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a smile and a twinkle in her eye. With this, the
woman started giggling and the tears began to dry.
    My aunt Cissie, who was about fourteen at the time, was sitting quietly during the reading. Alice would often take her to visit clients who were not too far away. The time the two spent
travelling together in Alice’s smart pony and trap was very precious to them. On this particular day, Cissie realised that not all relationships were as full of love and support as her
parents’. It also opened up her eyes to the fact that her mother was not as closed a book as she may have seemed. With her mother’s upbeat view of life and her knack of making people
laugh, she could help even when a person had particularly unhappy problems to deal with.
    Alice was training Cissie in palm-reading and clairvoyance, as she would go on to do with all her daughters. This was very traditional in Romany families, where the men would work with horses
and the women would read people’s hands. People often wonder why Romanies have a special gift for clairvoyance and I believe it is because our race is taught from birth to say how we feel and
to keep an open mind. We didn’t go to school and were not taught to place limitations on ourselves. Granny used to say that gorgers had their heads filled with world affairs, history,
geography and so on at school, but Romanies had room in their brains to allow their natural instincts to develop. We all have these instincts – how many times have you picked the phone up
before it rang, made extra food and had someone unexpectedly turn up for dinner, or told yourself ‘I knew that would happen’? The gift of being able to predict the future of others is
something that has run in our bloodline for centuries. Girls as young as five and six would be taught to recognise the meaning of the lines on a person’s hands and as they got older they were
taught how to interpret them.
    Alice was a skilled clairvoyant with many regular clients, from farmers’ wives to royalty. One of her most treasured possessions was a crystal ball presented to her by Princess Marie
Louise, one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, which I inherited eventually. When, many years later, I was invited to read hands at a ball thrown by Prince Edward at the Grosvenor House
Hotel in London in 1987 and was asked if I could donate anything to the charity auction, I gave them the crystal ball – since it came from royalty and the auction was on behalf of royalty, I
felt Granny wouldn’t mind. It was Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, who bid for and won it.
    Each year when the family travelled, they would stop on the outskirts of Wainfleet, a pretty market town five miles inland from Skegness in Lincolnshire. The town was (and is) known for its
famous Batemans beers and ales, which Naughty always made the most of. In fact, he was such a familiar sight at the pub that the black mongrel who lived there would often follow him home at night.
Alice would laugh that he was making sure Naughty got home all right. Who knows, perhaps she was right!
    During their stay, a big chauffeur-driven car would be sent to take Alice to Petwood House, the home of Sir Archibald and Lady Weigall. One year Alice was invited to attend a garden tea party at
Petwood and the girls were particularly excited, as they knew their mother would receive large tips and a promise of glamorous clothes from the ladies attending. These ladies and their children
only wore an outfit once or twice, and my mother and aunts knew that in a few days’ time they’d be very well dressed in expensive cast-offs. ‘First up, best dressed,’ as
Alice would say to them when they argued about who got to wear what.
    When the day of the party came, Alice dressed herself in all her finery and waited by the roadside for the grand car to arrive and take her to the even grander house. She knew she’d be
smuggled into the party by the back entrance, but this didn’t bother her.