The Gypsy's Parson: His Experiences and Adventures

NOT a few writers have essayed to study the Gypsies in dusty libraries. I have companioned with them on fell and common, racecourse and fairground, on the turfy wayside and in the city’s heart. In my book, which is a record of actual experiences, I have tried to present the Gypsies just as I have found them, without minimising their faults or magnifying their virtues. Most of the Gypsies mentioned in the following pages have now passed away, and of those who remain, many have, for obvious reasons, been renamed.

For the majority of the pictures adorning my book, I owe a profound debt of gratitude to my friend, Mr. Fred Shaw; also, for their kind permission to include several pictures in my “Romany Gallery,” my cordial thanks are due to Mrs. Johnson, of Yatton, Rev. H. H. Malleson, Mr. William Ferguson, Mr. T. J. Lewis, Mr. H. Stimpson, and Mr. F. Wilkinson.

The phonetics contained in this work are based upon a system invented by my friend, Mr. R. A. Scott Macfie, of the Gypsy Lore Society, whose innumerable kindnesses I most gratefully acknowledge.

G. H.

RUCKLAND RECTORY, NEAR LOUTH, LINCOLNSHIRE.

Gypsy Court—my Initiation Into Gypsydom

A TANGLE of sequestered streets lying around a triple-towered cathedral; red roofs and gables massed under the ramparts of an ancient castle; a grey Roman arch lit up every spring-time by the wallflower’s mimic gold; an old-world Bailgate over whose tavern yards drifted the sleepy music of the minster chimes; a crooked by-lane leading down to a wide common loved by the winds of heaven—these were the surroundings of my childhood’s home in that hilltop portion of Lincoln which has never quite thrown off its medieval drowsiness.

Not far from my father’s doorstep, as you looked towards the common, lay a narrow court lined with poor tenements, and terminating in a bare yard bounded by a squat wall. Every detail of this alley stands out in my memory with the sharpness of a photograph; the cramped perspective of the place as you entered it from our lane, the dreary-looking houses with their mud-floored living-rooms fronting upon the roadway, the paintless doors and windows, the blackened chimneys showing rakish against the sky, all combined to make a picture of dun-coloured misery. There were, it is true, a few redeeming features gilding the prevailing drabness of the scene. The entrance to the court had a southerly outlook upon green fields stretching up to the verge of the Castle Dyking, or, to revive its more gruesome name, “Hangman’s Ditch,” so called from the grim associations of a bygone day. From these fields a clean air blew through the court, rendering it a less unwholesome haunt for the strange folk who dwelt within its precincts; while not half a mile distant lay the breezy common, a glorious playground for the children of Upper Lincoln.

Seeing that this court and its denizens were destined in the order of things to make a profound impression upon my childish imagination, I may as well develop the picture rising so vividly before my mind’s eye.

It was somewhere in the fifties of the last century, a few years, that is to say, before my entrance into the world, that several families of dark-featured “travellers” had pitched upon the court for their Gypsyry, a proceeding at which our quiet lane at first shrugged its shoulders, then focussed an interested gaze upon the intruders and their ways, and finally lapsed into an indulgent toleration of them. Thus from day to day throughout my early years, there might have been seen emerging from the recesses of Gypsy Court swarthy men in twos and threes accompanied by the poacher’s useful lurcher; nut-brown girls with their black hair carelessly caught up in orange or crimson kerchiefs; wrinkled crones smoking short clays, as gaily they drove forth in their rickety donkey-carts; buxom mothers carrying babies slung, Indian fashion, across their shoulders, and bearing on their arms baskets replete with pegs, skewers, and small tin-ware of home manufacture. As for children, troops of the brown imps were generally in evidence, their eldritch shrieks rending the air between the portals of the little court and the gate opening upon the common.

No observes could possibly miss the fighting scenes and the ringing shouts which made the court echo again. A passionate folk are the Gypsies, a provoking word being at any time sufficient to call forth a blow. Even as I write these words, visions of gory fists and faces obtrude themselves through the mists of past days.

