[Picture: Gipsy quarters, Plaistow marshes]
The winter drives many of the gipsies to encamp in the marshes, or in the disused brickfields near London. Anything more dismal and wretched than this life it is hard to think of. All the poetry of gipsying is clean gone then, and nothing is left but filth, poverty, vice, and misery. In Hackney Marshes and elsewhere about London you may find scores of these tents, often so rotten that a stiff wind would blow them away. Creeping into one of them, almost on all fours, you find half-naked gipsy children squatting upon the ground, busy at skewer-cutting, for which they get from tenpence to one shilling for fourteen pounds’ weight. Or else the family is at work in the more elaborate processes of making clothes-pegs. One chops sticks the right length; another trims them into shape and flings them into a pan of hot water; a child picks out the floating pieces and bites off the bark; and then a bigger lad fastens the two together with a strip of tin, and the clothes-peg is ready. So the dreary day goes by until the lurcher dog springs up, the unfailing attendant of the gipsy man, and the women of the family return with the scraps they have picked up in questionable ways at back doors, and with the proceeds of their sales. At night all lie down where they have worked, and sleep as they are, with but a rag between them and the bleak night of pitiless rain and snow. Here the gipsy children are born and brought up. Here they live and here they die, almost as far away from the track of any day-school or Sunday-school as if they were African savages.
The poor wandering outcast gipsy child can say with Phineas Fletcher in the “Fuller Worthies”—
“See, Lord, see, I am dead; Tomb’d in myself, myself my grave: A drudge, so born, so bred, Myself, even to myself, a slave.”
“Ask’st Thou no beauty but to cleanse and clothe me? If, then, Thou lik’st, put forth Thy hand and take me.”
Two years ago I attended a village feast in the neighbourhood of Bedford, and found, as usual, a large gathering of gipsies and others of a similar class plying their avocation among the “knock’em downs,” “three shies a penny,” &c. On arriving at the place I found “a gipsy row upon the carpet,” and on going up to one of the gipsies to ask him what it was all about, a gipsy some fifty yards off, more like a madman than anything else, began to bawl out all sorts of hard things, and in doing so other gipsies began to cluster round us, and to all appearance I seemed to be in a fair way for being in the midst of a “Welsh fight.” So I said to the gipsy who was standing by me, “I’ll go to see what he wants.” “If you do,” the gipsy replied, “he will knock you down.” I said, “Then I will go to be knocked down,” and away I went, and while I was going along the mad gipsy was literally foaming with rage, and uttering oaths and curses on my head not quite as thick as hailstones. On arriving before his majesty I began to smile at him, and said as I put out my hand to him, “Will you shake hands?” At this he drew back a little, and said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Lend me your hand.” He again said, with more emphasis than before, “What do you mean?” Ultimately he put out his hand into mine, and the result was nothing would please him and the other gipsies but that we must drink some ginger-beer together. And while this was going on a gipsy from Barking Road, London, whom I had seen before, whispered in his ear who I was, and that I was trying to get their children educated. So nothing would serve them but to explain in a public-house bar how the education of the gipsy children was to be brought about, which plan seemed to please them amazingly; and at the end of my tale they again closed in upon me, but this time to thank and bless me. The foremost in doing so was the mad gipsy whom I faced in the storm, saying, as he shook hands with both hands in a rough fashion, “I do love you, that I do, for taking so much trouble over our children.” After similar greetings from the others we parted. Only one out of the large number of gipsies there could read and write, and he had taken to gipsying from the boarding-school at the age of seventeen, and, sad to say, neither his wife nor one of their eight children could tell a letter; and he further said that he was sure there was not one gipsy in a hundred who could read a sentence. To the gipsies I would say with a writer in _Hand and Heart_, Ah!