The first time Shelby Holmes saw Oxford University, she was helping her father with the St Giles’ Fair that takes place in the city every September. All her life, she had been called a “pikey” or a “gypo” by the “flatties” (the rest of us) – knee- jerk prejudice towards travelling communities fuelled in recent years by My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. But something stirred in her. Since the age of 12, she had been brighter than her classmates, despite a chronic attendance record at school.
When her family was crisscrossing the country on the fairground circuit, she would take her books with her and read them by the light of a torch. She read everything and anything, eventually returning to school to find herself a long way ahead. But the first time Holmes broached the subject of going to Oxford, her mother, Kim, was dismissive. “Yeah, right,” Kim said, never imagining it would happen, and part of her, if she’s honest, not really wanting it to.
Three years ago, Trinity College, Oxford, awarded Holmes a variety of grants and bursaries to help her become only the second child from the travelling showman community (estimated at 20,000) to go to Oxbridge. She wrote about her childhood and the prospect of university in The Times Magazine. Now she’s a 21-year-old graduate from one of the world’s most highly regarded institutions, a world away from the culture she grew up in. How did she cope? And what does the future hold back at home with the family she left behind?
“Oh, it’s a different life,” Kim says today, looking at her daughter, who was awarded a 2:1 in English literature. “I keep saying to myself, ‘I’ve got to shut up because it’s always been good for her all the way along.’ But I think it’s been a wrangle. You have this kid and you try to keep it in your own little circle and it’s kept wanting to go off, so then you realise you haven’t been very good at supporting her. I feel terrible.”
Both Kim and her husband, Michael, left school at 14. Both of them had bricks thrown at them by other children and were called “dirty gypsies” and “pikies”. On one side, the family is descended from the niece of John Brown, Queen Victoria’s gamekeeper, who trained dancing bears. It’s a terrifically colourful heritage, but not one that instantly seems compatible with the stereotype of gilded Oxford life.
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Holmes was minding a fairground sweet stall with her mum by the age of five. The family’s amusement arcade meant that she and her sister, Nevanka (living the showman life in Leicester), were needed to work until 11pm every night after school in the small-change kiosk. “They’d go there in their uniform and change,” says Kim. “And when it was quiet, Shelby would get her books out.”
Three years at Oxford mean Holmes’s north Welsh accent has been toned down, and she has all the polish one might expect. “But it doesn’t last long,” her mum says. “Give it a month and she’s talking just like the rest of us again.”
“It’s not some suspicious activity,” Holmes insists. “I pick up accents everywhere.”
When eight of her Oxford friends visited the family’s bungalow in Rhyl, north Wales, where we are today – and where the family is based when they are not travelling the UK in their caravans and trucks – she remembers, ‘‘It was weird. Because you work so hard to keep the two separate, but it was delightful to see the two come together and something bad not happen. I was thinking, ‘Oh, this is going very well. It’s brilliant!’ ” (Recently, just before Holmes’s father sold the arcade, a man came in armed with a knife and threatened to burn it down. “You can pretty much handle anything in life after that,” she says.)
It’s only now that Kim can admit to her ambivalence. “I feel awful,” she says, “because in those early days I didn’t support her. I am better than what I was … trying to keep this showman thing going. I feel like I’ve fought with her to keep a level pegging.”
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Holmes grew up in the closed showman community. “It is a bit like a cult,” she says of her life before Oxford. “Think of Britain about 50 years ago, and that’s what it’s like.” The only nod by her parents towards a different kind of life was that both she and her sister were sent to a state school 20 minutes from her parents’ amusement arcade and fair. “I wanted her with a different set of children who didn’t know her from the fair,” says Michael. But her school attendance was sporadic to say the least.
Holmes’s generation is the first to attend school beyond the age of 14, mostly because any other option is against the law. Her parents, back in the day, moved on every two weeks or so and were shoved at the back of the class with a colouring book. Even for Holmes, the norm was missing huge chunks of her schooling for weeks on end as the family headed to the various fairs all over the UK.
