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the lay-by, I saw them, standing by the vardo. There was two of them, one of them holding their horses’ harnesses, the other a-banging on the side of our wagon. ‘Dei! Dadus!’ I shouted in warning. The men heard me and looked round.
    I began to run towards them, but I couldn’t go so fast with Lijah strapped to me and the wet swaddling in the crook of one arm. While I was still some yards away, Dadus came down the step, pulling his braces over his shirt. The men turned to him.
    I reached them as they were showing Dadus a piece of paper. As I ran up, Dadus glanced at me and said, all cross-sounding. ‘Lem, go inside.’
    ‘Is it all right, Dadus?’ I whispered.
    ‘Go inside,’ he said.
    Inside our vardo, Dei was pulling on her outer things. Her face was set.
    ‘Dei, it’s the gavvers …’ said. ‘What do they want?’
    ‘Same thing they always want,’ said Dei, and I could hear in her voice that, though she was trying to sound casual, she didn’t feel that way at all.
    ‘Pack stuff up,’ she said, and together we began to roll blankets and stow the eider. Having Lijah strapped to me made me slow and clumsy but he had gone back to sleep and I didn’t want to shift him.
    The door opened, and Dadus came in. He stood there for a minute, looking at us.
    ‘They want my hawking licence,’ he said.
    I looked at him, and at Dei, and I knew in that minute that we allhad the same stricken look on our faces. Dadus had let his licence run out before Christmas.
Joseph Smith, Hawker of licensed goods, Knives, Kettles and Sundry Kitchenware.
It cost two pound to renew it, and he said he’d get another when he’d been to the wholesalers at Whittlesey as there was no point ’til then. But
Licensed Hawker
is what he called himself, and the gavvers wanted the proof.
    ‘Show them the old one,’ said Dei. She lifted the lid to the high chest.
    ‘I’ll ask them if you can stay here, at least,’ he said, and went out again.
    I looked at Dei. At least?
    *
    Turned out it was more trouble than it was worth, apprehending us. I heard one say it to the other, as they hitched our vardo to the horse. They had to send for a cart from Eye for us and all our things, on account of the back axle. Then they took us to Whittlesey and we spent the night in the vardo in the yard and they fed us quite well with a sort of stew. In the morning, they said we were going down to Ramsey but they wouldn’t say why. Well, they weren’t going to bother with the vardo all that way, so they put us in a huge wagon with a load of others.
    I don’t think I understood even then how bad it was, on account of how Dei and Dadus kept saying to me I wasn’t to worry. I should have realised, they said it so often, that worry was exactly what I should have done. But looking back on it, even though I had a baby, I was still something of a child. Dadus told me he had been apprehended four or five times and nothing had ever come of it. Quite cheerily, he said it.
    The others in the big wagon were mostly loose women and tramps from round about, so we wouldn’t lower ourselves to speak to them. We went the back route, across Glass Moor, and they stopped at another village and picked up a Travelling family like us. We rokkered to them right enough and they said somethingabout how there’d been a load of trouble down at Pondersbridge and across the Fens on account of it being such a bad winter, and how the gavvers were going around picking up Travelling people all abouts. They said how they had been part of a big camp, and their horses were all tethered in the next field and a whole gang of local men had come and untied the horses and flapped umbrellas at them to frighten them away. And some of them had run away on foot but they hadn’t as they had old folk with them who were poorly.
    We were in Ramsey a week, kept all together in a lock-up, a filthy, low place. I don’t care to describe it. I suppose it was then I began to realise this might be bad. There