My daughter likes books. More specifically, when she gets a new book she usually wants everybody to know about it. School included.

So when I bought her Rainey the Romany, I expected exactly the same thing.

This one was particularly special. I had got it from the author. It was signed for her, with a little illustration drawn inside. More importantly, there on the cover was a little Romany girl.

Someone she could recognise.

I showed the book in a video because I was genuinely excited about it.

Then something happened that knocked the excitement straight out of me.

She didn’t want to take it to school.

At first that might sound completely unremarkable. Children change their minds about things every five minutes.

Except she normally does want to take new books in.

So I asked why.

And what I slowly realised she was trying to tell me was that she was worried her friends might look at her differently if they knew she was Romany.

She is six.

That hurt.

Then, if I’m completely truthful, it made me absolutely boiling.

This is not a story about blaming her school

I want to make that really clear.

No teacher had told her there was anything wrong with being Romany.

As far as I know, no child had said something horrible to her about being Romany.

This isn’t an accusation against her school.

In some ways, that is exactly why the moment bothered me so much.

Where did she learn to anticipate the possibility?

How has a six-year-old already worked out that there is some information about herself which might change the way somebody sees her?

Nobody appears to have sat her down and taught her that lesson.

It felt almost subliminal.

And yet there it was.

I’ve been that little girl

It immediately took me back to something I wrote years ago.

In Ringlets of Red, I wrote about being introduced at school as a Gypsy child.

The headteacher walked me into a room and announced:

“Be nice to Violet, she’s a Gypsy you see.”

What followed stayed with me long after everybody else in that classroom probably forgot it happened.

Children asking what a Gypsy was. Another Gypsy child being remembered as dirty and having lice.

Trying to prove, inside my own head, that I wasn’t whatever they thought a Gypsy was.

I published that poem on this website in 2020. I had written it long before that.

And suddenly, all these years later, I was looking at another little girl with red curls having to think about whether being known as Romany was safe.

Except this time it wasn’t me, this time, she was mine.

Then she changed her mind

And this part matters too.

A little while later, she decided she wanted to take the book.

I have a video of her outside school with Rainey the Romany in her hands.

I don’t want to turn that into some enormous heroic moment that she has to carry for the rest of her life.

She is six.

She shouldn’t have to represent an entire ethnic group because she took a book into primary school.

But I was proud of her.

Not because she had overcome some test I had set her.

Because she made the choice herself.

The first time, she wasn’t ready.

So we didn’t force it.

Then she was.

There is something important in that too.

Pride cannot mean compelling our children to disclose parts of themselves before they feel safe.

They are allowed privacy. They are allowed uncertainty. They are allowed to decide.

And when they do decide to say, this is part of who I am, we should make sure the world they say it to is worthy of that trust.

Why I keep banging on about representation

This is why I keep talking about authentic Gypsy and Traveller voices.

Why books matter. Why films matter. Why history matters.

Why I get so frustrated when other people keep telling our stories for us and then wonder why stereotypes survive.

A child shouldn’t encounter Gypsy identity mainly through rumours, jokes, newspaper headlines or somebody else’s idea of what a Gypsy is.

She should be able to open a book and find a little girl.

Just a little girl.

With a family. A personality. A story.

A child she can recognise without first having to defend.

My daughter eventually walked through the school gates carrying Rainey the Romany.

I hope that one day a Romany child taking a Romany book into school will be so completely ordinary that nobody thinks it deserves a blog.

We aren’t there yet.

Rainey the Romany is by Elijah Vardo and published by Tate. Buy the book from the Tate Shop →