Books & Poetry

When Louise Doughty wrote her first book about Romany life, ‘Fires in the Dark’, she chose to tackle one of
the grimmest episodes in Roma history – the Holocaust, in which half a million or so European travellers were exterminated by the Nazis. For her follow-up, she has turned to a lighter subject: the saga, closely based on her own family history, of four generations of English Romanies living between the 1870s and the 1940s. The same deft, cadenced prose style is put to work, but here the vivid evocations are of a gentler world, where the hardships of life are tempered by human warmth and dignity. Much of the drama comes from the tough dilemmas and ad hoc realignments encountered by people who have had the rug – emotional or cultural – pulled out from under them, but manage to survive with the essence of themselves intact.

Over the course of the novel, as the old travelling traditions are supplanted by new economic imperatives,
the family must learn how to negotiate a strange new landscape of houses and towns.

Meanwhile, the book’s matriarch, Clementina, and her non-Romany daughter-in-law Rose are thrown together by Clementina’s spectacularly unreliable son Elijah, and despite their overt antipathy to each other, they gradually earn fragments of grudging and unspoken respect from the other. With the utmost delicacy, Doughty interweaves their points of view and teases out their secrets until it is impossible not to sympathisewith both.

‘Stone Cradle’ provides a fascinating insight into a neglected corner of English social history, but what’s most impressive is the way this meticulous research comes roaring to life in a timeless story of two women who hate each other with a passion bordering on love.