The investigative journalist and author of a study of Gypsy and Traveller communities explains why she was drawn to their lives, history and culture
How did you come to write this book?
I'd written about Dale Farm for the Economist in 2006. Then I went away to write another book, but I stayed in touch with some of the families there and kept going back to report on the situation. This book grew out of the realisation that there weren't really any current affairs books for normal people like me to read about Gypsies and Travellers. I thought, if I can tell the story fairly and give everyone a chance to speak, that might be quite a useful thing to do.
Your previous book, Scapegoat, was about hate crimes against people with disabilities. Was there any crossover?
I'm interested in groups on the margins and how they get treated by the mainstream – and some of the things people say about Gypsies and Travellers are quite similar to what gets said about disabled people. The language used is often the same. It's interesting, when you've studied one group, to look at another and see the similarities.
In the new book, you mention that you come from a diverse background. [Quarmby's family of birth is partly Iranian and partly English; her family by adoption is partly Serbian, Spanish and English.] How does that affect your reporting?
I grew up with parents who were very open to difference: they adopted me as this little mixed-race baby, as they called babies like me at the time, and they weren't fazed by that. Growing up as a child without strong genetic roots can sometimes cause problems but it can also be useful. It means that you can be very open to other people and where they come from and not feel particularly threatened. It also means I'm less threatening to them, because it's difficult to put me in a category. Wherever I go in the world, people always try to place me, but no one ever gets it right.
Had you written about the travelling communities before going to Dale Farm in 2006?
No, I was new to the subject and probably would have succumbed to all the romantic notions about Gypsies and Travellers that anyone from the settled community would have, until that moment.
What were your first impressions?
There is a pernicious myth about Traveller sites being dirty places. This was clearly completely untrue – Dale Farm was really clean – but the notion has been internalised by some young Traveller women, who clean to the point of obsession, which I found very sad. Another view from the outside is that it's a very patriarchal society. You do have men going out and protecting their role as breadwinners, but you also have a lot of women who are increasingly forceful and articulate advocates for their communities. That's something I think is tremendously hopeful for the future.
You work hard in the book to see the situations at Dale Farm and Meriden from both sides. Was it difficult to achieve a balance?
I really thought that fairness was important. The settled community has a right to raise their worries. By talking about them openly, it creates a space for those worries to be countered. For instance, people tend to worry about house prices, but academic research has shown that small, well-managed Gypsy sites have no effect on house prices. Unless people are allowed to express their worries, and unless people are able to bring forth that evidence, nothing's going to change.
Would you be happy to have Gypsies and Travellers as neighbours?
I live in a mid-terrace house in London at the moment so I can't answer that question honestly, but if I lived in the countryside I think I'd be delighted to have Gypsies and Travellers as neighbours – I think they'd be very good to me in my old age. I was up seeing Mary Ann McCarthy, who was at Dale Farm, where she now lives in Bedfordshire. She's got neighbours from the settled community and they're in and out of one another's houses, borrowing hedge-clippers and making sure one another are all right. This is what neighbours do – it doesn't matter if you're nomadic or settled.
Are you hopeful for the future?
Yes. I'm particularly encouraged by the efforts that some very courageous Gypsies and Travellers who have been through stressful evictions are making to move beyond the bitterness. Some are looking into conflict resolution and doing master's degrees on the subject. They're asking how to make this better for everybody, not just their own communities, and I'd like to see more settled people engaging in that kind of conflict resolution as well. What we have here is essentially a homelessness problem, and I think we in the settled community bear a heavy responsibility for sorting it out.
