FOR the first time in her life, Louie Goddard has been able to go to a restaurant with her family.

This is because the mother-of-three was accompanied by someone who can actually read the menu - her nine-year-old daughter.

Having lived a life on the road, the 28-year-old gipsy has only been to school for a week and is illiterate.

But she desperately wants more for her children.

And since she made a field just outside Eckington her home - along with six other families who controversially set up camp without planning permission last May Bank Holiday - she is already seeing the benefits.

While local villagers and Wychavon District Council have been fighting to get the travellers evicted (a High Court ruling now means they have to leave at the start of April), 12 children from the site have been welcomed into Defford Primary School, where they are finally getting an education.

And Louie said that since arriving in the Worcestershire beauty spot, the children have come on in leaps and bounds.

"Our way of life traditionally has been for the women to stay at home and look after the kids while the men go out to work, but times are changing. I want my daughters to have choices."

If the travellers stay in Eckington, which they want more than anything else, it would also provide them with other basic facilities they feel they have been denied up until now.

"I would love to be able to learn how to read and write but that won't be possible if we have to move on again," Louie said.

"But there are other things people don't think about. We have been able to have dentist's and doctor's appointments, too."

This last point is something that is especially important to 35-year-old Rosemary Birmingham.

The mother-of-four is heavily pregnant with her fifth child and for the first time she is booked into a hospital bed in Cheltenham to have her baby.

"I was looking forward to having post-natal care and home visits from the midwife to check on the health of my baby but if we move in April, this won't happen," she said.

After an injunction was slapped on the travellers the day after their arrival in Eckington, many of the facilities they had planned had to be put on ice while they waited to see if retrospective planning permission would be granted - an appeal is set for September.

"I haven't even got a flush toilet," Rosemary said.

"Ideally we would like to Tarmac the gravelled areas, plant trees and put in a cesspit but we have stuck to the rules and not put up anything since the first day.

"We know we broke the law when we turned up and put in an electric and water supply without planning permission but we really have nowhere else to go.

"What people don't understand is that if we did try to apply for planning permission first there is a 90 per cent chance we would get turned down anyway.

"It's a Catch-22 situation."

Louie said that if the travellers were given a viable alternative site they would happily move on - but she claims the wait for a council owned site is five years.

"And many of them are squalid with rats running around," she said, sitting in an immaculate caravan.

"People think we are 'dirty gipsies' but they haven't got a clue.

"We're humans, not animals - we want nice homes and safe areas for our children to play, just like anyone else."