To drive successfully along the crooked and zigzag lanes of life, time and space must be taken to go round the corners. Fools can drive along a straight level, but it takes a wise man to round the down-hill corners without a spill over.
Gilt and crested harness does not improve the quality of a poor emaciated, bony, half-starved horse; so in like manner a few Oxford and Cambridge gilt touches put upon a sensual, backwood gipsy romantic tale, will not improve the condition of our gipsies and their children.
My wandering meditation being over, I now drew myself up to a gipsy “grand stand.” To all sensible, good men it appears as a horrible fall rather than the “grand stand.” Thousands of young men and women, trained by Christian, godly parents, have been brought to ruin by its rotten foundation and evil associations. It is a “stand” from which men and women can see—if they will open their eyes—the wrath of God, the roads to destruction, and the “course” to hell.
My first salutation was from three big grizzly poachers’ snaps, a kind of cross between a bloodhound, greyhound, and a bulldog, that lay at the entrance of a wigwam, in which lay a burly fellow marked with small-pox, and whose hair was close shaven off his head and from round his coarse, thick neck. This specimen of an English gipsy possessed a puggish kind of nose, a large mouth, and his clothes seemed “greasy and shiny.” The woman looked an intelligent, strong kind of woman, and well fitted, to all appearance, for a better life. Round a tin pot upon the greensward there were three other gipsy tramps, kneeling and gnawing meat off a bone like dogs, with bread by their sides. They did not growl like dogs, but they showed me their teeth and muttered, and this was quite sufficient. The occupation of this gang seemed to be that of attending to a cocoa-nut establishment, the profits of which, during the races, they had travelled from London by road in three days to secure. To me it appeared all were fish that came to their net; and if they did not come of their own accord, they would not think twice before fetching them. This gipsy wigwam was the kitchen, drawing-room, dining-room, bedroom, &c., for four men, one woman, and two big girls, not one of whom could read and write. The only little gleam of light which shone from the conversation in this dark abode was when they referred to some gipsies, who, they said, had been “putting on a pretence of religion in order to fill their pocket,” and they knew one who “saved over £800 since he had been religious.” “If I must be religious, I would be religious, and no mistake about it,” said another. At this they began to swear fearfully. I mentioned several gipsies who had given up their old habits, and, as I told them, had begun to lead better lives. “Never,” they said, with a vengeance; to which I answered, “By their fruits shall ye know them.” I then shook hands, and wended my way to the next establishment. This was an old cart covered over entirely with calico from the ridge to the ground. Connected with this van there were two men and a boy, who, it seems, are novices at the cocoa-nut profession. To me it appeared that they were tired of the hard work and tightness of town life, and were trying their fortune at gipsying and idle-mongering. On the course there would be nearly twenty cocoa-nut “saloons.” Connected with three of the vans on the course there were sixteen children and eight men and women, only one of whom could read and write. In one of the three vans there was a poor little girl of about nine summers evidently in the last stage of consumption. Her cheeks were sunken, shallow, and pale; her fingers were long and thin; her eyes glassy bright, and black hair hung in tangled masses over her shoulders. I gave the poor girl a penny as she stood at the door of the filthy van, for which, with much effort she said, “Thank you, sir,” and sat down on the floor. I said to the mother, formerly a Smith, but now a G—, “Why don’t you get the poor child attended to?” She replied as follows: “Well, sir, gipsy children have much more to put up with now than they formerly had. They cannot half stand the cold and damp we used to do. They are always catching cold. I only bought a bottle of medicine this morning for which I paid half a crown, and I cannot be expected to do more. She has been staying some time with her grandmother at Bristol, but we did not like leaving her there in case anything happened to her. If she is to die, we gipsies like our children to die in the van or tent with us, as may be. We like to see the last of them. We have hard times of it, we poor women and children have, I can assure you, sir.” The woman had now begun to do some washing in earnest, not before it was needed, and while she was scrubbing away at the rags in a tin pail, she began to tell me