had told her about Kizzy. ‘Doesn’t it?’ asked Miss Brooke.

  ‘These are children.’

  ‘Children are people, Mildred.’

  ‘Well, what would you have done?’ Mrs Blount’s voice was high; she did not like being told about children; after all, she was college-trained.

  ‘Could you, perhaps, have interested them in the little girl? Made her romantic. Gypsies—’

  ‘Travellers,’ corrected Mrs Blount.

  ‘I like the old name. Gypsies have a romantic side. If, perhaps, you had told them stories . . .’ but Mrs Blount said she preferred to use her own methods and, ‘I want you to give me your promise,’ she told the class, ‘that there will be no more teasing of Kizzy,’ and she even asked them, child by child, ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘Mary Jo, do you promise?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Blount.’

  ‘Prudence Cuthbert, do you?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Blount,’ said Prue.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Blount . . . Yes, Mrs Blount,’ the answers came back, glib and meek – what Mrs Blount did not know was that every girl said it with her fingers crossed. Kizzy saw that from her seat at the back of the room and knew, as soon as Mrs Blount was out of the way, it would start again. Tinker . . . diddakoi . . . gypsy joker . . . clothes pegs . . . old clothes . . .

  Kizzy had come to school in new clothes, or thought she had. Unlike traveller men who often order fancy suits, traveller women seldom buy new clothes from shops; they make them or beg them or buy them at country jumble sales, but hers had looked to Kizzy brand new; she loved the tartan skirt and red jersey, the school blue blazer all of them wore, white socks, but, ‘Wearing Prue Cuthbert’s clothes,’ the girls jeered.

  ‘They’re mine,’ said Kizzy.

  ‘Now. They were Prue’s. Prue’s mum gave them for you.’ Prudence Cuthbert was the worst of the girls and that night Kizzy had put the clothes down a hollow in one of the old apple trees in the orchard, a hollow full of dead leaves and water. Her grandmother had lammed her but Kizzy did not care; no one could wear them after that, and next day she wore her own clothes for school. It had never occurred to her, or her Gran, that they were peculiar clothes, but they looked most peculiar in class: a limp strawberry-pink cotton dress too long for her – her vest showed at the top – a brown cardigan that had been a boy’s larger than Kizzy, but if
she pushed the sleeves up it was not much too big; some of the buttons had come off but Gran had found two large safety-pins. Kizzy wore gumboots over bare legs – she had washed the boots, not her legs, but mud still clung to them. ‘Where’s your coat?’ asked Mrs Blount.

  ‘Don’t need a coat.’ Kizzy said it gruffly because she did not have a coat and was afraid someone would give her one. She spoiled the look of the school, ‘and those clothes smell,’ said Prudence, wrinkling up her pretty white nose. They did, but not of dirt. Gran washed them often, hanging them along the hedge, while Kizzy wrapped herself in a blanket; they smelled of the open air, of wood-smoke and a little of the old horse, Joe, because she often hugged him.

  ‘You live in a caravan?’ asked Prue and, for the first time, she sounded interested.

  ‘In a wagon,’ said Kizzy.

  ‘It’s a caravan. I seen it.’

  ‘A wagon,’ said Kizzy.

  ‘In Admiral Twiss’s orchard. He lets you but he’s barmy.’

  ‘He’s not,’ said Kizzy.

  ‘He is. Everybody knows it. Barmy. Nuts.’

  Prudence doubled up. Kizzy’s hard small fist, hard as any boy’s, had hit her in the middle of her stomach.

  He was Admiral Sir Archibald Cunningham Twiss but everyone called him Admiral Twiss – except his man, Peters, and Nat, the groom, who said ‘Admiral Sir’; Kizzy, in her own mind, called him ‘Sir Admiral’. He lived in the great house of the village, Amberhurst House, as all his family had before him. ‘But they kept a proper big house,’ said the villagers. ‘Servants and footmen, a coachman, grooms and gardeners.’ Now there were only Admiral Twiss’s man, Peters, who had been with him in the Navy, and Nat, the bow-legged groom. ‘Not a woman near the place,’ said the village.

  ‘Thanks be,’ said Peters. Neither he nor Nat held with women and the Admiral was shy of them, shy and wary. ‘Don’t trust ’em,’ said Admiral Twiss.

