Читать книгу The Gypsy's Parson: his experiences and adventures - George rector of Ruckland Lincolnshire Hall - Страница 4

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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.

In all the world it is hard to find the elusive Gypsy’s compeer. Whimsical as the wind, and brimful of mischief as an elf of the wilds, Sibby was to me the embodiment of bewitching mystery. From a hillock by the hedge I have watched her seize a skittish pony by the mane and, leaping astride its back, gallop madly along a lane, to return a few moments later, breathless and dishevelled. This was her frolicsome mood.

Never very far below the surface of the Gypsy nature lurks a feeling of disdain, waxing fierce at times towards everything and everybody outside the Romany world. To this mood the Gypsy life appears to be the only life worth living, and the Gypsy is the only real man in the world. All other ways and all alien folk are suspect. There were times therefore when Sibby’s eyes would pierce me through with arrows of detestation as though one had hailed from beneath the eaves of a constabulary. Yet the next day, every shred of this dark feeling would be flung to the winds, as under a scented may-bush the girl was romancing merrily or instructing me in the peculiar whistle giving warning of the approach of Velveteens or a policeman.

Is there in the whole bag of humanity, I wonder, a nut harder to crack than the Gypsy?

One afternoon in turning a corner sharply on my way home from school, it happened that I ran full tilt into Sibby Smith, and before I could say “Jack Robinson” I received such a blow on the mouth as sent me sprawling all my length on the road. There was, I suppose, something ludicrous in the sight of a prostrate boy with his legs in the air; so at least the girl seemed to think, for immediately she burst into laughter, and her merriment being ever of an infectious sort, I found myself laughing too, though inwardly I thought my punishment unmerited. A moment later, however, as I stood wiping the blood from my lips, the puzzle was explained. There in the dust lay a half-eaten, red-cheeked apple which the Gypsy had been munching when the shock of the collision sent it flying from her hand; hence the blow that descended upon me so swiftly. Nor after the lapse of nearly forty years have I forgotten the forceful stroke that laid me low on that autumn afternoon.

On stormy days, when the loud-lunged gusts made a fanfaronade in the chimney-stacks at home, it was my delight as a boy to seek the brow of the grassy escarpment overlooking our common, and at that time I knew nothing more glorious than a tussle with the wind roaring over the hilltop. Leaping on the springy turf, hatless and bare-armed, fighting a make-believe giant of sonorous voice, what high glee of spirit was mine!

In those days the escarpment boasted a row of windmills, old-fashioned structures, built partly of timber and partly of brick and stone, and loud was the whirring of sails thereabouts in a brisk wind. At the head of a cleft in the hillside, known as “Hobbler’s Hole,” was a mill which had fallen into desuetude, and its great sails, shattered by a tempest, lay in tangled heaps on the thistle-grown plot around the building. To the tall thistles, tufted with downy seed, came goldfinches, dainty little fellows, shy as fairies. Hitherward came also visitors of another kind, for, as might be expected, the unwritten invitation to such a harvest of firewood had duly spread to Gypsy Court. More than once in the twilight Sibby got me to help her in carrying off fragments of timber, and to a boy with Tiger Tom the Pirate secreted in the lining of his jacket, these small adventures were not without a tang of the picaresque. As time went on, the door in the basement of the mill and most of the window-frames were dragged piecemeal from their places to boil Gypsy kettles, but there still remained the massive ladder giving access to the dusty chambers wherein nestled the strangest of shadows. Every youngster who came to play in Hobbler’s Hole knew quite well that the mill was haunted. Readily enough we climbed the worm-eaten ladder in broad daylight, and scampered about the resounding floors, or sat at the frameless windows pelting bits of plaster at the jackdaws flitting to and fro, but to think of invading the mouldering mill in the dusk hour when hollow and common were visioned away into shadowy night was another matter. Ah, then the mill took on an eeriness befitting a very borderland of goblindom.

Picturing the crumbling ruin and the wrinkled declivity dipping below it towards the common, I recall how Snakey Smith said one day to me, “I likes to sit afore a fire on the ground. You don’t feel nothing like so lonesome as you keeps pushing sticks into the fire and watching ’em burn away.” The words aptly express a Gypsy’s joy in a fire for its own sake, regardless of utilitarian considerations. At the moment there may be no kettle waiting to be boiled, no black stockpot demanding to be slung on the crooked kettle-prop, yet, for the pure pleasure of the thing, a Gypsy will light a small pile of dead sticks, and, lounging near, will gaze wistfully at the spiral of thin, sweet smoke upcurling between the trees in the lane.

Without a doubt, if “you’s been a bit onlucky,” or, if your sky is cloudy with sorrow, there is solace in a fire, as in a folk-tale and in the voice of a violin. Did not Provost M‘Cormick, lawyer and lover of Gypsies, find his Border Tinklers, amid their brown tents and shaggy “cuddies,” reciting traditional tales to banish gloom? “Whenever he saw me dull he wad say, ‘Come on, Mary, and I’ll tell ye a fairy tale,’ and wi’ his gestures, girns, and granes, he wadna be lang till he had us a’ roarin’.”

A Gypsy who resided in a derelict railway carriage on a Cheshire common, having lost a dear child, refused to be comforted and even declined to take food. To his old fiddle he confided his grief, his body swaying to and fro as he drew forth plaintive airs from the strings.

Wandering one evening in cowslip-time below the decrepit windmill, I came to a stile in the hedge, and, passing into the lane, I found Sibby and Snakey heaping dead wood upon a fire on the margin of the common.

