The University of Hertfordshire Press has been remarkable and highly commendable in recent years for the books it has published on European gypsy-traveller life and history, and this work is a fine, illuminating yet very unique example. It tells of the life of a Romani Gypsy woman born in Somerset in 1941. It is written as an autobiographical memoir, with narrated relived episodes which frequently involve remembered or recreated speech. The result is a vivid, lively presentation of experience, conveying character and dialect, with memory forming itself in and out of speech, as if by gypsy fires, as she tells her story.
It is remarkable for the seemingly unselfconscious ways in which it quietly undercuts many critical stereotypes about gypsies. For example, her mother ‘washed us several times a day’, a point that is reiterated: ‘me mam would've washed us to death’. Ideas about cleanliness and dirt, stressed as pivotal features of the culture by gypsy scholars like Judith Okely, are much illuminated here, largely confirming criteria affecting gypsy-gorgio (non-gypsy) divisions. Rabbits ‘in milk’, for example ‘are considered dirty’, and so not fit for the pot at times of the year when they are nurturing their offspring, an intriguing example of mochardi in practice. A gypsy boy retaliates against the insult of ‘dirty little Gypsies’ by yelling back at the gorgio children: ‘You lot is dirty, and you stink’.
What are most revealing are the accounts of the various forms that persecution took. The book is extremely telling on gypsies being moved on by the police, on educational prejudice and harassment of gypsy children at schools, with smaller details of persecution such as people setting their dogs on gypsies. There are many memorable cameos of a gypsy life that is, or was, often lived ambiguously on cultural borderlands. I especially liked the mention of gypsies fixing up their wireless sets and trying to ascertain the time correctly so as to listen to The Archers. The close-knit nature of the gypsies emerges strongly as, despite some tensions, a wider traversing ‘community’, with their forms of roadside communication and signs, the associations of roadside places, the importance of reputation, the culture of domestic and work singing, the care for the elderly and the return to old stopping places on behalf of the sick or dying, followed by the elaboration and respect of the gypsy funeral.
The book is fascinating too on gender relations. There was the male culture of horses from which women and children were excluded, or the money saved by women while ‘letting their men think they were the big “I Am”’. The author resolved not to marry a gypsy man, having seen the black eyes of women around her. So she married ‘a gorgie mush from Bristol’. ‘Me dad went wild . . . and refused to sign the marriage form. . .so I signed his name instead’. The author stresses that ‘My identity was me own’, and traveller boys could not subdue her. The impression is given that this was unusual for her generation. Yet it raises interesting issues about the influence of a wider external feminism affecting British gypsy life, the ways in which such changing attitudes may have impinged on gypsy identities and family lives, and how control over women related to gypsy distinctiveness and cultural self-preservation.
The book is also vivid in its documentation of agricultural work done by gypsies: hop-picking, pea- and bean-picking, and the like. ‘Many of us were born out on the pea fields. I was born on the pea field at Thurloxton’. The use of commons as stopping points is much discussed, to the extent that the reader might come to think of such commons as acting like cultural stepping stones through gorgio preserves. Or there is the place-name evidence bearing upon local gypsy usage, which I think deserves separate analysis by place-name specialists. For those place-names were one way in which host societies seem to have accepted gypsy existence, as well as by the adoption of certain gypsy words – bosh, lurcher, dosser, etc – or gorgio agricultural and other economic needs for the gypsy in the interstices of capitalist practice. The book is well illustrated, with photographs that repay close scrutiny, and some of the pictures show gypsies working in the fields or engaging in tasks like holly wreath making. Other important events like funerals are discussed in detail and are also photographically depicted.
A short review cannot do justice to the full richness and suggestiveness of this work and its wealth of cultural insights and meanings. It discusses gypsy rights and problems with council authorities. It contains valuable sections on culture and customs, Romani cooking, traditional crafts, wagon songs, and common Romani words. This is a vivid portrait of traveller life during a period of crucial transformation and some think absorption for the gypsies, and as such it is a most important and highly readable addition to the documentation of these people.
