“Mine’s a lonely life, and what would become of me I don’t know, if I hadn’t some kind delations living in this gav” (town).
As I stepped out into the narrow yard, a bright moon silvered the battered door and the little crisscross window of Old Coralina’s abode, and, walking along a crooked street, I thought of the strange life of the woman I had just left, an existence in which dreams and visions passed for realities.
In the same town lived another aged Gypsy, Eldi Boswell, whose days were chiefly spent on a couch-bed smoking and dreaming. Too decrepit to leave her cottage, she loved to bask in the glow of the fire, and I recall no more picturesque Gypsy figure than Old Eldi, with her furrowed face and her long, dark ringlets straggling out from beneath a once gorgeous diklo. It was easy to see that she had been a beauty in her time, and in confidential moments she would say that in her young days she had often been taken for her cousin, Sanspirela Heron (the lovely wife of Ambrose Smith), whose forename was (in Lavengro) changed by Borrow to Pakomovna. Certainly one could not help being struck by Old Eldi’s large eyes. Much has been written about the peculiarity of the Gypsy eye, Borrow and Leland in particular having enlarged upon this topic. Not of a soft, steady hue like that of a pool in the moorland peat, it is a changeful eye of glittering black endowed with a strange penetrative quality.
Born about the year 1820 at Susworth, a hamlet on the Lincolnshire bank of the Trent, Eldi remembered not only the names, but a host of tales in which bygone Gypsies played a part.
My father, a schoolmate of Thomas Miller at Gainsborough on the Trent, used to speak of the riverside Gypsies whom Miller presents in his writings: e.g. in Gideon Giles the Roper he gives pictures of the Boswells, who were probably some of Old Eldi’s folk.
For instance, if I had been reading in Borrow’s Gypsy Word-Book about that famous old rascal, Ryley Boswell, I would say to Eldi—
“Did you ever know Old Ryley?”
“Sartinly, I minds him well enough. ‘Gentleman’ Ryley, they used to call him. He was a tinker, like the rest of our mushaw (men), but he wouldn’t carry his creel (grinding-outfit) on his back like other people. He must have it on a little cart, and a pony to draw it.”
“Is it true that he had more than one wife living with him at the same time?”