some of her history and that of her grandfather. She said that her mother had “had fifteen children, all born under the hedge-bottom, nearly all of whom are alive.” I asked her if any of her family could read and write, and she said, “No, excepting the poor little girl you see, and she can read and write a little, having been to a day school in Bristol for a few weeks last winter. I wish they could read and write, sir, it would be a blessed thing if they could.” She now referred to her grandfather. At this her eyes brightened up. She said, “My grandfather was a soldier in the Queen’s service”—the poor gipsy woman did not understand history so well as cooking hedgehogs in a patter of clay—“and fought in the battle when Lord Nelson was killed. And do you know, sir, after Lord Nelson was killed, he was put into a cask of rum to be preserved, while he was brought to England to be buried; and I dare say that you will not believe me—my grandfather was one of those who had charge of the body; but he got drunk on some of the rum in which Lord Nelson was pickled, and he was always fond of talking about it to his dying day.” I said, “Do you like rum.” “Yes, we poor gipsies could live upon rum and ‘’bacca.’” In the van in which the poor gipsy child and its mother lived there were a man, a baby a few weeks old, and four other children, huddling together night and day in a most demoralizing and degrading condition. While standing by the side of this tumble-down van I found that vans and tents, in which people eat, live, sleep, and die, are put to other shocking, filthy, and sickening purposes during fairs and races than habitations for human beings to dwell in. Sanitary officers, moralists, and Christians must be asleep all over the country. In going by and round one van I noticed an old woman storming away at some children with an amount of temper and earnestness that almost frightened me. Immediately I arrived at the door, and almost before I could say “Jack Robinson,” she dropped down into a position with which miners and gipsies are so familiarly accustomed, and began to tremble, shed “crocodile tears,” and tell a pitiful tale of the sorrows and troubles of her life, intermixing it with “my dear sirs,” “good mans,” “God bless yous.” Every now and then she would look up to heaven, and present a picture of the most saintly woman upon earth. When I asked her how old she was, she said she was a long way over seventy, but could not tell me exactly. She further said that she had had sixteen children, all born under the hedge-bottom, nearly all of them gipsies up and down the country, some of whom were grandmothers and grandfathers at the present time. And then she would begin another pitiful tale as follows, “If you please, my good sir, will you give me a copper, I do assure you that I have not tasted anything to eat this day, and I am almost famished with hunger.” And then with trembling emotion she said, wringing her hands, “I shall die before morning.” After my visits to the other vans, and before going home, I turned unexpectedly to have another peep at the old gipsy woman, whom I found to be a long way off dying, and in all probability I shall see her again before she passes over to the great eternity.
Among the rest, sitting upon a low stool and drinking beer, there was a big, bony, coarse Frenchman, whom I found out to be a Communist. He was ostensibly selling calico, lace, and other trifles. His eyes were fiery, mouth ugly, on account of its having been put to foul purposes, and his demeanour that of an excited Fenian maddened by revenge and murder. Round him were a number of poor ignorant folks who could neither read nor write, and as they listened to his lies and infamy about the clergy, ministers, the well-to-do tradesmen, professional gentlemen, noblemen, and royalty, they opened their eyes and mouths as if horrified at his words and actions. Among other things he said the clergy of the Church of England were in receipt of over £20,000,000 per annum out of the pockets of the poor. I questioned him as to the source from which it came, and if he could point out the items in the Budget. At this he began to get excited and said, “It came from direct and indirect taxes.” I said, “Can you give me one instance or give me particulars in any shape setting forth the direct taxes in this country collected for the benefit of the clergy to the amount you say?” Instead of replying to this question he began to stutter and stammer, and appeared before me with his fists shut, exhibiting all sorts of mountebank megrims to the terror of some of the listeners and amusement of others. In the end I calmed him down, and he asked me if I would buy a parrot of him if I saw him again in two years’ time. One of those who stood by said, “He has got parrots enough of his own without buying more.”
