Geraldine Kaye (1925–2010)

Polly and Tom live in the turnpike cottage – their father Peg-leg keeps the toll-gate. Their mother ¡s dead and their father gees too much to the alehouse. Their life is harsh and both children dream of escape to something better — Tom of going to sea and Polly of service at the great-house. Hasn’t Miss Annabel, a girl of her own age, promised her? But the great-house is shut up now. Into their lives come the Gypsy band, who contrive, through their manipulation of the villager’s Ignorance, to settle down on the lawns of the great-house itself. And into Polly’s life particularly comes É preoccupied with the problem of his own longed-for acceptance as a true Romany.
A marvellous story, true for any century, of the clash between different lives, of problems that can’t be solved by dreams but that may be transformed by this very clash — a story whose details remain in the memory.… (meer)