CHAPTER 16
Morning was damper, with another low mist leaving the tents wet with dew. The campers were up before us, and already looking to be on their way when Lorraine shouted about the kettle, which brought both grins and nods. The three had apparently already breakfasted, but the lure of one last cup of Proper Tea seemed irresistible, before they set off along the path leading to the East.

We had our own meal, a bowl of porridge each, before rinsing the dishes and preparing to move on. Lorraine looked at the surroundings and sighed.

“Think this place will be lost to us soon, loves. Get all tidied up for tourists and that, locked gates and shit. Enjoy this sort of thing while you still can, Deb. It’s going fast”

We set off as the mist was burning away, but it still sat in hollows, which caused a little worry to me as the road dipped frequently, and each time we descended it was into a pool of whiteness. One of those was magical in its setting, for the mist only rose as high as the door handles, leaving us skimming through a pearly sea, oncoming vehicles looking as if they were late returning from Lindisfarne.

Ken patted my knee once more, which was something that would have set me screaming if it had come from anyone else. Something in his manner had calmed me on our first meeting, and as I grew to know him, it settled into understanding.

“Going to be stop-start along here, duck. Lots of interesting stuff to see, and it’s your first time, we’ll give you enough of that to enjoy it properly. There’s a car park ahead with great views…”

Half that day was spent in short bursts of driving interspersed with walks of various distances, as the sun burned brighter, and the waves flowed through the grass. One stop was a real surprise, after sweeping views of the Wall striding along clifftops over dark waters, or huge Roman camps sprawling up the reverse slope to our North. We walked out from a little car park, following a long bank, which revealed itself as another version of the huge camp I had seen up the hill.

After a couple of turns, there was a tiny little ruin, a rectangular pit with low posts standing like the ribs of an old shipwreck, which fitted so well with those rolling waves in the reeds and grass. Ken pulled us both to hon for a hug.

“This place has always spoken to me, Deb. It was a temple, for ordinary soldiers. Stuck up here, so far from home, so much colder, and I think this was their little but of comfort, little memory of their home. Somewhere like the van is for us, really. Get in, close the door, if this place had one, and lock the rest of the world away”

“Which god was it to, Ken?”

“Ah, Debbie, that’s the thing here. The soldiers probably weren’t Italians, and the god was Persian, called Mithras. Romans were nasty bastards, but they weren’t picky. If something worked, they adopted it. Mithras was a soldier’s god. Not going to try and explain it, but it worked for them”

I looked at the little hollow in the ground, the size of it, and it wasn’t that much bigger than our Commer, in truth. I could imagine the men packed in here, doors shut on the world, their own safe space, shared with those who kept it that way.

We spent what must have been half an hour standing there, as the wind sighed across the fields and the clouds scudded, a curlew calling in the distance, before walking silently to our own refuge.

All too soon, we were out of the National Park, and the first night was spent at a place covered in red dust from what Lorraine said was a steelworks. More markets, more cardboard boxes of stock gathered from warehouses or industrial units, and more miles to the South and East. It was a new life indeed, and a fine one. It settled into a pattern over the next few weeks, just as I settled into it. We worked our way down the length of England, day by day, week by week, occasionally adding to my little collection of metal badges, until we ended up in East Kent. A place called Swingfield had a village hall, where there were toilets and hot water, as well as an ‘arts and crafts fair’, a term I grew to understand meant stalls selling anything from well-crafted pieces of true artistic merit to items that could best be described as having been produced more in hope than in any real possibility of fitting the description ‘craft’, never mind ‘art’.

We stayed two nights in a pull-off in some woods near there, setting up on the first morning before returning to our hide at the end of the day, but on the afternoon of our arrival, Lorraine left us, catching a bus from a stop just up the road from our venue. She was back in a couple of hours, clutching a number of bags, which she left on the bed in our van.

