by Tim Pears
The boy rose and walked on but took only a few paces. He felt his head fill with a light wind. The hedge and the cornfield attempted to take to the air as birds did and wheeled about him, and the earth embraced him with a thumping hug.
*
‘Look, he’s took a hammerin.’
‘He’s a scrap of a lad.’
‘Aye, leave him.’
‘I’ll not leave him,’ said a quiet voice.
Waking, Leo kept his eyes closed. There were three of them, at least.
‘There’s nothin to him.’
‘No, he’s worth nothin.’
‘No,’ said the woman. ‘He’s not worth it. Leave him, George.’ She walked away.
‘He’s a scrap of a lad,’ said the quiet man. ‘I’ll not leave him.’
Leo waited for them to go away and let him be.
‘He’s near dead as dammit,’ said the older man. He walked away, following after the woman. ‘Leave him, George,’ he called back.
‘I’ll not.’
The boy felt huge hands sidle beneath him and lift his bony form. He was carried, and fell asleep again in this giant’s arms. When he woke he was being put in some cart or waggon. He rolled into deep sleep. Then he woke and was given warm milk by a woman, and boiled carrot mushed like the sop for a baby. He was aware of many eyes watching him.
On the days following Leo was fed by children. They plaited his hair as he lay there, and scrawled tattoos upon his skin. Little by little his strength returned.
2
The gypsies travelled with five waggons they called vardos, and two trolley carts. Leo recuperated in the vardo of George and his wife Rhoda and their many children. He looked out of the open front of the waggon. He had seen nothing like them. They were not travelling homes but rather cupboards on wheels, containing the gypsies’ possessions, and items for sale. Some had cages filled with songbirds hanging off them. The gypsies walked beside the vardos. Dogs accompanied them, mongrels and curs of all kinds but each one spry, with its own ideas, a pack of opinionated hounds.
The men wore long waistcoats and trousers high up the back, wide at the waist, narrowing to the ankle. The older men’s were lined with swan’s down. One man wore Luton boots of black and brown leather but all the others had hobnailed boots. They wore white shirts and red calico scarves, and hats of different kinds. The women wore brightly coloured clothes and wide, flat-brimmed hats like plates. Each woman had her own smell, a pungent mixture of sweat and woodsmoke and some musky perfume made from personal ingredients. Children seemed to call all the women Ma, though perhaps there was something defective about Leo’s hearing. He thought also that all called the man with black and brown boots Grandpa. One other older man they called Uncle.
Keziah, the eldest daughter of George and Rhoda, brought Leo food and sat beside him. As the waggon rolled along she told him who was who in their travelling band of the Orchard family. ‘That vardo belongs to our father’s father Samson Orchard and our father’s mother Kinity. The one there’s our father’s uncle Gully, and his wife Caraline.’
The girl told Leo of her family as if reciting less from memory than liturgy, an incantation of her lineage. ‘The fourth vardo belongs to our father’s brother Edwin and his wife and children. The last one there belongs to our father’s other brother, our uncle Belcher and his brood.’
Keziah told Leo that he had the dark eyes of a gadjo. It was a pity that his hair was brown and not black. Perhaps he was half-gentile, half-gadjo. His skin was too pale but a season or two on the road with them would improve it.
*
They meandered south for some days, along lanes bordered by full-leaved, thick high hedges, like winding tunnels. At gateways they would pause and stare as if surprised to see corn growing or beasts grazing in the hidden fields. The lanes undulated up and down and around the irregular landscape. The gypsies appeared to be in no hurry and journeyed at an easy pace. At night they did not sleep in their vardos but in temporarily erected bivouacs.
As soon as he was able, Leo rose from his bed and walked beside the waggons as the gypsies did. Each vardo was pulled by a single draught or dray horse, smaller than a Shire. There were many ponies too. At times the children rode these, bare-backed, but when they came to a hill the ponies were hooked up to the sides of the vardos as trace horses and helped pull them. On such inclines George walked behind his vardo, carrying chocks of wood. If the horses faltered, he dropped these chocks beneath the wheels to prevent them rolling backwards. Then he threw his own substantial weight behind the waggon. As it moved forward, Leo picked up the wood and followed after.
None spoke to the boy, nor much to each other. The weather grew warmer. Flies bothered the horses. They passed a field of rich grass in which a herd of cows had sat down, every one, and was chewing the cud in the morning sunshine. The beasts looked as if some bovine branch of the Agricultural Labourers’ Union had persuaded them to go on strike. The gypsies did no work. They stopped at nightfall and heated up a vegetable stew that had some faint trace of meat in its gravy, ate and slept, then without great enthusiasm moved on in the morning. Leo was bemused. It seemed to the boy an inexplicable life. They passed through tiny villages whose scruffy inhabitants stood and watched them pass like some suspicious summer mirage. The pace slowed and Leo thought that the draught horses might simply come to a halt, and the people too, in immobile stupor, only the dogs still sniffing around the grass verges and hedgerows.
One morning he heard a cuckoo, calling from somewhere in the distance. It called again. It felt like the distance not only of space but also time, as if the bird were calling from the past. He thought of Lottie and imagined her riding her elegant pony, the one she had tried to give to him. He wondered what his mother was doing. He wondered when he would see his home again. The estate was his home no longer. He knew this but could not accept it.
*
One afternoon Samson Orchard brought them to a halt on a wide verge beside a road.
‘Hear me, you all,’ he said. ‘We’ll stop here and we’ll stay us a while.’
