In the tastefully ordered drawing-room I chatted with Miss Boss, whose Romany rippled melodiously. A piece of classical music stood open on the piano, and several recent novels lay scattered about. On her father’s return within a few moments, I caught the sound of a horse pawing impatiently outside, and presently I was seated with Jack Boss in a smart yellow gig behind a slim “blood” animal. As we drove through the town my companion pointed to a carriage-horse in passing: “Wafodu grai sî dova” (a trashy horse is that), and when I translated his words he chuckled merrily. “To think that you know that, and you don’t look a bit like a Gypsy. Not a drop of the blood in you, I should think. You puzzle me, you really do. Perhaps you’ve got it from books. I’ve heard of such works, but have never seen them. I suppose you priests can find it all in Latin somewhere? Now, to look at me you’d never think—would you?—that I’d been born in a little tent” (he bent his fingers in semblance of curved rods) “and had travelled on the roads. But that’s years ago, yet I like to think of those days. If they were rough times, we had plenty of fun. Don’t I remember going with my old dad to visit the Grays and Herons, Lovells and Stanleys, in their tents—real Gypsies if you like. You don’t often dik a tatsheno Romanitshel konaw” (see a true Gypsy nowadays). “It gave me a deal of pleasure the other day to meet Ike Heron in his low-crowned topper and Newmarket coat. One of the old standards is Ike. Perhaps you know him?”
By this time we were speeding between green hedgerows in the open country, and when at last we pulled up at a wayside hostelry, nothing would do but I must drink my Gypsy’s health. Then the horse’s head was turned for home. Romany topics being still to the fore, and having recently heard of the passing of George Smith of Coalville, I asked my companion if he had ever met the parent of the first “Moveable Dwellings’ Bill.”
“I can’t say that I ever crossed his path, and I don’t know that I particularly wanted to. His letters in the papers used to rile my people terribly. We weren’t quite so bad as he painted us. It was plain enough that he knew nothing of the real Romanies, nothing whatever. Why, his “gipsies” were nothing but the very poorest hedge-crawlers, with never a drop of our blood in their bodies. The man meant all right, very likely, but as for his methods—well, the less said about them the better.”
As we parted after tea at his garden gate, I wished my Gypsy kushto bok (good luck).
“A good thing that, Mr. Hall, and may we both have more of it.”
I retain very pleasant memories of that afternoon spent in the genial company of Mr. Jack Boss, whom I have since met several times at horse-fairs in different parts of the country.
It has fallen to my lot to know a number of Gypsies who have made their homes in our cities, and who, though moving in respectable circles, still retain the old secret tongue of the roads, as well as a marked spirit of detachment from most of the ideas of the people among whom they live. Pride of race remains. No matter how high he may climb, the pure Gypsy is proud of his birth and secretly despises all who are not of his blood. When talking of breezy commons, green woodsides, rabbits, pheasants, and the like, I have seen the eyes of a house-dwelling Gypsy grow wistful as he sighed at the visions and memories arising within him.
The sedentary Gypsies are now largely in the preponderance. Not that the tendency to settle is entirely a thing of our times. Fifty years ago, the Gypsy colony hard by my childhood’s home told of a movement not then by any means new. Twenty years earlier, did not Ambrose (Jasper) Smith say to Lavengro?—“There is no living for the poor people, the chokengris (police) pursue us from place to place, and the gorgios are becoming either so poor or miserly that they grudge our cattle a bite of grass by the wayside, and ourselves a yard of ground to light a fire upon.”
Many years prior to this complaint, the wholesale enclosing of the commons, the harassing attentions of the press-gang, the flooding of our roads by Irish vagrants, the barbaric administration of “justice,” and the pressure of the times generally, had caused many a Gypsy to adopt a sedentary life. Numbers of old-fashioned Romany families, finding life no longer tolerable in England, were allured to the colonies by glowing accounts received from migrated friends of the freedom and manifold opportunities for making a living across the sea. All along since those times it may be said that no year has passed without witnessing the settlement of many Gypsies.
Some of my happiest “finds” in the way of house-dwelling Gypsies were several aged members of the great Boswell clan, living in the town of Derby, and to them I owe many reminiscences of Gypsy life in bygone days. It was from Lincolnshire Romanitshels of the same clan-name that I had first learned of the Derby colony whose Gypsy denizens were so entertaining that if ever I found myself within a few miles of their Midland town I could in no way resist going to see them. It must have been many years since first they settled there, and yet they would talk of Lincolnshire as though they had quitted its highways and byways but yesterday. Moreover, these Boswells were related to some of Borrow’s originals, a fact which in my eyes lent no small glamour to these folk.