Book excerpt: The sequel to the perennially popular Yellow on the Broom, Red Rowans and Wild Honey follows Betsy's story to the end of the Second World War. She recounts in vivid detail the heady years of her adolescence, her courtship and her mother's struggle to bring up four children in the only way a Travelling woman knew: hawking wares, fruit picking, tatty howking – in fact any kind of work that would provide the next meal. This edition also contains another substantial piece of autobiography, which remained incomplete at the time of her death and which appears in print here for the first time.