"No Place to Call Home" - review

No Place to Call Home – Inside the Real Lives of Gypsies and Travellers By Katharine Quarmby

Published by OneWorld / ISBN: 9781851689491

Publication Date: 22 August 2013 / 320 pages, paperback

Review by Damian Le Bas

Editor

IN THE OLD days of wagons and cobs, Gypsies and Travellers used to meet a crossroads every few miles or so. Maybe you’d see some sticks laid in a pattern on the verge, or a sod of turf in the road: then you’d know there were some other Travellers pulled nearby. Maybe there would just be the wooden ‘X’ of the signpost’s planks hovering over the junction: maybe you could read the words, most likely you couldn’t. If you were on your family's age-old local circuit, though, at least you probably knew which way you were going. And at least for the last few hundred years there haven’t been many dead Romany bodies swinging from the gallows at the roadside, since the last people executed for the crime of being a Gypsy were hanged way back in 1650.

Nowadays it feels like the world of Gypsy and Traveller politics is at a perennial crossroads, with different interest groups trying to force the discourse into a direction that suits them. I don’t think I’m alone in detecting a hardening of attitudes over the past few years, either. Many in Britain seem to have had enough of political correctness ‘gone mad’: they want to ‘tell it like it is’, and that means admitting that Travellers are basically a nightmare. Many seem to have lost all patience with the story that tries to give balance; with the nuanced narrative, the odd sympathetic aside. Take these fairly typical quotes, comments on reviews of Katharine Quarmby’s new book taken from the Guardian website. All of these comments have a high number of “recommendations” from other readers:

“Surely the "shameful rate of literacy" is self inflicted wounds?”

“Their answer to someone thinking different to them was to ask them for a fight. They see this as honorable behavior.”

“These are my direct experiences of travellers. I am not prejudice. Respect is a 2-way street; you have to earn it and the travellers that I have come across do not earn it.”

“I bet she has never had to live next to them.”

(The spelling and grammar mistakes in these comments aren’t mine: they’re self-inflicted wounds, I’m afraid.)

Something strange is going on here, and it shows exactly why a serious book on this subject by a serious journalist who knows what she’s talking about is so badly needed. It seems that it’s no longer acceptable to make the simple point that not all Gypsies and Travellers are the same: that alongside our villains we have our heroes; our writers alongside our fighters; our MBE activists as well as our stay-at-home mums. Say that in an online article, and all you’ll get in response are accusations of being deluded, pathetically liberal and of living in cloud cuckoo land. My personal favourite is being told to ‘try living next door to them’. That one always reminds me of a proud Romany man I once met who used to say to his neighbours, “I must be better than you, because at least I’m not the one who’s living next door to a Gypsy”. Maybe the people who love telling us to try living next door to Travellers should go one better: try being one of us, because that’s what we have to do every single day of our lives.

Katharine Quarmby has gone where most journalists never dare to tread: the inside of Traveller homes. She spent long hours with the McCarthys at Dale Farm, and the Burtons and Townsleys at Meriden. Perhaps it’s for this reason, and for the resultant insight that in a Traveller home you’re more likely to be offered a cup of tea in a clean cup than a bare-knuckle fight or a view into a criminal underworld, that this book has been accused of “sentimentality” by one reviewer. Quarmby also has the nerve to refer to Travellers by their first names: perhaps other journalists find this offensive, because it reminds them how often newspapers and broadcasts simply refer to ‘groups’ and ‘encampments’ of Travellers, whereas Quarmby has- shockingly- bothered to go and talk to some of them.

The book gives a good, brief introduction to Romany Gypsy and Irish Traveller history at the start, which is essential background for understanding where many of today’s problems originated. It should be common knowledge that it was once punishable by death to be a Gypsy, and that hundreds of thousands of Romanies were murdered during the Holocaust, and that Enclosure Acts in Britain and Ireland have forced a legitimate way of life onto the margins and onto the defensive, and that as recently as the 1960s many schools simply would not accept Gypsy children. These things aren’t common knowledge, though, and that’s partly why today’s problems with Traveller accommodation and education are easy to mistake for the deliberate stubbornness of Travellers trying to make life difficult.

Quarmby takes us on an in-depth journey through the drawn-out planning battles at Meriden and Dale Farm. These stories make up the heart of the book, and they show us not only how Romany Gypsies and Irish Travellers face the same barriers when it comes to setting up home, but how quickly things always seem to degenerate into a rural ethnic stand-off.

Quarmby’s work also shows us just how angry many people are at the idea that Gypsies and Travellers get special treatment in the planning system. They seize upon John Prescott’s 2006 planning circulars, which told councils who hadn’t provided enough sites that they should look favourably on Travellers who wanted to build their own (in reality few councils ever did, and in any case this was just an extension of John Major’s suggestion that Travellers should build their own sites when he repealed the Caravan Sites Act in 1994. I wonder why people are so keen to forget this).

None of this changes the fact that only 5,000 pitches for Travellers have been built since 1968, whereas an average of 20-30,000 homes get built in the UK every month. One of the key points made by Quarmby’s book is that it’s the perception of special treatment that sends everyone into a rage. Perception is enough: there’s no need for it to be linked to reality. This is why the Department for Communities and Local Government also talks about “perception of special treatment for some travellers undermining the notion of ‘fair play’ in the planning system”: if you focus on perception, then you don’t have to face the reality of Travellers being 20 times more likely to be refused planning permission than non-Travellers, and you don’t have to ask why that is the case.

Katharine Quarmby has done an excellent job in observing the current situation around Gypsies and Travellers on the ground. I grew up immersed in the actual grass roots politics of the British countryside, in a time when Parish Councils would still think nothing of posting flyers encouraging people to mobilise in order to get the Gypsies out of the village.

In truth, little has changed below the surface: lingering behind the media-savvy talk of the green belt, “inappropriate development” and poorly-chosen sites is the brute fact of communities who struggle to understand each other, and who therefore tend to snap back into a confrontational pose whenever the going gets tough. Quarmby acknowledges that Travellers pulling onto village greens and cricket pitches is bad news for everyone involved, and observations like this should let readers know that rather than being blindly pro-Traveller she, like all of us, genuinely wants to see the situation improve.

My only concern is that the very people who would most benefit from reading this book have already made up their minds, but where there’s the slightest trace of empathy across the garden fence or the barbed wire bounds of the Gypsy site, there always will be the hope of a better future.