Kim admits for years that she was terrified of losing a grip on her daughter, that the culture into which she was born was slipping away. “If she hadn’t looked so like her father, I would have assumed I’d taken the wrong baby home from hospital,” she says. “She was just so different from us. She was trying to get away from a very early age. Around 14, she seemed to reject the showman life entirely.”
It was a difficult, traumatic time, Kim says. Holmes often had to bargain with her to be allowed to spend time on her revision, or even be allowed to go to school. On one occasion, desperate not to slip behind, she had to promise to learn to “street sell” (those teddy stalls where the vendor pesters you for your cash) at the fairground.
“Here, love! Come over ’ere. You ’avin’ a try? A prize every time,” Holmes learnt to shout. “And I bloody hated every minute of it,” she says. “But I’m glad they made me do it. I think I needed that in my life. Without it, I might have been at risk of going to Oxford and becoming quite a different, unpractical person.”
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It gave her a confidence, too. “When I got to Oxford, the undergrads were too scared to cross the room to talk to the president of the college, Sir Ivor Roberts. But I went straight over and said, ‘Hello. My name is Shelby Holmes. I’m reading English.’ We’re just much more confident because of our background.”
Holmes says she remembers going through a period of resenting her showman life and in particular the demands it made on her time. Now, however, she feels fully integrated in both worlds. She’s seeing a local showman, for example, but she admits there is a change of gear required (her last boyfriend at Oxford is still her best friend).
“You have to respect the fact that talking about Michel Foucault’s Death of the Author is not the most interesting thing to someone who has barely read a Dickens novel. You have to appreciate that your cultural references from Oxford bear no relation to the cultural references of a showman.”
“We have come to terms with the fact that she is probably not going to marry a showman,” adds Kim.
It seems extraordinary to imagine a teenager with Holmes’s frames of reference (“We weren’t encouraged to mix with the local children because there were so many children in the showman community”) not being intimidated by the prospect of Oxford life – all those Brideshead cultural associations pitted against the stereotype of the toothless, tattooed travelling communities.
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“People think we’re all covered in tattoos,” says her father. “But it’s not like that. Often those people are staff we’ve hired for the day. The real show people are in the cabs of the rides, operating the equipment. We’re the businessmen.”
And the showman life is not dogged by poverty. Large families work hard and split the profits. “I don’t feel guilty about taking money from my parents, which is the one thing all my Oxford friends say, because I’ve been working hard for the family for years,” says Holmes.
When she got into Oxford, her father bought her a Rolex. For her 21st birthday, she chose a pretty diamond ring. And when she passed her driving test, her grandparents bought her a car.
Holmes says of the period just before she went up, “A couple of people, showman and non-showman, said, ‘Look, you don’t have to be defined by this culture or by that label. You don’t have to tell anybody and the few [showman children] who have gone to university – a minuscule percentage – don’t usually say anything about their background. It’s just easier not to because of the grief and associations.’
“And I understood that and thought it over for a long time. I thought, ‘I’d have to be an awfully weak person to be defined by it.’ So I came to the conclusion it was best to be honest with everyone, because how else is it going to change if you don’t start talking about it?”
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When Holmes was appointed to the committee of 12 organising the Trinity College Commemoration Ball last year, the students hadn’t quite grasped her added value. Her parents set up a stall selling candyfloss in Trinity’s colours, while her father helped secure some fairground rides for Trinity’s green.
And it was only because the college gates were too small that the family’s massive showground carousel wasn’t erected there, too. Holmes ran around Trinity in her black, wired ballgown marvelling at the bizarre meeting of her two very different worlds. Once, when she was working at the St Giles’ Fair in Oxford, trying to flog wooden roses, her Shakespeare professor approached her on the stall and said, “Didn’t I interview you?”
