The Girl in the Painted Caravan by Eva Petulengro Read Free Book Online Page A

suggested to Alice that she open a palmistry booth, Alice felt it was an answer to her prayers. A six-month season
without travelling. No more knocking on strangers’ doors, but letting the people come to you instead. Recently, Alice and Naughty had been starting to find that they were not as welcomed by
strangers as they had been and, as a result, money was harder to make. They didn’t want to see their children left behind by the times, unable to make a living. All of the children were
teenagers by now apart from Shunty, who was not yet born, and for the first time in their lives the Petulengro young men and women would be mixing with non-Romany people.
    The family knew Mr Henshall, who owned the Royal Oak public house in the village of Ingoldmells near Skegness, a stone’s throw from the amusement park, behind which he had a caravan site.
He agreed to rent it to them for the season, which lasted from Easter to after the August bank holiday.
    The month they had to wait for the park to open seemed like a year. The night before opening day, they were all full of anticipation. The girls were planning what they would wear and doing their
beauty preparations and they hardly slept a wink.
    The big day arrived. Adeline had bought new court shoes, but found they pinched her toes, so Lena suggested she poured boiling water into them, left them for five minutes and then put them on
the wrong feet, which was common practice for stretching suede or leather. She breathed a sigh of relief when she tried them on and they fitted better so she wouldn’t have to worry about not
being able to walk all day!
    Just inside the park was a roller coaster and underneath it, at street level, was a little parade of sites, created to look like caves hewn out of the rocky face of a cliff, but actually made
from plaster. Alice’s first booth at Skegness was one of these caves. There was a brightly coloured velvet curtain just inside the mouth of the cave, its wide hem filled with sand to weigh it
down and stop the sea breeze blowing it up and revealing who was inside. Once through the curtain, the inside was a kind of dome with uneven walls, which had the exact appearance of damp rock.
Alice also took another site at the other end of the amusement park and planned to run the businesses with her daughters.
    Alice had ordered signs for the palmistry places, which were to be fixed outside on the walls. When they arrived at the site, she was horrified, for the signs read: ‘Madam Eva, Romany
Palmist and Clairvoyant. Patronised by Royalty’. Glaringly, the name Petulengro was omitted. Apparently, the sign writer didn’t know how to spell it! Thereafter, she was known as Madam
Eva all over Lincolnshire.
    Soon queues began to form outside both the palmistry places. It cost two and sixpence to have one hand read and five shillings for both, so the money began to flood in.
    Alice had taught her daughters how to greet and speak to the clients, how not to let the clients tell them anything and to keep them quiet while the reading was in progress. When clients did not
have anything interesting in their hands, or had short lifelines, the girls would watch as their mother expertly found something positive to say. We are there, after all, to make the client feel
safe and secure about their future, not petrified of it. Sometimes we play the role of counsellor, sometimes of priest. Many of our clients see us as a friend, but one they can tell their secrets
to, unlike their real friends, who they’re frightened will judge them. The eldest girls, Cissie, Lena and Adeline, were the first of the sisters to start giving readings on their own at the
park, while Mummy and Vera continued to watch and learn the trade.
    There were other travelling people who had concessions in the park too, and as the girls stood by the door of the palmistry place, lots of young men would naturally hang around and try to chat
them up. Their brothers would do shifts, making