By The motorway cuts through it. It was always
a proper Cheshire country lane with
ditches and hedgerows of may and oak
but it remained an unpaved track subject
to the weathers. Travellers or Roma –
though ‘Gypsies’ or ‘Irish Tinkers’ we called them
then – with grass for their hirsute ponies,
their caravans obscured by the hedges
and their shy kids safe from the odd car,
would camp there. We would try to explore,
to find where it led, hoping for some mansion
occupied by GIs with their comics
and gum. But, each time we tried, one of the men,
the same one always – wiry, dark haired, sharp eyed –
would send us packing with a raised fist
and a curse. One summer, near dusk, we crept
as close as we dared. The man was seated,
on a stool, playing a guitar. Somewhere,
out of sight, a woman was singing.
We got a telling off, home after dark,
and my spinster aunt sang, unbidden,
‘I’m away wi’ the raggle taggle gypsy-o!’
I drive by what remains of the lane often
and always, out of the corner of my eye,
look – as if there were something to see
other than grass and weeds.
CheshireGIsguitargumGypsiesIrish Tinkersmotorwayromatravellers‘I'm away wi' the raggle taggle gypsy-o!’
Ian Craine
May 25, 2014This really takes me back. Apart from the quality of your work I can also enjoy reading of the shared locations of our youth. I too have been on such a walk. I know exactly what are you writing about though I might struggle a little to find that lane now. Somewhere above the Ring Road, somewhere beyond the Zoo.
Always the gypsies – though they roam the earth in a way we have stopped doing they, like us, are fiercely territorial when they stop somewhere for a while.
And the sense of exploration, the imagined mansion at the end- my mind drifts between images of Hoole Bank and Alain-Fournier’s magic reveries of childhood in “Le Grand Meaulnes”.
David Selzer
May 25, 2014Yes, you know the place. I would imagine it would be difficult to get to it on foot now – too many fields to cross and hedges to force one’s way through.
Yes, again, you know the place or places – Hoole Bank and ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’, the latter a favourite of both Sylvia and I, and one we studied for French A level a little time ago!