George Borrow: The Man and his Work

“What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?” . . . “There’s night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there’s likewise a wind on the heath.  Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?”

The speakers were two young men, met casually on breezy Household Heath outside the city of Norwich; the time towards sunset on a fine evening; the year at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  The tall young Englishman who questioned and the lithe swart gypsy who answered were friends of some years’ standing, but of infrequent intercourse.  The one, with an absorbing curiosity in all things rare and strange, especially in rare and strange dialects and languages, the other, with a gypsy’s agile, half-developed intellect and pagan philosophy, had a common bond in their love of The Wild and their passion for pugilism and horse-dealing.

The quality of this friendship was peculiar, but not more remarkable than the manner of its origin.  Norman Cross, on the North Road, is a lonely place, remote from the trafficking of the world, peopled mainly now by ghosts.  In the year 1810 it was the home of several thousands of sorrowful men.  There was enacted the sequel of many an incident in the world-tragedy of the Great Conflict, for on that solitary cross-road the Government had built sixteen prisons to hold six thousand Frenchmen, human spoil of war, and fenced them round with a palisade.  Outside were barracks for the militia who guarded the prisoners and captives, and wooden houses for the officers who commanded the militia.  It was a fantastic environment for an episode which determined the career and directed the effort of such genius as was latent in a boy of seven.

In one of the wooden huts on the roadside dwelt Captain Thomas Borrow, a Cornishman, adjutant of the West Norfolk Militia.  With him were his wife, formerly Ann Perfrement, the descendant of Huguenot refugees, and their two sons, John, aged ten, and George, aged seven.  The younger boy, even at that age, was fond of self-communion, of solitary wandering; shy of normal relations with his fellows and prone to scrape acquaintance with the oddest people he could find.  He absorbed impressions readily; he never forgot what he saw or heard.  He observed how the unhappy prisoners earned some scanty comforts by straw-plaiting; his dark face was often lit up by the light of the bonfires on which callous authority threw the dainty work of French fingers, prohibited and condemned because it interfered with the prosperity of the Bedfordshire straw industry.  He was one of the astonished listeners to the adventure of the French officer who hid himself in a refuse bin and was shot out of prison and collected by the scavengers.  He picked up the friendship of a snake-collector, who told him the tale of the King of the Vipers, and made him a present of a toothless snake, which thereafter he carried about in his bosom as a pet.

This companion of his lonely excursions was with him on the day when he strolled into a green lane where the gypsies had encamped.  With it he turned the tables on the pair of vagabonds who threatened to assault him and drown him in the toad pond for prying into their tents; and, for his supposititious occult power over a poisonous reptile, he was endowed by them with the title of “sapengro,” or snake-master.  Who had been, one moment before, a “young highwayman” and a “Bengui’s bantling” became a “precious little gentleman” and a “gorgeous angel” when the snake “stared upon his enemy with its glittering eyes”; and presently was introduced with ceremony to their son, a lad of thirteen, ruddy and roguish of face, with whom he swore eternal brotherhood.