I gave her another verse, but I could see tears in her eyes, which prevented her getting through it as well as she desired. She laid the fault to her being without spectacles. Her reading these lines touched her very much, and she became quite excited again, and jumped up and clutched hold of both of my hands and said, “Yer see, my good mon, if none o’ the t’other gipsies con read, I con, conner I? But I con do more than read, I con say a lot o’ the Bible off by heart. The Creeds, Church Catechism, Belief, and Sacraments, which I larnt by heart when I was a girl. I went to the Church Sunday School at Uttoxeter. Yer’ll see by that I have not allus been a gipsy. When I got married to my old mon I had to go a-gipsying wi’ him, and have never been in th’ church since. My name’s Bedman, of ‘Ucheter,’ and am well known.”
She knelt upon the grass again, and supped a little more of her strong tea. The number of Hinckley working people and gipsies was increasing, and up she jumped again, clutching both of my hands, after which she laid her hand in navvy fashion upon my shoulder, and began to repeat the Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God,” and on she went to the end in her fashion. After this she knelt down again and began with the Decalogue; “God spake these words and said, I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have none other gods but me,” and with a red face, and tears in her eyes, trembling with emotion, she sung in the usual chanting tone, “Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.” The old gipsy woman went on to the end, to which I responded, “Amen.” Some portions of the Litany were repeated, and then she struck off at a tangent into the Catechism, commencing with “What is your name? May Bedman. Who gave you that name? My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism, wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. What did your godfathers and godmothers then for you? They did promise and vow three things in my name. First, that I should renounce the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh. Secondly, that I should believe all the Articles of the Christian Faith. And thirdly, that I should keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of my life;” and then she sung out, “Amen.” “Ah!” said the old woman, “you see, my good master mon, I know a little, don’t I?” “Yes,” I said, “you know a little, and he that knoweth his Master’s will, and doeth it not, ‘shall be beaten with many stripes.’” “Yes,” said the old gipsy, “I do know my Master’s will, and I have not done it, and I’ve been beaten with many stripes during the last forty years, and here I am. Never mind, let bygones be bygones. ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.’” And I replied, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” “Yes, you are right, bless you,” said the old backsliding gipsy, and with wet knees and wet eyes she sang out again, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law,” to which I responded, “Amen.” I then left this penitent gipsy’s strong grips, the gipsy gang, and the number of lookers-on to go to my “quarters” for my breakfast. I then spent another half-hour with the Salvation Army. After a pleasant conversation with the clergyman at my lodgings, I started homeward, and on my way to the station I came upon one of my old gipsy families, who were just having their breakfast in a very filthy, tumbledown van, with their six poor ragged, dirty little children squatting about on the bottom of it. The good-hearted posh gipsy woman seemed to have lost all spirit in her struggles to live a respectable traveller’s life, and was now with her children in the depths of despair and poverty. She would insist on my having a cup of tea as I sat upon the doorstep. I could not drink all of it, but did the best I could under the circumstances. She persisted in pressing me to take a cocoa-nut and a sponge for my little folk at home, the cocoa-nut to eat and the sponge to clean their slates with.
It is from two adjoining villages in the neighbourhood of Hinckley that two of our present-day English tribes of gipsies spring. Many years ago the father of one tribe was a “stockinger”—i.e., one who makes stockings—and he conceived the idea that he would like to be a gipsy. Accordingly he set up a pedlar’s “basket of trifles” and began to stump the country. From this small beginning there are now between forty and fifty “real gipsies,” as some backwood gipsy writers—who would delight in seeing this country dragged backward into Druidism as a retaliation for their own failure in the battle of life—would call them. Poor little-souled mortals! they are to be pitied, or my feeling of disgust at their wrong-doing would lead me to say hard things about them. To be laughed out of school is a start bad enough in the wrong road in all conscience, without a severe probe from me. My pleasure would be to put out the hand to lead wrong-doers back to the wise counsel of a loving Christian father, the decalogue, and the teaching of Christ.
The success of the first gipsies in their “rounds” led the second lot to take up the “profession,” and to-day we have two full-blown tribes of English gipsies in full swing, tramping the country in vans, carts, surrounded in many instances with dogs, dirt, wretchedness, and misery. Sometimes they will be fraternizing with kisses, and other times they will be quarrelling and fighting with each other to the extent of almost “eating each other’s heads off.” In these two families there will be close upon one hundred and fifty men, women, and children, and not more than three or four out of the whole able to read and write a sentence. It is truly heartrending to contemplate the amount of evil that has been done in the country by these two families of artificially-trained gipsies. Thank God, some of them are beginning to see the error of their ways.
I bade the Hinckley gipsies good-bye, and having dined off a slice of bread-and-butter fetched out of the corner of my bag, at Nuneaton station, I made my way homeward. As I was mounting the last hill on this bright, lovely Christian Sabbath day the church bells were pealing forth—
“Come to church and pray
On this blessed day.”
Mr. George Burden, the Leicester poet, author of “The Months,” had heard something of the cry of the gipsy children when he was prompted to send me the following touching little poem:—
“THE GIPSY CHILDREN.
“From the remotest ages,
From many a lovely lane,
The cry of gipsy children
To heaven hath risen in vain.“Chorus. Then rescue gipsy children,
Who roam our country lanes.
Break off their moral thraldom,
That keeps each life in chains.“Through many a bitter hardship
Their little lives have passed;
Round them the robes of kindness
As yet have ne’er been cast.“From city, town, and village
They wander wild and free,
Too long despised, forsaken,
Amid their revelry.“No influence pure and heavenly
Protects them night and day;
Nor wise and blest instruction
To help them on their way.“From vice and shame and ruin,
That taint their early youth,
Ye English hearts deliver—
Shield them with love and truth.“One hastens to their rescue
With earnest heart and will;
God bless the noble mission
Of George Smith of Coalville!”
Rambles among the Gipsies, Posh Gipsies, and Gorgios at Long Buckby.
During the Sunday night after my visit to Hinckley I more than once thought that I was about to enter the great unknown and unseen world of Tátto paáni (spirits) from whence no choórodo (tramp) returns.