I thought I was buying my daughter a book.

Rainey the Romany was signed by the author, with a little illustration drawn inside for her. I was excited because there, right in the middle of a children’s story, was a Romany little girl.

Not a stereotype. Not somebody else’s idea of a Gypsy. Not a problem to be solved.

Just a child at the centre of her own story.

My daughter normally wants to take every new book into school.

But not this one.

When I asked why, what slowly emerged was that she was worried her friends might see her differently if they knew she was Romany.

She is six.

And that is the part I have not been able to shake.

Nobody had told her to hide

I want to be really clear about something.

No teacher had told her there was anything wrong with being Romany. As far as I know, no child had said something cruel to her about it.

This is not a story blaming her school.

In some ways, that is exactly why it troubled me so much.

Where had a six-year-old learned to anticipate that knowing this one thing about her might change the way somebody looked at her?

It felt almost subliminal.

Nobody had said, “hide who you are.”

And yet somehow the possibility already lived in her head.

I knew that feeling before she had words for it

It took me straight back to Ringlets of Red, a poem I wrote years ago and published on this site in June 2020.

That poem came from my own childhood experience of being identified as Gypsy in a classroom and learning, very quickly, that other people’s ideas about what a Gypsy was could become something I had to carry.

Six years after publishing it, I found myself looking at another little girl with red curls making a calculation about visibility.

So I wrote Ringlets of Red — Six Years On.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised this was about something bigger than one book and one morning outside a school.

“You can hide it” is not the comfort people think it is

I have been told before that I am “lucky” because I can hide what I am.

Don’t tell people.

Let them assume you are White British.

Blend in.

And apparently that is supposed to make racism easier.

But hiding is not neutral for us.

For generations, Gypsy people were pushed to become less visible, less mobile, less culturally distinct and easier for the state to absorb. At points in our history, that was not figurative language. It was brutally literal.

In Scotland, for example, the 1609 Act regarding Egyptians made being a Gypsy/Traveller punishable by expulsion or death. The Scottish Government’s later archival research also documents subsequent policies that drove assimilation and forced settlement.

That history did not end with one law or one period. I explore some of that longer story in The Tinker Experiment: Why Did It Happen, What Happened—and Why Should We All Know About It?, including how policy could move from controlling Gypsy and Traveller lives to trying to absorb them altogether.

There were times when the message really was: disappear, assimilate, or face the consequences.

Today, when somebody tells me to simply “not tell people”, the threat is not the same. I am not pretending it is.

But I cannot separate that advice from the history behind it.

Be less visible. Be less Gypsy. Make yourself easier for everybody else to accept.

The punishment may no longer be written in those same laws, but the shame can still do its work.

The weight of hiding

I do not believe it is responsible to reduce suicide in our communities to one cause. Lives are more complicated than that.

But I do believe the pressure to hide a fundamental part of yourself belongs in the conversation about why so many people carry so much in silence.

Our work on The Weight We Carry has reinforced for me how grief, racism, family pressure, trauma, identity, silence and the expectation to simply keep going can overlap.

What does it do to a person to constantly calculate whether it is safe to be known?

What does it do to a child to begin that calculation at six?

Putting “White British” on a form does not rewrite ancestry.

It does not erase family history, inherited health risks or the effects of trauma carried through generations. Research into exactly how trauma may affect later generations biologically is still developing, and I would never pretend that science is simpler than it is. But hiding an ethnicity on paper does not alter your genes, your family or what came before you.

And it certainly does not make racism disappear.

Sometimes passing means you hear the racism more clearly

People sometimes talk about being able to “pass” as though it means racism cannot reach you.

Sometimes it means people simply feel safe saying racist things in front of you because they do not realise who is sitting beside them.

You hear the joke.

The stereotype.

The casual comment about Gypsies being dirty, tax dodging, criminal, dishonest or undeserving.

Sometimes you hear things far worse — people talking as though an entire ethnic group deserves less safety, fewer rights, or even less right to life.

And because they do not realise they are talking about you, you are suddenly left with another decision.

Do I tell them?

Do I challenge it?

Do I expose myself?

Or do I stay quiet because that feels safer?

The fact that racism was not aimed directly at you does not mean it hurts less when the people being spoken about are your family, your community and you.

Hiding may sometimes protect you from somebody else’s prejudice. But it asks you to carry the protection yourself.

Privacy is not the same as shame

This is why I want to be careful about the story I tell about my daughter.

I did not make her take that book into school.

I did not tell her she had to announce that she was Romany.

I do not believe pride means forcing a child to disclose part of herself before she feels ready.

She is allowed privacy.

She is allowed uncertainty.

She is allowed to decide who she tells and when.

What I do not want is for that decision to have already been made for her by fear.

There is a world of difference between choosing not to tell somebody something about yourself and believing that you must hide it in order to be accepted.

A couple of days later, she changed her mind.

She picked up Rainey the Romany and took it into school.

I was proud of her.

Not because she had passed some test of pride.

Because the choice was hers.

That is why this little book matters

I do not want our children to have to be brave simply to be ordinary.

I want a Romany child to carry a book about a Romany child into school and for nobody to think that is remarkable.

I want our children to meet themselves in books before somebody else’s stereotype gets there first.

I want them to know their history without inheriting only the shame other people attached to it.

And I want my daughter to know that she never has to perform her identity for anybody — but she also never has to disappear to make somebody else comfortable.

That is what Rainey the Romany unexpectedly opened up for me.

A children’s book.

A six-year-old.

And centuries of history sitting quietly underneath one small decision about what to put in a school bag.

My daughter should never have to disappear in order to be safe. Neither should any of us.