We say travellers,’ Mrs Blount told the children. Kizzy seemed only to have one, but that was because she was what they called her, a ‘diddakoi’, not all gypsy. Mrs Blount had touched a sore spot in Kizzy’s family, as in some gypsy clans, a child is given three names: a secret one whispered by its mother the moment it is born and, when it is grown, whispered again into the child’s ear a private or ‘wagon’ name which is used only by its own people, and a third open name by which it is known to the world. ‘Kizzy must be short for something.’ Mrs Blount had asked her, ‘What is your real name, dear?’
‘We shall not have such behaviour in this school.’ But they would silent and small, Kizzy knew that. The twenty-ninth pair, Kizzy’s, looked down at her table she had a curious burning in her ears. Twenty-eight pairs of eyes looked back at Mrs Blount blandly and innocently: ‘As if we would,’ they seemed to say. ‘If anyone,’ said the teacher, Mrs Blount, in the classroom, ‘any one,’ and her eyes looked sternly along the lines of tables filled with boys and girls, ‘teases or bullies or jeers at Kizzy Lovell, they will answer for it to me.’ She died at the age of ninety in Dumfriesshire, UK.Ĭlothes pegs. Nine of her novels have been made into motion pictures. Godden won the Whitbread Award for children’s literature in 1972, and in 1993 she was named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. She returned to the United Kingdom for good at the end of World War II and continued her prolific literary career with the acclaimed novels The Greengage Summer, In This House of Brede, and numerous others. A number of her novels were inspired by her nearly four decades of life in India, including The River, Kingfishers Catch Fire, Breakfast with the Nikolides, and her final work, Cromartie vs.
Godden began her writing career with Chinese Puzzle in 1936 and achieved international fame three years later with her third book, Black Narcissus. Born in Sussex, England, she moved with her family to Narayanganj, colonial India, now Bangladesh, when she was six months old. Rumer Godden (1907–1998) was the author of more than sixty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s literature, and is considered by many to be one of the foremost English language writers of the twentieth century.
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