No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers
Katharine Quarmby
Oneworld, 320pp, £12.99
Images, rather than words, stand out when we look back on the long dispute over the Dale Farm travellers’ site in Essex: smoke rising behind TV reporters; a huge gantry defending the entrance of the six-acre former scrapyard near Basildon as police and bailiffs brought a ten-year saga to a traumatic, violent end. Those enduring pictorial memories are pertinent because – almost by definition – isolated, alienated communities such as this t one lack a voice. Or rather, their voices are usually drowned out by the powerful images in the public’s mind. Travellers? We know who they are. Tinkers, pikeys, didicoi. Dirty, violent, chavvy. The alternative, more romantic stereotype, of proud people who trade horses at Appleby and Stow, probably has the same degree of truth to it.
With the dust settling on the 2011 Dale Farm eviction, Katharine Quarmby attempts to fill in some of the missing words and to chart the relationship between the UK’s settled population and the nomads who live alongside it. The great strength of this book lies in the access Quarmby had to those whose story she seeks to tell. Guided by campaigners, she takes the reader into the homes of some of the families involved: the McCarthys, who defiantly took tea outside the high court as the eviction loomed; the Sheridans, who saw “settling down” as a way of providing their children with the education they’d never had. Through them – and with the help of a range of commentators and written sources – she charts centuries of discrimination, antipathy and conflict that led inexorably to where the Dale Farm families found themselves in the autumn of 2011 as the police and bailiffs closed in.
No Place to Call Home is best when it surprises. For instance, Quarmby gives voice to the frustrations of travellers who tried to keep open the lines of communication with local authorities and the police even as barricades were built and bricks were stockpiled. And she shows how the presence of activists who advised on tactics for resisting eviction was not universally welcomed.
The book is also successful in demonstrating that the fates of various traveller groups – Irish, English, Roma, even New Age – are linked by how the authorities treat them. For example, legislation designed mainly to curtail gatherings by “new” travellers has been applied to older communities, making the use of historic stopping places a criminal offence and dismantling the hard-won duty of local authorities to provide sites.
Yet most important is the human face the book gives to people often deprived of one. In this respect, the pictures speak loudest – Mary Ann McCarthy sitting on a neat leather sofa in her immaculate chalet at Dale Farm, vases and photos on the dresser giving the lie to public perceptions.
The book is a hard read if, like me, you listen with scepticism to pro-traveller activists who defend the flouting of planning laws and if you sympathise with local authorities caught between the warring factions. What were the Dale Farm families trying to achieve when they bought plots of land on the green belt and started putting down roots without recourse to the planning authorities? How could they have thought it was going to end well? Quarmby gets round to this, but she takes a while.
Writing about a separate dispute at a site at Meriden in the West Midlands, she describes the feelings of Senga Townsley and her family as they “pulled on” to a field owned by a friend, Noah Burton. Previously, the Townsleys had spent winters on a stud farm owned by Burton’s wife’s family, but when his marriage broke up they were left with few options.
Townsley recalls an earlier conversation with a friend who used the phrase “gypsy war” to describe moving on to land without permission. “You don’t want to do that, it causes real trouble,” she responded at the time. Yet later she found herself planning to do the same thing: “For me to sit here and say we didn’t know what we were doing would be a lie, but we didn’t understand the ramifications of it. We just knew this is what people did.”
Quarmby also takes time to ask some fundamental questions: what are the wider aspirations of the UK’s traveller communities? What do they want for their children? Do they hope to cling to the nomadic existence that their forebears lived for generations, dealing in horses, scrap metal and Royal Crown Derby china, or do they hope for a more settled life?
The book eventually provides answers: family, religion and a sense of community are most critical. Yet these are families without easy answers to how they can build a secure future for themselves while clinging to their cherished traditions.
Although it is slow to come to the point, No Place to Call Home is an important book that raises bigger issues about socially isolated and alienated groups everywhere. It underlines a truth – that a sense of “otherness” brings with it a dividend: it binds families and it binds communities.
Ask yourself this: why did the Dale Farm families live on the roadside near the site after the eviction, despite being offered housing and even other traveller sites? Without electricity or running water and with children ill and out of school, why did they not go? It was because the more hostile the world seems, the more your family – immediate, extended and wider, in the sense of clan or tribe – matters. They stayed there, together.
In some respects, it is the power of that sense of togetherness in these marginalised communities that keeps them apart from the rest. It will take much more than the combined force of local authorities, police, bailiffs and courts to break down that barrier.
Fran Abrams’s most recent book is “Songs of Innocence: the Story of British Childhood” (Atlantic Books, £20)
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