Connected with one of the cocoa-nut establishments, and owned by a good-hearted gipsy from London, there were the clowns, fools, hunchbacked old women, and other simpletons to catch the “foolish and the gay.” At the back of this establishment there were all sorts of painted devices, or I should rather say “daubed” devices, upon the sheets, full of satire which the fools with plenty of money could not read. One was a barber shaving his customers; another was a donkey, after he had been well fed, turning his heels towards his silly friends and kicking them in the face and sending them sprawling upon the ground with their pockets empty; and many others with the flags of “Old England” flying in all directions. I learned some time after that the owner of this establishment during the two days’ races cleared nearly twenty pounds out of fools and cocoa-nuts, giving thousands of young folks of both sexes a taste for gambling, and then clearing off to London with smiles and chuckles, and his poaching dogs at his heels, leaving his customers to say the next morning, “What fools we have been, to be sure!” If I had been at the door of their bedroom I should have bawled out, “No greater fools in existence could possibly be. When you went upon the race-course you had money if you had not any sense; this morning you have neither money nor sense, and now you are neither more nor less than a third of a shrivelled-up sausage without any seasoning in your nature, unsuitable for pickling and not worth cooking, fit for nothing but the dunghill, and food for cats and dogs.” I now took another stroll amongst the gipsies at the other end of the “course,” and came up against one who owned the “steam-flying dobby-horses;” but before I began to chat with him one of the gipsy women whispered in my ear, “It is his wife that has made him; she is very good-looking and one of the best women in the world; no one can tell why it was that she took up with the man as his second wife. He would not have been worth twopence had it not been for her. She is a rare good un, an’ no mistake. You must not tell him that I say so. She sees to all the business and he dotes over her. He is not a bad sort of a chap.” I soon began to chat with the “dobby-horse” owner, and he was not long before he began to tell me of his cleverness and what he had passed through, as follows: “You see, sir, a few years ago I had to borrow three shillings and sixpence to help me to get away from this town, now I’ve turned the tide and got at the top of the hill. These ‘shooting galleries,’ ‘dobby-horses,’ ‘flying boxes,’ vans, and waggons are my own.” Pointing with his finger to a new van, he said, “I made that myself last winter, and have done all the painting upon the ‘horses’ myself.” The steam organ, the steam whistle, the shouting, screaming, and hurrahing, and his face having been in the wars, made it difficult for me to hear him. He now spoke out louder and referred to family affairs and some of his early history. “I left Bagworth when I was a lad, owing to the cruel treatment of a stepmother, and wandered up and down the country in rags and barefooted, sleeping in barns, and houses, and piggeries, and other places I could creep into; and in course of time I fell in with the gipsies and married one. But she was a wretch; oh! she was a bad un, and I was glad when she died. I am thankful I have got a better one now. She is a good un; but I must not say anything about her, we get on well together, and she keeps me straight.” “Bang bang” and “crack crack” went the bullets out of the rifle guns close to our ears, against the metal plates, through a long sheet iron funnel of about twelve inches diameter. “Now then,” cried out a little sharp, dark-eyed, nimble woman of about thirty-five years—of course upon this point I had no means of knowing or guessing exactly; I had not examined her teeth. She might say she was only twenty-eight, a favourite age with some maids looking out for husbands—“be quick and rub out the marks upon the plate.” And away the old man trotted at his wife’s bidding, as all good husbands who are not capable of being masters should do. A “slap” and a “dash” with the old gipsy’s brush, and all the “pops” were for over obliterated. What a blessed thing it would be for themselves and future generations if all the sins committed upon the racecourse that day could have been wiped out as easily. Why not?
Upon the “course” there were, at a very rough calculation, nearly fifty families of gipsies in vans, tents, and carts, in which vans, tents, &c., there lived over a hundred and fifty children and one hundred men and women sleeping inside and huddling together with their eyes open, like rabbits at the bottom of a flour cask, when no other eye sees them but God’s. While the jockeys were riding to death upon classical horses with the devil at their heels, to a place where, as Dr. Grosart says in the Sunday at Home, “The surges of wrath crash on the shores infernal,” I mused, pondered, and then wended my way home for meditation and reflection, and, as a writer in the Churchman’s Penny Magazine says—
“We take Thy providence and word
As landmarks on our way.”