  To see Amberhurst village from the Downs was like looking at a map. ‘Why are they called “downs” when they’re up?’ asked Kizzy. The hills ran green and chalky to the horizon, the valley wide below; the village did not nestle in it, but stood up clear and plain, its short street leading to the common where a jumble of cottages edged the green. Miss Brooke’s cottage was the last on the common. The Cuthberts’ new white house stood out at the top of the village street; then came the garage, a market garden, the post office–bakery shop. The Council estate, with the school on its far side, spread back almost to Amberhurst woods and the House park with its old chestnut trees. The church had once been part of the park but had its own plot and drive now. The House still crowned the knoll; its yew walk, the lawns and walled kitchen garden could be seen from the Downs with the stables behind; they had a cupola with a clock and, above the hayloft, a weathercock that, in sunshine, glinted for miles. An avenue of lime trees led to the tall gates where Nat lived alone in the lodge. Though the grass was creeping up to the huge stone house, ‘and the bell pull often comes off in your hand if you ring it,’ said Mrs Cuthbert, the Admiral still let the villagers play cricket in the grounds and the pitch was kept rolled and smooth, and there were still horses, high-bred yearlings and two-year-olds at grass in the paddocks. ‘Then they goes to be trained,’ said Nat.

  Admiral Twiss was long and thin with fierce eyes and eyebrows and moustaches that seemed to the village children to bristle at them, but his hands, that were fine and thin too, were gentle – as any of his horses could have told – and deft. He made models, chiefly of ships, sometimes sail, sometimes steam; he never spoke to the village children, nor they to him – they were afraid of the eyebrows and moustaches – but he made a model church, big enough for a child to creep into, and every Christmas stood it at the House gates. The church was lit up so that its stained-glass windows shone, every tiny piece perfect, and from inside came music, carols that Kizzy liked to think were tiny people singing – Prudence would have told her at once it was a tape – and at midday and midnight, bells would ring a miniature carillon.

  In the wagon Kizzy could hear them and knew it was Christmas. Admiral Twiss, too, always sent Kizzy’s Gran a cockerel for Christmas, some oranges and dates, and a bag of oats for Joe. Sometimes Kizzy thought the oranges and dates were for her; sometimes she thought the Admiral did not know that she existed.

  He used to come down at sunset and stand looking at his horses just before Nat took them in; they came to the Admiral for sugar and Kizzy used to hide behind the wagon wheels to watch. If he saw Gran he would lift his tweed hat and say, ‘Good evening, Mrs Lovell.’ He never called her ‘Granny’,‘as some do,’ said Gran, and spat. ‘He has manners.’

  He had put aside the orchard for the travellers and laid on water, a tap and a trough for them, though the village did not approve. ‘It’s my land,’ said Admiral Twiss. ‘They don’t do any harm,’ – in the orchard they kept his rule of no litter – ‘Besides, they like my horses.’ The paddocks ran along the back of the orchard where, on the other side of the hedge, the gypsies’ rough horses used to be tethered; they were gone now; the caravans were towed by cars or lorries or were mechanized themselves.

  The only horse was Gran’s and Kizzy’s Joe, who was the last of the many horses who had once drawn the wagon, plodding along the roads to meadows and commons all over England, grazing on the road verges where, though even then there was plenty of traffic, the grass was still sweet, not so petrol-tainted and strewn with litter, and travellers could pull in to camp almost anywhere if the farmers and landowners were willing. ‘There was smoke in the lanes then,’ Gran used to say, from many a campfire. The horses spent the winter with the family in some site like the Admiral’s, coming close to the campfire that smelt of apple or cherry wood branches to get warm, and had, like most of the humans, a sack across their backs. Joe was the only one left now – most of the sites set apart for travellers would not let a horse in – but Joe still grazed close to his wagon, which was one of the few horse-caravans still lived in. Though its wheels were rotten and its axles rusty so that it could not be moved, its paint shabby, the brass was still bright, the lace curtains at its windows stiff with starch; it was gay with Gran’s good china and photographs, a bunch of plastic roses Kizzy had bought for her, saucepans and a frying pan. Kizzy had been born in the wagon.

  ‘Does your mother wash?’ they asked her at school. If she had said ‘Yes’, Kizzy knew they would say, ‘She’s a washerwoman’; if she answered ‘No’, they said, ‘Then she’s a dirty sow’, but Kizzy did not have to say either; her mother was dead, and her father. ‘Who d’you live with then?’

