“Let me tell you how to cook ’em.
” ... first of all you pull off all the prickles one at a time with the pincers——”
“Don’t you take no notice o’ her,” broke in her sister; “she’s a-gettin’ at you; we don’t do nothin’ o’ the sort, we allus takes ’em to the nearest barber’s and gets ’em shaved.”
Good-natured banter of this description constituted a fair proportion of the talk that evening, although now and again conversation would take a more serious turn. Meanwhile, one of the little ones had fallen asleep in his mother’s arms, and she now proceeded to put him to bed; however, he awoke during the process and as I stood at the caravan door he suddenly sat bolt upright in bed, called out to me, “Goo’ night, mush,” then as suddenly snuggled down to sleep.
When the woman returned to the fireside, she showed me a Bible, which, she told me, she had carried about in the van for over twenty years, but could not read a word of it. She also produced a book entitled “The Traveller’s Guide,” a work issued by a colportage association; this was, of course, equally useless to her unless some one could be found who would read to her.
“If anybody starts readin’ to her,” said another of the company, “he’ll get tired of the job before she’s done enough listenin’; why, she’d stay up all night to have a book read to her.”
In connection with the reading of written or printed matter to gypsies, a curious fact has many times come under my notice:—
Those who are unable to read see nothing extraordinary in the possibility of recording, by means of written or printed characters, all the sounds of the English language; but that one should be able to write anything that may be spoken in the Romany tongue, and afterwards to read it so as to reproduce the original speech, nearly always occasions surprise.
I have often jotted down jingles, verses or quaint sayings by the simple method of phonetic spelling, and when, somewhat later, I have read aloud what I had written, considerable surprise has been evinced.