Five Leaves and Traveller books

Five Leaves has, over the years, published a handful of books by or about Travellers, and the our new bookshop has a small section devoted to Roma and other Travellers. I'll come to the books in a minute.
There are a number of ethnic groups of Travellers in the UK. Historically this has included bargees (a more or less extinct group though I've met one or two of their descendants), showmen, Irish Travellers, Scottish Travellers and Romanichals, the latter being the mainstream "Gypsy" community in Britain. Romanichals have the same origins as the Roma from Eastern Europe that have been coming here in significant numbers in recent years. It is this final group who have become the latest threat-to-civilisation-as-we-know-it. For many years their culture was suppressed under Communism, but free-market capitalism brought to the surface both age-old fears and out and out racism. The British Romani community has long been cut off from its East European equivalent and, through a degree of assimilation, or partial assimilation, and intermarriage, has lost Romani as an inflected language but still use it as a pogadi jib ("broken tongue"). There are writers of Romani background, including the novelist Louise Doughty and the poet David Morley. These two draw on their origins and use Romani words in their work. There are even more with a partial Traveller background, including a number of young adult fiction writers I know who, perhaps, have inherited the Traveller storytelling tradition.
Recent scares include the renewal of the Romani "blood libel" equivalent, that Gypsies will steal your children. The most recent of these involved two Roma families in Ireland whose "white" children were stolen by the state only to find that DNA testing showed their parents were, well, their parents.
This trope is long standing. The Nottingham (ironically, Jewish) writer Rose Fyleman - whose poetry Five Leaves published - wrote a children's book, I forget which one, which had the heroine passing a Gypsy encampment, then coming across a baby in its cot, drawing the conclusion that the Gypsies must have stolen the baby and the girl took it to the police. That the culprit was a nursemaid dallying with her boyfriend is irrelevant - the issue is that this was natural to immediately suspect Gypsies of stealing babies. I can't find my copy, but don't remember them getting an apology when they were found to be uninvolved!
If you are new to this world perhaps the best book to read is Ian Hancock's We are the Romani People (University of Hertfordshire, 2002), a basic history of the diverse Romani world. Readers of Ian's book will note that it is usually Romani children who have been stolen, enslaved and in some cases transported.
Ian himself is a Romanischal. He was from a London family but lives in America where he is a professor of linguistics at the University of Texas, one of only two English-speaking Romani professors in the world. Interestingly, he is also fluent in Yiddish, and used to teach the language. He is also fluent in the major Romani dialects.
Ian wrote the introduction to the Five Leaves book Settela, translated from Dutch by the Romani Janna Eliot. The original book is by Aad Wagenaar. Aad wanted to trace the story of a well known Dutch Holocaust image, of a young girl looking back from a train heading towards Auschwitz. Who was she, what happened to her? Assuming she was Jewish initially, Aad discovered she had been Settela Steinbach, a Sinti girl (Sintis are a particular Romani "tribe" - excuse the shorthand description). She was murdered on 31st July 1944. Aad traced her story, and those of her surviving family and their attempts to trace her fate after the war.
Janna wrote a further book for Five Leaves, Spokes, a series of short stories fictionalising true stories of individuals across the entire Traveller world, including from her own Russian musical family.
The third book is the autobiographical Beneath the Blue Skies by Dominic Reeve, a partially Romani man who literally ran away to join the Gypsies to avoid conscription. He married the Romani artist Beshlie. This book is a memoir of the 1960s, when Romanies left behind the "wagon years" as stopping places began to be closed to them and traditional trades died out, turning to automated transport and other trades such as scrap-dealing and motor repair. Dominic, now at an advanced age, is still selling compost door to door.
Publishing these books - we should have done more - and having a Traveller section in the bookshop is important to me. My mother's family were Scottish Travellers in origin, at least in part. She was born in a hamlet next door to a Romani family and my childhood was full of "Gypsy" friends. Indeed, until the age of seventeen we always had a trailer, living part of the year in it. The links are long gone, but as a nod to that past I keep an interest in the Traveller world.
As someone living in the outside world I have come across, and challenged, people referring to pikeys, to gippoes. Scottish Travellers are not a Romani ethnic group (nor are the unrelated Irish Travellers) but to hear the current vile or veiled comments by politicians and the press is an invitation to solidarity. We saw this scapegoating in the press before over the Dale Farm eviction of Irish Travellers and see it now against Roma desperate to leave a world where education, employment and in some cases access to water and sanitation is impossible for them. Scottish Travellers, in recent times, have not been persecuted, are literate and form part of the diversity of Scotland. Now, more than ever, I am pleased that we published these books and have a small, but prominent Traveller section in the bookshop.

Five Leaves Gypsy book hits the Mail and Sun!

Here's the Mail review - an astonishingly good one - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2192031/MUST-READS-Out-Now-In-Paperback.html. Yes, yes, I know that the Mail and Romanies are thought of in the same way as, say, the NHS and Jeremy Hunt, but it is a good review. But wait, that's not Five Leaves, that's Abacus. Indeed, we sold the mass market rights to Dominic Reeve's book to Abacus and they have done well with it, with reviews so far in the Sun and the (Glasgow) Herald and a lot of copies appearing in WH Smith. So, scratching my head here, why is it that when we first published Beneath the Blue Sky the only reviews appeared in Romani journals worldwide, for which we give thanks, but no reviews appeared in the general press? And WH Smith? Could it be because we is small?

