Book review: No Place to Call Home, by Katharine Quarmby

No Place to Call Home: Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers
by Katharine Quarmby
OneWorld
4.5 stars
Rose George

Settlement, as Bruce Chatwin is quoted as saying in Katharine Quarmby's forcefully written book on modern nomads such as gypsies and travellers, is a relatively new habit of humans, who have been settled for only 10,000 years, a blip in the evolutionary calendar.

But it is a new habit that has produced a "settled community" that is hostile, bigoted and suspicious of any peoples that do choose to wander, rove or travel.

Five hundred years ago in England, there were vagabonds from Ireland and others supposedly from Egypt, hence the word "gypsy"(although the gypsy language Rom has more in common with Sanskrit spoken in northern India).

In 1554, the Egyptians Act gave the crown power to remove gypsies from England "by any violent means necessary", and to hang any who stayed for more than a month.

In Romania, the Romany people - related to gypsies (although Quarmby never makes it clear how) - were flogged, burned with lye and made to wear a three-cornered spiked iron collar.

Nomadism posed a threat to the enclosure and control of the land by a modernising nation state, and to the norm, which was "bricks and mortar".

After a brief period of the romantic, fortune-telling gypsy figure beloved by Victorians, the hostility grew to its height in Europe during the Holocaust, when up to half a million Roma were murdered by Nazis and their allies, in the camps and elsewhere.

Onwards, then, into the modern version of the anti-travelling hostility of the settled. It is a depressing litany: lye and flogging then, verbal abuse now, and widespread ostracism by pubs and other establishments that bar gypsies in Britain.

Quarmby's affection for gypsies and travellers is clear. It's a shame that the passion veers into bias and sentiment, so that anyone opposing gypsy or traveller sites is referred to by their surname, while all sympathetic characters are first-name only. Is the future more confrontation, hostility and trouble? The final chapters are cautiously hopeful. Gypsy elder Billy Welch thinks the solution lies in travellers opening up and opting in. After all, two-thirds of them now live in settled sites. Only 30 families in Britain travel all year round. Times are changing. "We live in a democracy," says Welch, "and we don't use it. We are our own worst enemy."

Quarmby's book is a whole-hearted effort to lift some secrecy. As an exposure of the modern troubles of these unique communities it sets you travelling on the right road.

Guardian News & Media