Her friends, made in the first week or so, were a mixed bunch: a guy from Brighton, a couple of girls from Cheltenham Ladies’ College, her boyfriend of a year and a half, who was educated both by the state and privately, another boy “from Manchester, who seemed quite rough and ready and then you find out his parents went to Oxford, too”. Her background, cheeringly, melted away. If anything, she says, “People were like, ‘Hey, that’s so cool! Do you get to go on fairground rides all year?’ ”
There was the odd crass comment from “a posh idiot”, just like her parents experienced when they were her age – “Do you go to the toilet in the ground? Do you all share a bed?” – but this was much to the derision of the other students, too.
It was, Holmes attests, a meritocracy, with so many students “on all sorts of bursaries and grants. You belong because you’ve got there. Everybody has a story.”
There were questions about her culture, but for the most part, they were interesting ones and she didn’t mind answering them. Sometimes, if she wanted a bit of pocket money, she’d work at a local fair and take a couple of students with her. “If anything, it was the students who’d been to a really posh school, especially a school like Eton, who were trying to hide the fact. It’s just not cool at the moment.”
The challenges, it turned out, were more for her family than for her. Because the showman community is so closed, her parents were used to knowing everything about her life. “I had lots of showman boyfriends before I got to Oxford,” says Holmes. “I’d come back to the caravan having kissed a boy and my mum already knew. Somebody would have phoned her in that short space of time. I’m used to them knowing everything. Mum calls it a cult.”
There was also, of course, the risk that Holmes would drift away from her parents, not just intellectually – that had happened already – but culturally and emotionally, too. She remembers initially loving the “scouts” who cleaned her room at Oxford and emptied her bin for her. Now she’s embarrassed about feeling that way.
“We can’t even have a conversation with her about what she does because it’s [above] what we know,” says her father. “We don’t read like she does, so the only involvement we could have was with who she was pally with.”
In a calculated effort to retain some control, Kim befriended Trinity’s porters.
“One in particular would ring me and say, ‘She’s walked past twice today and she’s got a cold.’ ”
Didn’t she feel oppressed by that? There aren’t many teenagers who’d be happy with the idea of their mother in cahoots with the porters. “I’m used to them knowing everything about my life,” she says. “I’m not bothered.”
“I know I should be less controlling,” says Kim. “I’m sorry, Shelby, but I check the numbers on your phone bill. It’s the drugs I worry about. I am so aware that she is out of my community and I’ve got nobody who is going to ring me and say, ‘Oh, Shelby’s just taken two lines of cocaine.’ I’ve got to be ahead of that. Do you know what I mean?”
“Like it’s going to flash up ‘drug dealer’ on my phone bill,” says Holmes, laughing. Being a showman child is, in some ways, extremely protected, even though within the culture they are allowed great freedom because of the inbuilt system of eyes everywhere.
“I’m still a showman,” Holmes says. “I still do showman things. I have a very close bond with my family. We fight all the time, but at the end of the day, we get on. I know I could come here tomorrow and say, ‘I’ve got a cocaine addiction,’ or, ‘I’m pregnant,’ and my parents will say, ‘We’ll fix it.’ I enjoy having their opinion and their trust, and I value it. A lot of non-showman children don’t want to bring their parents into their lives like that, and that worries me a little bit.”
In fact, it has not been her integration into Oxford that has tested her, but rather into the flattie world beyond. When Holmes first visited her Oxford boyfriend’s family, she was perplexed by the culture change.
“Being awfully polite in a showman’s culture is not the same as being awfully polite in a flattie’s,” she says. “A showman family would be disgusted if you called them Mr and Mrs and didn’t make yourself immediately at home. They’d think, ‘Do you not like us?’ But that is the polite way to behave when you are not a showman.”
Holmes admits she was out of her depth, trying to pick up the rules as she went along. “You kind of have to infer it and appreciate they are different,” she says. “Going to Oxford and being constantly surrounded by people who are non-showman, you understand and pick up things. I just thought, ‘I’d better keep my mouth shut and absorb stuff so that I’ll be more prepared for the next time.’ And I was. But it is a learning experience.”
