by Katie Hutton
I got my inspiration browsing in a charity bookshop (this often happens for my fiction, because I find so many avenues to explore there, and I relish a chance discovery). I was keen to write something rural, set between the two world wars, and knew it would be a love story (a common theme in just about all my writing is love and culture clash – this is probably something to do with coming from Northern Ireland).
In Oxfam I found a copy of W.H. Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life, and was immediately intrigued by a chapter entitled ‘The Dark Men of the Village’. I was expecting Morris Men or mummers, but what I found were Romani Gypsies, people then moving with the seasons and working on farms, be it digging up wurzels, getting in the harvest, or pulling the bines in the hopping season in Kent. They were part of the warp and weft of the agricultural year, seasonal workers for whom their employers didn’t have to find accommodation because they, of course, came with their own caravans. From there I moved onto George Borrow’s Lavengro and Romany Rye and was hooked, and I started to glimpse Sampson Loveridge through the trees.
The earlier literary images of Gypsies were not, by and large, written by Gypsies themselves, and so were sometimes highly coloured, romanticising, or derisory. I owe a huge debt then to the Brazil family of the South-East Romany Museum in Marden, Kent, who with great patience and kindness answered my questions and told me things not to be found in any book. They also advised me to ‘ask Tom’, meaning Professor Thomas Acton, Emeritus Professor of Romani Studies at the University of Greenwich, who kindly read my manuscript and put me right when I’d got the wrong end of the stick. If any inaccuracies remain they are not his fault, nor the Brazils’.
For Ellen Quainton, I looked to the history of the English part of my family, once part of a rooted rural community. My great-great grandfather was a Primitive Methodist preacher in a village in the Chilterns. I have a photograph of him looking stern and magnificently whiskered; he is the original of Ellen’s grandfather. The ‘Prims’ united with other Methodist groups in 1932 to form the Methodist Church more or less as we would recognise it today, thus disappearing as a discrete entity, but the impact they and other strands of non-conformism had on working-class life should not be underestimated. Through their Sunday schools they provided education for children and adults – not all Prims, by any means – before legislation established free state education. Their involvement in rural trade unionism they saw as God’s work, standing up for those at the bottom of the pecking order; they were similarly active in mining and other industrial communities. ‘Prim’ principles persisted long in my family; my mother signed the Temperance pledge as a child (she has since progressed to Campari and soda). There may well be a former Prim chapel somewhere near where you live, though it is likely now to be someone’s home, a garage, a furniture store or even a pub, rather than a place of worship. My portrait of Ellen’s vanished Prim community was only possible with the help of Dr. Jill Barber and her dedicated team of volunteers at Englesea Brook Museum of Primitive Methodism, housed in an early chapel and school-room near Alsager – a fascinating place.
I hope you enjoyed The Gypsy Bride. If you did, please do share your thoughts on the Memory Lane Facebook page MemoryLaneClub. I hope you will also want to read about Sam and Ellen’s daughter. She is the heroine of my next novel, which is set mainly in 1950s Nottingham, and will be published next year.
Best wishes,
Katie Hutton
A Recipe for Spiced Crab Apples
This recipe for spiced crab apples was contributed by Mrs F. H. Wood, to Hornsea Trinity Methodist Church and Circuit’s Recipe and Quotation Book, published in 1936 to support the annual bazaar.
Ingredients
1 pound of sugar
1 pint of vinegar
¼ ounce each of whole cloves and white pepper
A stick of cinnamon
2 pounds of Siberian crab apples
Method
- Boil the sugar and vinegar till they reach a syrup consistency.
- Add the whole cloves, white pepper and a stick of cinnamon to the syrup and mix.
- Add the apples to the syrup and mix until well coated.
- When the fruit is tender, remove from the syrup and set aside. Continue cooking the syrup until it has reduced to half the amount.
- Pour the syrup over the fruit and leave for three days.
- After three days, reheat the syrup and pack the fruit and spices into jars. Then pour over the boiling syrup, and cover.
This recipe book was published four years after the unification of the three main strands of Methodism, but very much follows the tradition of the Tea Meetings to which a Primitive Methodist like Ellen and her mother would have contributed. I particularly liked some of the encouraging quotes that preface the recipes: ‘May a mouse never leave your cupboard with a tear in his eye’ (from Mr G. W. Hardbattle of Aldbrough) and ‘Don’t kill time – work it to death’ (from Mrs R. Gibson-Fisher of Woolwich).
Reproduced by kind permission of Driffield-Hornsea Methodist Circuit.
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First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Zaffre
This ebook edition published in 2020 by
ZAFFRE
80-81 Wimpole St, London, W1G 9RE
Copyright © Katie Hutton, 2020
Cover design by Alexandra Allden
Cover photographs © Lee Avison / Trevillion Images; Shutterstock.com
The moral right of Katie Hutton to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-83877-026-6
Paperbook ISBN: 978-1-83877-025-9
This ebook was produced by IDSUK (Data Connection) Ltd
Zaffre is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK
www.bonnierbooks.co.uk
