Friends for Life. Jan Fennell

life. Horses and dogs were crucial members of the family business and were treated with respect. In fact, horses played their part in bringing my grandparents together.

      When my great-grandparents died, the family wagon was burned according to the ceremonial traditions of the Romany nation. My grandmother and her sister were allowed to keep some of the family’s possessions. But they themselves were passed on to another family for adoption. The sisters were deeply unhappy with their new family and kept running away. They never made it very far and were returned to the new family, where each time they were treated worse than before. Eventually their shoes were taken away from them to prevent them from breaking away again.

      I didn’t know my grandmother’s sister very well, but I know my grandmother was a determined character. It was the middle of winter when they made their final, successful break for freedom. They found themselves outside London, in Middlesex, but they didn’t know precisely where. They just ran, barefoot, carrying their few possessions bundled up. A blizzard was blowing and they were close to collapse when they stumbled across a horse-drawn cart on a pathway. Two young men, wrapped up in big coats, were driving the horse home through the snows. One of them shouted: ‘Come on, girls, get up here.’ The two men were my grandad, George Fennell and his brother, my Great-Uncle Jim. The pair ran a fruit and vegetable delivery business and had been out on their rounds when they were caught in the snow themselves. They were making sure the horse was looked after.

      George and Jim took the two girls home to their parents; it turned out they had been lost in Hammersmith, then a village outside London. The girls stayed, and they and the brothers were eventually married.

      My grandfather’s family had an equally great respect for animals. My gran used to tell me a funny story about him. He had pulled up outside a pub, The Redan in Grafton Road, at the end of a working day. There were several horses and carts outside. My grandfather walked into the pub. Going up to one of the men at the bar, he asked him: ‘Are you enjoying your beer?’

      The man had hardly said yes when my grandad punched him in the face. ‘Go on, put a coat on your horse,’ he said. ‘You look after your horse first.’

      They tended to hit first and ask questions afterwards back then. But the man hadn’t put a coat and nosebag on his horse. My grandad was right – the animals were their livelihood.

      Like many Romany women, Nan Fennell had the ability to foresee the future. She didn’t always regard it as a positive attribute. Whenever anyone told her she had a wonderful gift she’d always say: ‘It can be, but it can also be a terrible curse.’

      It was easy to see why. Her family had suffered more than its fair share of tragedy. She foresaw the deaths of two children. The first was Uncle George’s youngest, Ellen, the baby. Her older brother, the eldest of the grandchildren, was Johnny. When Ellen was born she was taken up to see my nan, who held Ellen in her arms for only a few moments before asking: ‘Where’s Johnny?’ She was in a real state. ‘Just get me Johnny.’ When Johnny appeared, she said to him: ‘We love you, and we always will, no matter what happens in your life.’ The year after Nan died, Ellen was run over in a freak accident. Johnny was at the wheel of the lorry when it happened.

      She foresaw tragedy again when her youngest son, Bill, and his wife Elsie had a son. When the baby boy, Trevor, was put in her arms all she said was: ‘You love this baby, you make the most of this baby.’ At the age of three the baby fell into the River Mole at Walton in Surrey and drowned.

      On both occasions, people recalled my grandmother’s words after the tragedies occurred. She didn’t spell out what she had seen. Her philosophy was that you tell someone good news but you don’t tell them bad. She had a happy knack of being able to tell her daughters and daughters-in-law that they were expecting babies – sometimes weeks before they’d even conceived. But on other occasions my father would just say: ‘She’s seen something.’ She would see things then that would upset her deeply.

      While I sat on my grandmother’s lap, she would often tell me things. For instance, when I was six she predicted that I would have two children. ‘But there will be more,’ she said obliquely. It would be many years before that made any sense.

      If Nan Fennell was a powerful force within the family, so too was my grandfather’s brother, Jim, by far the most colourful of the clan. I remember vividly the day I finally summoned the courage to ask him about the awful lump he had on the back of his neck. How could I ever forget the story he told me?

      As a thirteen-year-old boy growing up in Fulham at the end of the nineteenth century, Jim had headed off to see Buffalo Bill Cody’s great Wild West show at Earls Court in 1896. He was so overwhelmed by what he saw that he went home that evening and promptly announced he was joining the show and heading off on their European tour.

      He was the little boy who ran off with the circus – and a memorable time he had too. His experience working with horses stood him in good stead and he was put in charge of Buffalo Bill’s stable.

      Great-Uncle Jim was the family’s natural performer, however, and he soon persuaded Buffalo Bill to give him a place in the show. While driving the famous Deadwood Stagecoach around the arena one night he was hit on the back of the neck by an Indian tomahawk. The blow was accidental but it split his neck wide open. ‘That’s where the hatchet hit me,’ he told me.

      It was Jim who introduced me to the first important animal in my life, his horse Kitty. Kitty was a typical Thelwell pony, as wide as she was tall, black with a long mane, her tail trailing down to the ground.

      Great-Uncle Jim kept her in stables in Battersea Park, where he also kept the cart from which he sold his fruit and vegetables. I vividly remember Great-Uncle Jim placing me on her back and feeling the warmth and softness underneath me. Together we spent hours padding around Battersea on his horse and trap, talking about his adventures – and his love of horses.

      Great-Uncle Jim had learned a lot from the native Americans he had worked with during his time with Buffalo Bill. He remembered one of them coming up to one of the horses one day before a performance, looking at it and saying: ‘That horse is lame.’ The cowboy who was due to ride the horse wasn’t having any of it. ‘To my shame I got the horse ready and let it go out into the arena. When it came back it broke down,’ Uncle Jim told me. ‘Bill Cody asked, “Didn’t anybody spot it?”’ Great-Uncle Jim said: ‘He did,’ and pointed to the native American.

      Great-Uncle Jim had a huge respect for the quiet courage of those men. He disliked intensely the way they were presented as the ‘baddies’ in Buffalo Bill’s show, in which the white men were always being rescued from the redskins. But from the stories he had heard the native Americans tell of their time back in the West, he wondered who needed rescuing from whom.

      In that sense he was the first person who made me think about injustice. He gave me another important idea too.

      His relationship with Kitty was almost telepathic. I remember Great-Uncle Jim used to be able to lay down the reins, put his arm around me and whisper a gentle, ‘Take us home, Kit.’ In London in those days there was hardly any traffic. Kitty would take her time going home at her own pace.

      At the stables where he kept Kitty he would sit me on her, bareback, and tell me how important it was to become one with the horse, to become part of it. He didn’t like the way ‘the nobs’, as he called them, used to ride, with a saddle and a whip. He would say: ‘You must breathe at the same rate as it. Until you can take in every breath that it takes you’ve got nothing.’ Again this was something he had picked up during his time with the native American horsemen.

      Looking back on it now, I realize it was Great-Uncle Jim and Kitty who first instilled in me the idea of animals and humans working in harmony. As a little girl I saw them working together instinctively, as a team. There was no coercion, they understood each other perfectly. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Chapter 3

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