However, the Gypsies were never reported to be otherwise than polite towards the outsider who ventured into the alley. Diplomats rather than hooligans were they. “Let’s ’eave ’alf a brick at ’im,” is not the Gypsy’s way with a stranger who happens to stroll into the camp. At the same time I would not have it imagined that the inhabitants of the squalid court were of the best black Romany breed; far from it, they were mostly of diluted blood, else how came they to turn sedentary at all? For pure Gypsies (or Romanitshelaw, as they call themselves), the aristocrats of their race, abhor settled life, preferring to die on the road rather than wither inside four walls.

On the occasion of a horse fair in the city, our lane would resound with the clanging of hoofs beyond the ordinary, and in front of the taverns there was much rattling of whipstocks on the insides of hard hats, in order to enliven some weedy “screw,” and so reward its owner for hours of patient “doctoring” in a corner well screened from prying eyes. Then when the autumnal rains set in, and the leaves began to flutter down in showers, there would come from afar the rumbling of Romany “homes on wheels,” driven townwards by the oncoming of winter. To me it was always a saddening sight to watch the travel-stained wanderers hying to their winter quarters through miry streets heavy with mist and gloom. Staruben sî gav (town is a prison), an ancient vagabond was heard to remark on a like occasion.

A spectacle far more inspiriting was the departure of a Gypsy cavalcade from the city on a gay spring morning. For into the dingy purlieus where the travellers had wintered more or less cheerlessly, stray sunbeams and soft airs had begun to penetrate. Tidings had reached them that away in the open something had stirred, or called, or breathed along the furzy lanes and among the tree boughs, and forthwith every Romany sojourner within the ash-strewn yards of the city became eager to resume the free, roving life of the roads. How often have I longed for the brush of an artist to depict the company of merry Gypsies—men, women, and bairns, horses, dogs, and donkeys, jingling pot-carts and living-wagons bedizened with new paint, starting from the top of our lane for the open country, just when the wind-rocked woods were burgeoning and every green hedge-bottom had a sprinkling of purple violets.

Now until my eleventh year I had seen no more than the mere outside of Romany life, and I might never have had any Gypsy experiences to relate but for a trivial blood-spilling, which, as I look back upon it, may well be called my initiation into Gypsydom. Indeed, the small incident I am about to mention had for me a most important result, insomuch as it made me akin to Gypsies for the rest of my life.

My earliest schools were dames’ academies—there were two of these old-time institutions in our lane. Approached by a dark passage, the second of these had for its lecture-hall a large brick-floored room, whose presiding spirit was a dwarfish lady of sixty-five or more, before whom we sat in rows at long desks. The school consisted of about a score of children who were awed into subjection by a threatening rod of supple ash, half as long again as the tapering stick around which the scarlet-runners in your kitchen garden love to entwine themselves. This dread implement of discipline, reared in a recess near our mistress’s desk, would oft descend upon the head of a chattering boy or girl, and to the tip of that rod my own pate was no stranger.

Among my acquaintances at this school was a Gypsy girl whose parents dwelt at the sunny end of the aforementioned court. A year or two my senior, Sibby Smith was a shapely lass, having soft hazel eyes and a wealth of dark hair crowning an olive-tinted face. Lissom as whalebone, she had a pretty way of capering along the lanes with hedgerow berries or leaves of autumn’s painting in her hair, and I, a silent, retiring boy, would watch her movements with admiring eyes. Fittingly upon that lithe form sat a garb of tawny-brown, with here a wisp of red and there a tag of yellow, mingled as on the wings of a butterfly. The girl had a harum-scarum brother, Snakey by name and slippery by nature, a little older than herself, with whom out of school hours she would be off and away searching the bushes for birds’ nests, or ransacking the thickets for nuts; and one day in school I remember how she pulled out inadvertently with her handkerchief a catapult—a Gypsy can bring down a pheasant with the like—and falling with a clatter at our teacher’s feet, the unholy weapon was straightway confiscated, whereat Sibby’s face grew darker by a shade, as with her pen-nib she savagely stabbed the desk on which our copybooks were outspread. A roamer in all the copses and lanes around our city, and enjoying the freedom of the camps which tarried for little or for long in the old brickyards fringing the common, this schoolmate of mine expressed the out-of-door spirit in her very gait, and as she pirouetted along the causeway, you caught from her flying figure the smell of wood smoke and the mossy odour of deep dingles.