“But I would seek on earth below
A space for heaven to win,
To cheer one heart bowed down by woe,
To save one soul from sin.”
I left this hut, after taking a breath of fresh air, for another gipsy dwelling round the corner, picking my way among the masses of filth as well as I could. Here another sight, not quite so sickening, but equally heartrending, presented itself. A gipsy woman was squatting upon the filthy boards, the father was sitting upon a rickety old chair without any bottom in it; i.e., there were a few cords tied across which served to hold up one or two dirty rags, and these were sunk so low that any one sitting upon the chair could feel nothing but the rims, which were not at all comfortable. Round the man and woman were six children of all ages and sizes, partially dressed in filthy rags and old shoes, which seemed to have been picked out of the ashes upon Hackney Marshes, all of which were much too large for their little feet, and were stuffed with rags. One little girl had a pair of cast-off woman’s shoes, possessing little sole and almost less “uppers.”
The gipsy father was partially blind through having been in so many gipsy combats. A kick over the eyes had not only nearly blinded him, but as B. said, “I feel at times as if my senses were nearly gone. Thank the Lord, I can see best when the sun shines clear.” On my approaching nearer to where they were sitting the man got up and kindly offered me his chair, which I accepted, notwithstanding the disagreeable surroundings. On the walls of their dwelling pieces of pictures and old newspapers were pasted. There were parts of The British Workman, Band of Hope Review, Old Jonathan, The Cottager and Artizan, Churchman’s Almanack; in fact, they seemed to have upon the greasy walls a scrap of some of the pictorial publications published by the Wesleyans, Baptists, Church of England, the Unitarians, Congregationalists, the Religious Tract Society, Cassell, Sunday School Union, Haughton and Co., Partridge and Co., Dr. Barnardo, and others. I said to the poor man, “This is a very tumbledown old place.” “Yes,” he said, “people say that it has been built nine hundred years; and I believe it has, for the man who owns it now says he cannot remember it being built.” I said, “How old do you think the man is who owns it?” He answered, “Well, I should think that he is fifty, for he has great grand-children.” Their only table consisted of an old box, upon which, in a wicker basket, there were a young jay and a blackbird which the gipsy woman was trying to rear. As the young birds opened their beaks, almost wide enough to swallow each other, the woman kept thrusting into their mouths large pieces of stinking meat of some kind, about which I did not ask any particulars. These little gipsy attractions and observations being over, I began to inquire about things concerning their present and eternal welfare. I found on inquiry that the only food this family had had to live upon during the last two days had been a threepenny loaf and half an ounce of tea. When I asked them what they did for a living they could scarcely tell me. The man said, “I go out sometimes with a basket and a few oranges in it, and I picks up a bit of a living in this way. Some of the people are pretty good to me. As a rule we begs our clothes. Occasionally I catches a rabbit or picks up a hedgehog. If I can scrape together a shilling to buy oranges I generally manages pretty well for that day. Our firing does not cost us anything, and in summer-time the young uns picks up a lot of birds’ eggs out of the forest, which are very nice for them if they are not too far hatched.” Just at this juncture a practical demonstration took place as to how they dealt with the birds’ eggs. One of the boys, I should think of about seven years, came with a nest of blackbirds’ eggs—poor little fellow he was no doubt hungry, for he had had no Sunday dinner—which he placed into his mother’s hands. The mother was not long before she began to crack them, and into the children’s mouths they went, half hatched as they were, just as she fed the young jay. I really thought that one of the youngsters would have been choked by one of the half-hatched young blackbirds. With a little crushing, cramming, and tapping on the back the poor Sunday dinnerless gipsy child escaped the sad consequences I at one time feared would be the result. To see a woman forcing food of this description down a child’s throat is a sight I never want to see again. Hunger opens a mouth that turns sickening food into dainty morsels. None of these poor gipsy children had ever lisped a godly prayer or read a word in their lives. The father said he would be glad to send the children to school if they would be received there and they could go free. The whole of these children were born in a tent upon a bit of straw among the low bushes of Epping Forest. Some in the depth of severe winter, others in the midst of drenching rains, and even when the larks were singing overhead, with “roughish nurses and midwives” as attendants.
I found that this “gipsy-man” had been a Sunday-school scholar, but somehow or other—he did not seem desirous of saying how—he got among a gang of gipsies in early life. He left his praying mother for the life of a vagabond among tramps, with a relish for hedgehogs, snails, and diseased pork. He said he liked hedgehog-pie better than any other food in the world. “Two hedgehogs will make a good pie,” he said. He also said that he was once with a tribe of gipsy tramps, and he laid a wager that he “could make them all sick of hedgehogs.” They told him he could not. The result was he set off to a place he well knew in the neighbourhood and caught twenty-one hedgehogs. These were all cooked, some in clay and others turned into soup, and all the gipsies who ate them “were made sick, excepting an old woman of the name of Smith.”
He next told me how to cook snails, which he liked very much, and wished he had a dish before him then. The snails, he said, “were boiled, and then put in salt and water, after which they were boiled again, and then were ready for eating.” Feeling desirous of changing the subject, I reverted to his Sunday-school experience, and asked if he could remember anything he once read (he could not now read a sentence) or sung. All he could remember, he said, was “In my father’s house are many mansions,” and a bit of a song—
“Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again;
In heaven we part no more.
Oh! that will be joyful.”
My heart bled, and I felt that I could have wept tears of sorrow as I sat in the midst of this family of our present-day gipsies. In these two tumble-down wooden dwellings there were two men and three women and twelve children growing up in the densest ignorance, barbarism, and sin.
I gave the mother and children some money wherewith to buy some food, and I left them with gratitude beaming out of their dirty faces. In going down the hill, a couple of hundred yards from this hotbed of sin, iniquity, and wretchedness, I came upon a party of about one hundred and fifty beautifully dressed and happy Sunday-school children tripping along joyfully with their teachers by their side to an afternoon service in the church close by. I could almost imagine them to be singing as I looked into their cheery faces, and nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have sung out with them lustily—
“Merrily, merrily, onward we go.”