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.”