And in the future? Will the clash of cultures ever subside? “Perhaps in the end, it will be something where I will just have to tell myself, ‘Oh! That’s how flatties do it and that’s how showmen do it and so if I want to marry a flattie, I’ll have to just get on with it.’”
She is in the process of applying to do a master’s in the history of art, either at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London or back at Oxford. Her parents are going to convert their garage space into a sitting room for her and she intends to fill it with the old furniture that she has grown to like (the bungalow is full of very new-looking, immaculate furniture with flourishes of gold and drapes of silk covering the ceiling).
Her eventual goal is to work in a museum or gallery, or perhaps for the National Trust or English Heritage. “But not far from here,” she says. “And I guess I’ll always find a fair to work in at the weekend.”
What I learnt at Oxford
By Shelby Holmes
1. You can’t always be a spokesperson for your culture.
I was once asked how showmen felt about religion. I suppose I could discuss the logistical problems of getting to a church every Sunday. But I just couldn’t answer for 20,000 people. And that’s fine.
2. Don’t make assumptions about people at university before you meet them.
I was so ready, and kind of excited, to meet posh people, so ready to be the practical one. When I got there I was kind of disappointed by how annoyingly normal everyone was.
3. And don’t let them make assumptions about you.
I got asked a lot if I could do circus tricks, juggling and so on. I nearly said yes once, just to fulfil this person’s delightful dream about what being part of this culture might be. The reality is long hours, hard labour and unstable returns. And mud. Lots of mud.
4. Don’t blame your failings on your culture.
In my essays my biggest failing was often a lack of structure. I used to blame this on the fact that I must have been away from school when they concentrated on it. Every time it came up, I’d blame it on the lack of school attendance, and therefore on being a showman.
5. You did not get in because of a loophole.
This is something a lot of Oxford students struggle with – the belief they got in because of a loophole/there was a mix-up/they just scraped the requirements, etc. Oxford’s reputation is such that you undermine your own achievement.
6. It’s OK to go a little bit native.
A small insight into the daily life of showmen: towels are single-use only. If you have a shower and use a towel, it then has to be washed. No exceptions. While folding my laundry at Oxford, a friend came in and, noticing my eight towels, asked why I had so many. We shared a quizzical look. People use towels more than once after a shower? I was disgusted. My friend was bemused. Cut to several months later. I’d come back from a club desperate for a shower but had forgotten to do my laundry. I sighed, and gave in to the conventions of another culture.
7. Don’t gloss over your home life.
The best approach is usually to be open and honest. This doesn’t mean you have to divulge every detail of your lifestyle. If you’re with people who don’t know much about your culture, they usually appreciate it if you at least let them know where the major divergences are. People can’t know they’re being rude unless you inform them of how your culture differs from theirs.
8. If you don’t want to change, you don’t have to.
Last year, there was a fancy dinner in the college. By this time I had already noticed that people dressed rather more low-key than most showmen I know. We like big hair, big dresses, and a few rhinestones don’t go amiss, either. I knew I wanted to wear a long Fifties-style dress with an A-line skirt and an oversized underskirt with red lipstick and matching heels. But I knew a fair few people would consider it too much. I contemplated the drab, grey, formal dress that was my alternative, but decided to stick to my guns. And it paid off! One dignitary came up to me afterwards and complimented me about my outfit – she loved it and wanted one herself.
9. You don’t get to ride on your high horse.
I got one particular question a lot: “It must be so annoying, being in Oxford surrounded by people who don’t have a clue what it’s like to work hard.” I think they expect me to be bitter. Umm, no. For one thing, everyone at Oxford has had to work hard to get where they are. And second, I don’t resent my childhood. I don’t think it was a “tough” upbringing. I didn’t have a “difficult” life. I had everything anyone could want.
10. You actually don’t have to tell anyone.
It’s your culture, your upbringing. You get to tell people as much or as little as you like. It’s easy to see how your culture can be viewed as your most defining feature. It does not have to be. I obviously did not take up this last piece of advice.