![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In accordance with traveller tradition, the wagon is burned to the ground by a small legion of unfeeling cousins that arrive to oversee the matter, and Kizzy’s only other companion – her beloved elderly horse, Joe – is decreed ready for the knacker’s yard, where “they’ll sell him for the hounds… he’ll be torn up.” Living in a traditional painted wagon, and spending the winter in the orchard belonging to kindly local toff Admiral Sir Archibald Cunningham-Twiss, she is effectively marooned in this rural bolthole when her guardian, actually her 100-year-old great-great grandmother, suddenly dies. As a “Diddakoi”, she’s actually half Romany, the daughter of a traveller father and an Irish mother and as such finds herself an outcast from both her own extended family and from the population of the village that she is reluctantly forced to call home. Is there an intrinsic aspect of all of our personalities, forged by a combination of background, upbringing and cultural heritage, that is essentially non-negotiable? A core part of our beings so immutable, even from a tender age, that no degree of outside influence can alter it – and neither should it try? The plight of six-year-old Kizzy Lovell, a troubled traveller girl marooned in a snooty, resolutely middle-class English village, suggests so.Īnd the touching irony at the centre of Kizzy’s plight is that the Romany heritage so integral to her identity is not enough to win the full acceptance of her own community. Identity is at the heart of The Diddakoi. ![]()
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