George Smith. I've been a Gipsying

RAMBLES AMONG OUR GIPSIES AND THEIR CHILDREN IN THEIR TENTS AND VANS

A Sunday Ramble among the Gipsies upon Pump Hill and Loughton.

Sunday, April 23, 1882, opened with a wet morning.  The clouds were thick and heavy.  The smoke seemed to hover, struggle and rise again as if life depended on its mounting higher than the patched and broken roofs of London houses.  The rain came down drearily, dribbly, and drizzly.  It hung upon my garments with saturating tendencies, and I really got wet through before I was aware of it.  The roads were very uncomfortable for feet in non-watertight boots.  Umbrellas were up.  Single “chaps,” and others in “couples” were wending their way across Victoria Park.  The school bells were chiming out in all directions “Come to school,” “It is time,” “Do not delay,” “Come to school.”  In response to the bell-calls the little prattlers and toddlers were hurrying along to school.  Their big sisters, with “jerks and snatches,” frequently called out, “Now, then, come along; we shall be too late; singing will be over, and if it is I’ll tell your mother.”

At Victoria Park Station the platelayers were at work, and when I inquired the cause, I was told that the Queen’s 


carriages were to pass over the line to Loughton at eleven o’clock “to try the metals,” and to see that the platform was back enough to allow sufficient space for the footboards of the royal carriages.  In some cases there was not sufficient space, and the line had to be swung a little to enable the carriages to pass.

At Stratford I had a few minutes to wait, and a little conversation with the stationmaster soon satisfied me that he was an observing and common-sense Christian, with a kind heart and good wishes for the poor gipsy children.

I arrived at Loughton in time to join in the morning service conducted by the Wesleyans in a neat iron chapel.  The service was good, plain, and homely, and as such I enjoyed it.  Of course, being a stranger in “these parts,” I was eyed o’er with “wondering curiosity.”  In the chapel there was a tall old man who sat and stood pensively, with his head bending low, during the services, and whom, without much hesitation, I set down as a gipsy.  He did not seem to enjoy the service.  On inquiry afterwards, I found that my surmise was correct, and that the tall man was a gipsy Smith, of some seventy winters, who was born under a tent upon Epping Forest, amongst the brambles, furze, and heather, with the clouds for a shelter from the sun’s fierce rays in summer, and the slender tent covering, with the dying embers of a stick fire, to keep body and soul together in the midst of the wintry blasts, drifting hail, snow, and sleet, and keen biting frosts to “nip the toes.”

After climbing the steep and rugged hill, I made my way to find out a cocoa-nut gambler, who once gave me an invitation to call upon him when I happened to pass that way.  With much ado and many inquiries I found the man and his wife just preparing to go with a donkey and a heavy load of nuts to some secluded spot a few miles away, to “pick up a little money” for their “wittles.”  My visit having ended in moonshine, I now began in earnest to 


hunt up the gipsies.  A few minutes’ wandering among the bushes and by-lanes brought me upon a group of half-starved, dirty, half-naked, lost little gipsy children, who were carrying sticks to their wretched dwellings, which were nothing better than horribly stinking, sickening, muddy wigwams.

On making my way through mud and sink-gutter filth, almost over “boot-tops,” I came upon a duelling which, were I to live to the age of Methuselah, I could never forget.

Sitting upon an old three-legged chair, and with a bottom composed of old rags, cord, and broken rushes, was a bulky, dirty, greasy, idle-looking fellow, who might never have been washed in his life.  I put a few questions to him about the weather and other trifling matters; but the answers I got from him were such that I could not understand.  To “roker” Romany was a thing he could not do.  Mumble and grumble were his scholastic attainments.

At the door stood a poor, old, worn-out pony, which they said was as “dodgy and crafty as any human being.  It was a capital animal in a cart, but would not run at fairs with children on its back.  Immediately you put a child upon its back it stood like a rock, and the devil could not move it.”

In the room were five children as ragged as wild goats, as filthy as pigs, and quite as ignorant.  On an old “squab bed”—the only bed in the room—sat a big, fat, aged gipsy woman, on a par with the man and children.  A young gipsy of about eighteen years stood at the bottom of the squab bed enjoying his Sunday dinner.  In one hand he held the dirty plate, and the other had to do duty in place of a knife and fork.  Of what the dinner was composed I could not imagine.  It seemed to be a kind of mixture between meat, soup, fish, broth, roast and 


fry, thickened with bones and flavoured with snails and bread.  Upon a very rickety stool sat a girl with a dirty bare bosom suckling a poor emaciated baby, whose father nobody seemed to know—and, if report be true, the less that is said about paternity the better.  In this one little hole, with a boarded floor, covered with dirt and mud at least half an inch thick, one bed teeming with vermin, which I saw with my own eyes, and walls covered with greasy grime, there were a man, woman, girl, young man, and five children, huddling together on a Christian Sabbath, in Christian England, within a stone’s throw of a Christian Church and the Church of England day and Sunday school.  None of them had ever been in a day or Sunday school or place of worship in their lives.  They were as truly heathens as the most heathenish in the world, and as black as the blackest beings I have ever seen.  The only godly ray manifest in this dark abode was that of gratitude and thankfulness.  A pleasing trait is this.  It was a vein embedded in their nature that only required the touch of sympathy, brotherhood, and kindness to light up the lives of these poor lost creatures living in darkness.  Natural beauty I saw none inside; but the marks of sin were everywhere manifest.  Just outside this miserable hive, notwithstanding the stench, the bees were buzzing about seeking in vain for honey, the butterflies were winging fruitlessly about trying to find flowers to settle upon; and across the beautiful forest valley the cuckoo was among the trees piping forth its ever beautiful, lovely, enchanting, and never-tiring “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo,” “cuck-coo;” throstles, linnets, blackbirds, and woodpeckers were hopping about from tree to tree within a stone’s throw, sending forth heavenly strains, echoing and re-echoing in the distance among the wood foliage on this bright spring Sunday afternoon.  I could almost hear with Dr. 


James Hamilton, in his “Pearl of Parables” (Sunday at Home, 1878), a poor gipsy girl singing with tears in her eyes—

“Some angel in the land of love

   For love should pity me,

And draw me in like Noah’s dove

   From wastes of misery.”

The lark echoes in the air—

“But I would seek on earth below

   A space for heaven to win,

To cheer one heart bowed down by woe,

   To save one soul from sin.”