A Pair of Clogs
The story opens on a young mother and her toddler. Maggie loves her daughter Mary with a ferocity that defies her circumstances as a factory girl in Victorian England. Then the gypsies come, and Mary is taken. But they leave her behind somewhere in the countryside, a child with no name and no history, and she is rescued by the vicar of a quiet parish. Mr. and Mrs. Vallance raise her as their own. She grows up in the vicarage, beloved, educated, safe. Yet as she grows older, the questions sharpen. Who was she before? Do the gypsies still have a claim to her? What makes a family after all, the blood that runs in your veins or the people who chose you? Walton tells this story with a child's eye view and a novelist's understanding of how identity calcifies around mystery. It is part melodrama, part quiet meditation on belonging. The novel sits comfortably alongside Victorian novels about found families and the permeable boundaries of class. It asks what we owe to children who do not know where they came from, and what they owe to themselves.