It was an odd day, with a real mixture of punters, including three MCCs and a solitary MC, who turned up on three-wheeled machines that looked home-made, mingling with families and single people who seemed more interested in the burger van and bar than in whatever work of ‘art’ might be available. Trade was almost as brisk as it would have been at a real biker do, and as I had pulled on my little vest at the first sound of a bike engine, I was fussed over all day by hairy men and chunky women in leather. The cash box was stuffed, now, and our little clearing in a Kent wood saw us happily wrapped around a meal of barbecued lamb and chicken cooked with mixed vegetable skewers on a little charcoal grill Ken extracted from the base of our trailer.

That meal explained some of the bags Lorraine had brought back the first evening; the others held rather different items: books. To be precise, schoolbooks, covering maths, English and a number of other subjects that I realised I might normally have been expected to be studying, given my age.

‘Normally’? What on Earth was there about me that could ever be described as ‘normal’? What passed for education in Mersey View had been reading by rote and simple sums, the penalty for any lack of engagement a back-hander across the face by one or other of my ‘carers’. Before we settled down to eat, I looked at the pile of books, and the stationery that sat beside it, and raised my eyebrows mutely to the woman who was everything Marie Parsons would or could never be, except female. Lorraine’s smile was a little tentative.

“Debbie, love, please hear what I am saying, take it the right way, take it how I mean it? Ken? Can you come over here a sec?”

He stuck his head into the van, once more taking her hand, this time kissing her on the cheek; I wondered how much discussion had already taken place out of my hearing. Loz turned her attention back to me.

“Not been that long, has it? Us as a threesome?”

I shrugged, not trusting myself to speak, and she continued.

“How often we have lain here at night, wondering when the terrors would take you, when you’d panic and feel you had to run again. When we’d lose you. What is… What we… Shit, love, we don’t want that. State you were in, fuck, how could we not respond to that? How could any human being see what those bastards had done and not want, not NEED to make it better?”

I dug the words out, somehow.

“I don’t want to run anymore, Loz”

Ken put a finger to his wife’s lips, smiling gently at her before turning back to me.

“This is hard for us, duck. What we’ve been looking for is something else, that you would realise you don’t need to run anymore. That’s what this is all about, all this school stuff. Wouldn’t be safe… Start again, Petrie. Deb, darling, people like us, we live in the cracks in society. Some people fall through those cracks, and they end up in places like that place you were in, but that’s now the same. Shits like the Parsons use the cracks to do what they like, and that’s a bad thing, and I am making a mess of this, but bear with me. We live the way we do, and for now we can get away with doing so. Not as easy as it used to be, but we manage.

“What we would like is to give you a chance. You stay with us, we try and give you a decent start, bit of school stuff, and then we get you sorted for O-levels. There are systems, schemes, for traveller children. We get you through them, we get you to eighteen, then you are free, and there is sweet F.A. they can do to you then. But until that day, we keep you safe. Up to you, Deb. No compulsion”

I looked from one to the other, as tears rolled down Lorraine’s cheeks, realisation hitting me.

“How long have you been talking about this?”

Ken grinned guiltily.

“Since the first night, duck. Not true, Loz?”

Her reply came torn from depths of pain.

“What I said, love: how could anyone not need to? Fuck, sorry, shouldn’t weep like this, not now, so I am going to make an assumption, and it is one in hope, but I think I am bloody well right. You will work through those books an hour or so each night, see how you do, as well as what you’re good at, then we’ll look at it again, rejig the plan. Does that sound right to you?”

I had no answer for a few minutes, and not because I wasn’t sure; it was simply the tears that held the words away from my tongue. After all, there was no other answer I could possibly give than my agreement. I changed the subject.

“Could I ask a favour?”

They both nodded, clearly as tongue-tied as me.

“Where did Loz get the books?”

She whispered “Canterbury”

“Well, could I have a look at it as well? Before we go?”

A double nod, so I pressed on.

“They got any record shops?”

Ken looked at Lorraine, who managed a decent smile before she turned back to me.

“Loads, love. You want to have a look at them, see what you’d like?”

“I’d like to see what we might like…”