Sometimes unusual articles are laid on graves. Upon his boy’s grave, Bohemia Boswell deposited a little teapot from which the boy used to drink. Rodney Smith placed a breast-pin upon his mother’s grave in Norton churchyard.
Gypsies shrink from uttering the names of the dead. Fear of invoking the ghost underlies this ancient tabu. One of the Herons had a child named Chasey, who died, and now he never utters that name. He even invented a nickname for a friend bearing the name of Chasey, in order to avoid pronouncing the name of his own dead child.
One day, during conversation with Frampton Boswell, Groome asked—
“How did you get your name, Frampton; was it your father’s?”
“I can’t tell you that, but wait a minute.” And going to his mother’s caravan, he returned with a framed photograph of a gravestone.
“That was my poor father’s name, but I’ve never spoken it since the day he died.”
“He don’t want her to walk,” said my old friend, Frank Elliot, in explanation of a Gypsy’s reluctance to mention his dead sister’s name. A Gypsy boy was baptized Vyner Smith, but when his Uncle Vyner died, the boy was renamed Robert, because the name Vyner was too painful a reminder of the departed relation.
A death-omen among Gypsies is the cry of the “death-hawk” heard over a camp by night. A Gypsy once told me how two crows and two yellow pigeons flew to and fro over him in a town street in the early morning. By these signs he knew that his wife had died in the hospital, and so it proved.
Let me close this chapter with the passing of my old friend Jonathan Boswell. Not long ago tidings reached me that he had died in his travelling cart, in which I have spent some happy hours with him on the road. The last time I saw Jonathan alive he was seated by his fire on a little lonely common, and near him stood the old cart looking so very ramshackle that a gust of wind might almost have wrecked it. Among the tufted bog-rushes, the lambs were gambolling a few yards away. As I sat with him, my old friend talked of bygone jaunts we had taken together, and his grandson, who was present, recalled the day he once spent at our Rectory. With slow and feeble steps Jonathan walked with me to the edge of the common and waved his cap in farewell. I never saw him again. I like to think of the old man as, looking back, I saw him holding out his hand to fondle a lamb whose confidence he had won while camping on the common.