New edition from Five Leaves, Beneath the Blue Sky

Dominic Reeve is one of the few authors we publish that I've not met. We have long phone conversations and he bashes out letters on his old fashioned typewriter, the keys clearly having seen better days. He's a self-confessed cantankerous old man, still living as he has for decades, selling compost from door to door. His Smoke in the Lanes was a classic of the old days of the horse-drawn "waggon years" and was an enormous commercial success when it came out, and is now available in a trade edition from the University of Hertfordshire Press and a mass market edition from Abacus, taking advantage of the current popular interest in Gypsies. Not that Dominic is thrilled by that, raging (correctly) about some of the Big Fat Gypsy Wedding coverage. After Smoke, Dominic wrote two or three fairly derivative books which sold less, before returning to Travelling life with his partner, the successful Romani artist Beshlie. After a forty years break he returned to publishing with Beneath the Blue Sky with Five Leaves. This covered the 1960s and onwards, the less "romantic" decades when Romanis moved from four legs to four wheels, yet tried to remain self-employed, tried to retain a Travelling lifestyle and tried to hang on to their culture in the wake of their traditional trades and stopping places vanishing.

Trucks are of less interest than the old bow topped waggons, and the book was therefore less commercial but nevertheless we sold 1,000 or so. After a gap we've tidied up the book, inserted some better photographs, included some drawings by Beshlie and it is again available. There will be a mass market edition from Abacus sometime, without the illustrations and photographs, in a supermarket near you, but meantime you can buy our edition at http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/beneath-the-blue-sky-four-decades-of-a-travelling-life-in-britain/.

Catching up on our writers

Many, if not most, Five Leaves writers have written for other publishers, before or after we have published them. That's fine. Maxine Linnell and Dan Tunstall, for example, were first published by us but their third young adult fiction novels have gone to bigger publishers. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes books we have turned down have gone on to other publishers - that's fine too. Horses for courses and all that. By chance the first three books I read this year were all by Five Leaves' writers, but published elsewhere. The earliest of them was by Bernard Kops - his Awake for Mourning was published by the great MacGibbon and Kee in 1958. The book is of its era, with a good story of the entwined lives of two ex-prisoners, one of who is taken up by a far-right adventurer. The opening story of the prisoners' entwined lives works, but the ending doesn't. There are good cameos - of the party which included a visit by "The Group", of whom "Two are playwrights, one is a novelist, and one is a philosopher, playwright and novelist. All very up and coming. All genuine geniuses. I hate them." I wonder who they were based on. Just so you knew what you were getting into, the cover had a sort of teddy boy on it, with a miserable looking pregnant woman in the background.
Dominic Reeve is hardly a spring chicken either, though his Green Lanes and Kettle Cranes was only published in 2010 (Lamorna, £9.99). Reeve's classic of Romani life, Smoke in the Lanes, is out now with Abacus, a major publisher that has published or republished Romani books. Our revised edition of Reeve's Beneath the Blue Sky has been a bit delayed but will be out soon. The first edition was a steady seller for us, and while Smoke in the Lanes described the "waggon years" Blue Sky covered the 60s, when Anglo-Romanies were moving fully into mechanised transport. In Green Lanes Reeve wittily has a go at those who think that these people were not "real Gypsies", as they should still be travelling with horses and trailers, selling clothes pegs door to door, comparing that attitude to thinking that farm workers should still be wearing smocks and ploughing with oxen. The main thrust of his book though is to describe how, though there is strong evidence of the author being of partial Romani descent, he ran away to join the Gypsies. He fell in with Romanies local to him as a boy and gradually moved into their circle and way of life. His pleasure in finding he was the only gadje (non-Romani) at a big family gathering still appeals, though he is describing the late 1940s. Dominic has always been rather secretive about his life and his real name (still not mentioned here) so this is probably as close to the truth as we will get. The book could have done with a bit of editing, and is repetitive in places but it is a good insight into Romani life in the late 40s in southern England. Dominic still sells compost door to door, and still travels.
The youngest of the three writers mentioned here, being merely in his 70s, is John Lucas, the critic and poet. Several of his books are published by Five Leaves but his first novel, yes, a novel, is published by Greenwich Exchange. The book is called Waterdrops (£9.99) but due to a Greenwich glitch it is not on their website, nor is it on Amazon or listed yet with any booktrade bibliographic information. The book does exist though, the evidence is in front of me, and anyone trying to find it should know that Central Books has it in stock. I'm sure that it will officially exist soon. Waterdrops is a story of World War 2, and if you can get over the awful cover and don't mind a few typos (yes, yes, "pot" here) and stick with it you will find a rather good novel. It is a little hard to get into, but worth it. The novel is based round "letters home" from a soldier then serving in Malta, his life there, the life of his wife and children back in blighty (there is a lot of WW2 language in the book) and the impact of something major on their later lives. I'm not going to give it away, but the hook is a misunderstood passage in Troilus and Cressida. The whole subject is "the terrible things that happen in war, and not only on the battlefield."