  ‘I live with my Gran.’

  Gran was not Kizzy’s Gran but her Gran-Gran-Gran, her great-great-grandmother. If she had told that to the children at school, they might have been impressed, but Kizzy told nothing, not to Gran about school, nor at school about Gran who might have been a hundred. ‘Yes, perhaps a hundred years old,’ Mr Blount told his wife and Miss Brooke. ‘A true old-fashioned traveller.’ Gran smoked a clay pipe; her face was dark and wrinkled by wind and fire smoke, as were her clothes; she had long ago lost her teeth, ‘but it’s a fine proud face,’ said Mr Blount. ‘They say she’s lived there in Admiral Twiss’s orchard for the past twenty years, perhaps more.’

  Living alone with her Gran, some of those hundred years had rubbed off on Kizzy, who seemed far older than her size. It was Kizzy who took the shabby bag to Rye, the small nearby town, for shopping, Kizzy who went to the corn merchants to beg the spillings out of the bins or sacks for Joe – even if Gran and Kizzy went short, the old horse had corn in his nosebag once a day and, if Gran could get beer, she gave half to him. In spring Gran warmed bunches of pussy willow at the fire to make the buds come out and Kizzy took them, not to the village but to Rye, and sold them from house to house: palm and the first sticky-buds. Gran made baskets of willow twigs that bend easily and planted the baskets with primrose roots in moss and Kizzy sold those too; they were so dainty people would buy them – and perhaps
Kizzy’s brown eyes that Clem Oliver liked made a difference. In winter she sold mistletoe and holly.

  Gran could not make holly wreaths now, her hands were too shaky Kizzy’s too small, but they lived happily in the orchard. Gran kept the caravan while Kizzy was away and went stick-gathering for the fire they lit and kept protected by a shelter of two sheets of corrugated iron, with sacks to keep out the wind. No one could build a fire like Gran; she sat on a bench, a plank across two piles of bricks; Kizzy had a fish-box that had McPhail and Son, Aberdeen stencilled on its side, but it was sturdy, the right size for Kizzy, and when it grew warm from the heat of the fire it gave out a sweet resin smell. They would eat their breakfast or supper there, sometimes a stew, but more often nowadays bread and butter, perhaps a spread of dripping. Kizzy’s grandfather and father would have snared rabbits, sometimes a hare, even a pheasant to put in the pot; she had a dim remembrance of eating hedgehog – ‘hotchi-witchi’ Gran called it – but they had to manage without such things now though sometimes they had pan cake – cake fried in the frying pan. The black kettle sang on its hook, Gran’s kittle-iron, and presently they would have a mug of strong tea, drinking it in the firelight, their backs protected with a sack and Joe tearing up grass, keeping as close to them as he could get.

  Kizzy did not have toys, except an old skipping-rope that Gran had bought with some jumble – travellers are forever buying and selling things. Kizzy did not need toys when she had Joe. She combed him with an old curry-comb and brushed his mane and tail; she would sit beside him in the grass, giving him buttercups, of which he was fond; if she lay down beside him he would sometimes push her with his nose; the breath from his nostrils was warm, and now and again he would gently lick her face. A horse’s lick is clean to a traveller. ‘Well, they only drinks clean water,’ Gran said. ‘Not like dogs’ – travellers keep their dogs apart – ‘Not let come into the wagons like “they” lets ’em into rooms – covering everything in hair.’ To Gran, ‘they’ were ‘gorgios’, people who were not gypsy. Gran had no dog now, but Joe moved his big hairy feet carefully round the campfire, always coming to see what they had for supper, always getting a crust of bread. Sometimes Kizzy climbed on the fence and called him and got on his back; it was so broad she could lie down there too and feel him swaying, rippling his muscles as he moved, munching, across the grass. When the apples were ripe she would stand up on his back and reach him an apple; Admiral Twiss would not mind: he kept apples in his pockets for his own satin-skinned colts and fillies. They were beautiful, ‘Yet I wouldn’ change you,’ Kizzy whispered to Joe, ‘not ever.’ But there is never an ‘ever’; that February, getting off the bus, Kizzy had had two bunches of early palm and catkins left; Prudence Cuthbert’s house was near the bus stop and Kizzy had knocked at the back door. She only wanted to sell her bunches; she had not met Mrs Cuthbert then – nor Prue.