What was she doing there in a quiet country pub? She was sitting alone, lost in thought. She must have been waiting for someone. She was nursing a drink but not drinking. She was unmistakably Romani, traditionally dressed, with grey hair and fine, chiselled features. To us she seemed old though she was probably only in her fifties. Her clothes were worn but scrubbed spotlessly clean. Her skin was more weathered than tanned, with the look of someone who has worked and lived an outdoor life. There were no Romani communities that we knew of in the area and her presence, of itself, was unusual – a Romani woman sitting alone, self-contained and private.
We were new parents, anxious, tired, stressed, shell-shocked. We kind of knew more or less what we were doing and had packed my mother off back home after what seemed an age of extremely unhelpful ‘I know best’ comments that heightened our anxiety. What we really wanted was someone to cook and wash-up, not someone to recall or misremember how she had parented more than a quarter of a century earlier. I expect she meant well but talk of maternal anxiety curdling milk and causing colic didn’t really help. Eventually I had steeled myself to explain that we felt able to cope without her support now, which she hadn’t liked overmuch but the sometimes one has to be cruel to be….well in this case just to get by. She soon recovered and over the years our children would periodically be left with her for a few days and she could force-feed them sweets and hysteria to her heart’s content.
We were close to stir-crazy by the time my mother had departed and we decided to try a lunchtime drink in a local country pub with a garden. The change from two professional lives and a shared social life to new parenthood was quite a shock and a pub with a garden on a warm spring day was an attractive idea. A baby crying in a garden would be a lot easier to cope with than a baby crying inside the pub. So we packed up all the kit needed to actually go out with our baby and set off.
We didn’t sit out though; it might have been too breezy or too hot or too cold or perhaps looking like rain or maybe there were wasps about. There were so many things to worry about. Whatever the reason, we went inside. The landlord was fine about our bringing our baby in and the noisiest she managed was an occasional gurgle.
We sat in what in those days was the snug. It was quiet and empty, except for the lone Romani lady. She looked somewhat stern, almost fierce, in repose and there was an unmistakeable dignity about her.
We hadn’t been there long when she finished her drink and stood up to leave. She didn’t go straight to the door, instead she came over to our table and smiled. She asked the baby’s name and told us how beautiful she was. She asked if she could touch her and gently touched her hand, looked at the two of us and said, “She will be a lucky child.” And then she left.
It wasn’t till we got home a little later that we found the coin that kind and generous woman had placed in our baby’s hand. Her words on their own would have been gift enough for us; she made two anxious new parents believe their child was special and that things would all work out for the three of us.
Sometimes, when I think back to that day, I find it possible to believe that stranger, never seen before and never seen after, had been waiting there for us so that she could say those things and so that she could give our baby the gift of luck.[i]
My daughter’s life has not been without incident and challenge; that’s not what being lucky means. To float effortlessly through life is not to live at all. What my daughter’s luck consists of is having the strength and support needed to crest the waves that otherwise would overcome any one of us when they hit.
Our ‘lucky’ daughter was married a few months ago.
[i] My wife has a different memory of these events and, given the reliability of our respective memories, she is surely right. I had forgotten we didn’t find the coin until we reached home and she insists our benefactor was not drinking alone but had a partner. But we agree on the impact of that unsought generosity on the three of us. If there is such a thing as magic, it touched us that day.
