title: Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two: A Gypsy Family's Hard Times and Happy Times on the Road in the 1950s
author:  Maggie Smith-Bendell 
description: Maggie Smith-Bendell runs an advisory service for Gypsies and Travellers, and campaigns for the rights of Gypsies.
zlib_text: ![](Images/image00113.jpeg)
  
  _**Maggie Smith-Bendell**_
  
  United Kingdom
  
   **Our Forgotten Years**
  
   _A Gypsy Woman’s Life on the Road_
  
  2009, EN
  
  Aka: _Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two_
  
  Born on a Somerset pea-field in 1941, the second of eight children in a Romani
  family, Maggie Smith-Bendell has lived through the years of greatest change in
  the travelling community’s long history. As a child, Maggie rode and slept in
  a horse-drawn wagon, picked hops and flowers, and sat beside her father’s
  campfire on ancient verges, poor but free to roam. As the twentieth century
  progressed, common land was fenced off and the traditional ways disappeared.
  Eventually Maggie married a house-dweller and tried to settle for bricks and
  mortar, but she never lost the restless spirit, the deep love of the land and
  the gift for storytelling that were her Romani inheritance. Maggie’s story is
  one of hardship and prejudice, but also, unforgettably, it recalls the glories
  of the travelling life, in the absolute 