He has been brought out to sit a little while in the sunshine. The poor fellow has, I ascertain, taken his discharge from the infirmary a few days previously. He wants to die at home—at home in Jetsam Street!
The picture I have had so far to draw is a painful one and a squalid one. But it is typical of the neighbourhood, and could not be omitted if in these travels off the track I am to give a faithful account of the London that is so little known even to Londoners.
Let us hasten through the sordid streets, looking up at the blue skies and ignoring the squalid houses, and make our way to a more romantic spot.
"The Potteries!" How odd this description of a portion of Kensington sounds, yet the district we are now in is known by this name, and yonder is what remains of the kiln.
Here in the Potteries the spell of the old romance still lingers, for this is the district of the gipsies. In front of it is the pleasant recreation-ground, Avondale Park, which the County Council has made beautiful for the children of the Dale, and just round the corner is hidden a space where, year after year, the gipsies came with their vans and encamped for the winter. And close at hand are cottages and gardens, to which ducks and geese give quite a rural appearance.
"THERE ARE ONE OR TWO VANS LEFT TO MARK THE SPOT."
The gipsies are not here this winter, but there are one or two vans left to mark the spot where, until quite recently, the sons and daughters of Egypt pitched their "tans" in the heart of fashionable Kensington. Some of them, yielding to the force of such modern ideas as the sanitary inspector and the School Board officer, have given up the fight for existence in a dwelling-van and have gone to live under a roof like the gorgios, though a gipsy of the true Romany blood believes that nothing but ill-luck will attend the Romany chal or the Romany chi who lives in a house.
To-day the children of the gipsies are, many of them, in the Notting Dale Board School and the fathers and mothers are in the lodging-houses. One of the wanderers, who in the old times used to pitch on the vacant ground of the Potteries, so far fell into Gentile ways as to take a lodging-house and run it himself. He and his wife became noted characters in the Dale, and when he died a little time ago the gipsies came from far and near and gave him a genuine Romany funeral, with all the ancient rites and ceremonies of the great Pali tribe who wandered out of India long centuries ago and gave the word "pal" to our language to signify brother.
Though the gipsy camp has departed and the ground will know it no more, the surroundings are still suggestive of the old days. Hard by a dwelling-van left, like the rose of the poet, blooming alone is the shed of a chair-caner, a handsome, prosperous-looking man, who is working in the open and singing at his congenial task. The battered carts, the old chains, the broken wheels, the pigeon lofts, and the wooden sheds standing on a patch of waste ground remind you of the pictures you were given to copy at school when you were in the drawing-class. If there had only been a mill handy the resemblance would have been complete, but the chimney of the old kiln dominates the scene and takes the mill's place.