“There!” exclaimed the Gypsy girl, “I know’d somebody was a-thinking of me, ’cos my boots kept coming unlaced.”

“Well, well, you made me jump, baw (mate), you did,” put in her brother. “How did you jin we were akai?” (know we were here).

“See,” said I, “what a pother you are making. I caught a whiff of your smoke right on top of the hill.”

With that I dropped down beside the fire, and, yielding the soul to the witchery of red-gold flames dancing against the dark, it was easy enough to glide into the realm of Faerie. Sibby, who had been lying at full length before the fire, now gathered herself into a cross-legged posture, and, lapsing into meditation, sat twisting a black elf-lock round her forefinger. A touch of the “creepy” world seemed also to have fallen upon Snakey, for he lay in silence staring into the beyond as though he had sighted fairy faces peering between the brier sprays; or was it that the knotted tree-bole leaning from the hedge had begun to make grimaces? At last the boy awoke with a start. By his side lay a maiden ash-plant with numerous hearts and rings neatly cut on its green bark, and, whipping out a knife, he proceeded to add further touches to his kosht (stick). This led me to talk of my own achievement of that day in carving my initials on a beech tree not far from where we were sitting. Whereat Sibby remarked—

“Why, it was only last week that me and mother went in our cart past Dalton Brook, and we pulled up to look at the old tree what has dui vastaw (two hands) cut into it by Orferus Herren, and there they were right enough. It was his brother Evergreen who broke his neck by tumbling headlong into a stone-pit, wasn’t it, Snakey?”

“For sure it was, pen (sister), and our uncles Fennix and Euri were well-nigh killed the same way right up agen Scotland, as I’ve heard dad say times and agen.”

“How was that?” I asked.

Then followed Snakey’s story, which, as well as I remember, ran (in his own words) something like this—

“One night my uncles Fennix and Euri was crossing a moor among the mountains, a long way up into the North Country. They’d been sitting all the day in a kitshima (tavern) and at last they begins to think it were time to be marching to their stopping-place, some five miles away across the moor, a wery nasty country with deep pits and ponds in it. It was getting dark and the teeny stars were shining above the mountains. Well, my uncles made off with a deal of bustle at first along a beaten track, but after going a mile or two, down comes a fog—a clear thick ’un it was—and they soon got off the path and were lost. It looked like ’em having to besh avrí (lie out) all night, as poor Jacob did. Only my uncles didn’t see no silver ladder with angels dancing up and down on it, and mi dîri Duvel (God) sitting atop of it. But just as they were about dead beat after poddling up and down for I can’t tell you how long, they walked as nigh as nothing over the edge of a deep pit. It were a narrow shave, for they only managed to save theirselves by clutching at the bushes atop of the pit. Then what do you think, baw? They just turned round, and there afore ’em stood a terrible crittur rearing itself up and groaning loud. Their hearts was in their mouths. They thought their time had come.

“‘If that ain’t a mulo (ghost), my name’s not Fennix,’ whispered my uncle.

“‘Keka’ (No); ‘it’s the wery Beng (Devil) hisself,’ says Euri.

“And there they stands a-dithering like leaves, till at last my uncle Fennix pulls hisself together and walks on a yard or two, staring hard afore him, and weren’t Euri glad above a bit to hear his brother say in his nat’ral voice, ‘Come on, it’s nobbut a blessed dunnock (steer) after all.’ And with that the crittur kicked up its heels and galloped away, and by a bit of luck my uncles stumbled right on to a cartway as led ’em straight to the tents.”

Among Gypsies, when the tale-telling mood is on, story will follow story, often until drowsiness supervenes; for these folk dearly love a tale, and are themselves possessed of no small store of family legends and folk-narratives.

“Now, it’s your turn, sister. Let’s have that tale about Old Ruzlam Boz’ll’s boy.”

Without stopping for a moment to think, Sibby began to reel off what was evidently a well-known and favourite story, punctuating her sentences by picking from her gown and flinging at me sundry prickly balls of burdock seed, telling of what prowlings in the woods!

“It’s donkey’s ears (i.e. long years) since Ruzlam Boz’ll’s wife had a baby boy born’d in a tent near a spring what bubbled out betwixt two rocks, and every summer they used to besh (rest) by the same spring. By and by, when the dear little boy grew big enough, his mammy sent him every morning to fill the kettle. But one day he got a surprise. There on the grass by the spring what should he see but a new silver shilling. Of course he picked it up and put it into his pocket, and never said nothing about it when he got back to the tent. Next morning he found double the money at the spring-head, and so it went on until his pockets were chinking full of silver, and for all that he never breathed no word about his luck. But one day Old Ruzlam heard the boy rattling the money in his pockets, and forced him to tell where he got it from. Next morning the daddy went off, laughing to hisself and thinking of the nice heap of silver he was going to pick up, but after he had looked up and down and all over, he found just nothing at all, leastways he saw no money; but as he stood scratting his head, puzzled-like, there, on one side of the spring, he saw a dear little teeny old man, and on the other side a dear little teeny old woman, and, saying never a word, they stooped down and flung water right into Ruzlam’s eyes. So away he ran home, and there, if he didn’t find his boy had gone cross-eyed. What’s more, he never came right agen.”

Thus, by pleasant steps amid scenes not lacking in glamour, I advanced little by little in my knowledge of these fascinating straylings with whom no stranger ever yet found it easy to mingle as one of themselves.