Book Description

Romany Gypsy True stories, Bittersweet and sometimes funny, from my childhood.1943 to 1959. Family History: Lords, Ladies, and Gypsies going back over 700 hundred years.These are true Romany Gypsy stories from my childhood as I remember them, with a little bit of the author's artistic licence to make them more enjoyable.If you are looking for stories that romanticise a Romany Gypsy life on the open road, then this book is probably not for you. However if you are interested in the true life of Romany Gypsy's, you may find this book interesting.Not all Romany Gypsies lived in wagons but more often houses, preferring a permanent base where they couldn't be told to move on, but still travelling and living the gypsy life in their horse-drawn vardo wagons, carrying on the Romany traditions of flower and rag rug making, duckering (fortune-telling), and hawking (selling) flowers and firewood logs from a horse-drawn cart, as me and mum did, travelling back and forth from the gypsy Camp on Belverdere Marshes the hop picking and fruit farms.Many kept their carts and horses in their backyards as we did. Some had vardos (horse-drawn wagons) and houses, as did my grandad's sister, Ocean. Family History: Lords, Ladies, and Gypsies going back to over 700 hundred years.We are related to Princess Di and her boys, for me and I suppose you [Lenny Harvey] are the same generation as me. I think that makes her our fifteenth cousin once-removed (that means fifteen generations back, we shared a grandad).Winston Churchill is also our thirteenth cousin three times removed.The removed bit means they are not of the same generation as us. Diana is actually of my mum's generation, and Winston is the same generation as my great grandad. Sarah Ferguson and her daughters are also our cousins. We share a great granddad back in the 1400s called Richard Yate. I met HRH Prince of Wales in 1996 in Crimea, Ukraine. At the time, I was not aware that he was family. He never mentioned it either. Sadly none of the family were invited to either Diana or Sarah's wedding. Probably with all our travelling about they lost our address.