They unharnessed the horses and drove stakes into the ground, to which the beasts were tethered. Uncle Gully tended to the horses but all the other men and older boys disappeared with their dogs. The women gathered wood and lit fires and put up semi-permanent tents. These were benders, made from bent hazel or chestnut poles covered with canvas painted with the smelly tar used on roads, or sometimes with old coats. With the horses unharnessed, wooden steps were placed between the shafts of each vardo, leading up to the door or open front. A woman Leo had not noticed until now climbed down out of Belcher’s waggon, in which she must have lain on the journey while others walked, and made her way into one of the benders, holding her greatly swollen belly before her.
Leo asked George’s wife Rhoda what he should do. ‘Wood and water,’ she said. ‘Water and wood. See in the trees up yonder’s plenty a scrap. That stream there’s good for washin. And in the wood’s a spring for drinkin water. We’ve stopped here before, see.’
Uncle Gully meanwhile led the draught horses one by one to the stream and let them drink, and then the ponies. Some were thirsty, and whinnied to let the old man know this, but he made them wait their turn. Gully wore a three-piece suit that looked to have been tailored for his frame, but many years ago. It was faded at the knees and elbows, frayed at the hems, yet it conferred upon him a certain elegance nonetheless. His felt fedora was less impressive, for the brim had long since lost whatever firmness it might once have had and fell down around his head, covering his eyes. It made him look furtive. Perhaps he was. He smelled of horses and of something else, some aromatic oil that Leo recognised, but from where he did not know. Then it came to him that he had detected it on another man, the old horseman Moses Pincombe.
Gully did not speak but whistled to the horses. Between carrying buckets of water for the women, the boy watched him and listened. With his whistling he ordered one horse to be patient, he told another it w
ould be his turn next, he informed a third he would take her to the water soon. All this by whistling. Leo had not known there could be such variety in the sound. He stood near to Gully. Up close to the animals, he spoke to them by clicking his teeth. Perhaps he was a mute.
The first of the men came back carrying pheasants. These they passed to the women, with the pride of hunters. One of the lads, Henery, son of Edwin, was surrounded by dogs and they too strutted, high off their paws, shoulders up, though the women grumbled that pheasants would need to boil or to hang overnight and would feed no hungry children’s bellies now.
The other men and lads returned with rabbits. Some of the boys carried sparrows, netted or shot with catapults. These they and their sisters plucked and skewered and roasted over the fires. There was no sign of George. Grandpa Samson Orchard leaned against a wheel of his vardo, lit a pipe and called the boy over.
‘Leo, is it?’ he said. ‘You’re travellin with us now, boy, and a band of vagabonds is what we are. We’ll not stay long in no place. Myself and me Kinity, we wouldn’t even stop for you. Our boy George, though, is a soft-hearted man who’s saved your life. But you’ll pay us back now, won’t you, Leo?’
The boy nodded. Samson Orchard was a stoutly built, ruddy and glowering man. He had black hair, though his walrus moustache was nearly white, and black hooded eyes. ‘Let me tell ye, Leo, people will treat ye bad while you’re with us. You being a gentile, t’will make no difference to them. You’re one of us now as far as they’re concerned.’ He sucked on his pipe then removed it and it was as if he had a stove inside him that he’d lit with his pipe for he seemed suddenly to glow with heat. ‘I’ve been done for drunk and riotous,’ he said. ‘I’ve been done for disorderly conduct. For breach a the peace in four counties. For assault. I’ve never laid hands on no one who didn’t ask for it, do ye hear me, Leo? Look at this.’
Samson Orchard gripped the stem of his pipe between his teeth and undid his jacket. Instead of buttons it had sovereigns, holes drilled into them to take the thread. He opened his shirt. ‘Will ye look at that?’ he said. Leo came closer and saw that the letter D had been branded on the old man’s left breast. ‘I’ll bet ye thought there’s no man alive carried a brand like that, Leo,’ Samson said.
The boy had never heard of such a thing on any man, alive or dead.
‘Must be nigh on thirty-five year ago,’ Samson said. He refilled his pipe.
The women skinned the rabbits and butchered them with long knives and threw them in big pots over their fires, and cut vegetables they’d pilfered from fields along the way. They scraped a little salt from the large blocks each possessed, and threw in handfuls of barley. The warm day waned. The sparrows the boys had caught were readying. Children tore the roasted carcasses apart and ate the flesh off the bone. The smell of roasting meat made Leo salivate, but no one, not even Keziah, invited him to join them and he did not ask. Pheasants hung at the side of Samson’s vardo. Blood dripped from their beaks onto the dry grass.
‘The Battle of Majuba Hill,’ Samson said. ‘We occupied the hill, see, Leo, and for what reason? There was none. And who were we? Most of us was raw. Even the few old soldiers had seen little action since the Crimean palaver. When the Boers came forward we still could have held the hill, but they wouldn’t engage, see, Leo, they wouldn’t come hand-to-hand with us. No, boy, they kept well back, didn’t they, and picked us off one by one. They was only Dutch farm boys but, by God, Leo, they was good shots.’
The old man yelled something at one of his sons a good distance off. Some words Leo did not recognise. The aromas of the food cooking made his stomach grumble, and it occurred to him that he had fully recovered from the beating his father had given him.
‘I don’t know who ran first . . . it wasn’t me, honest to God, Leo, but then we all did. We fled. It was a rout. We fled for our lives, Leo. Afterwards a few of us was shot by firin squad, they’d to make an example, but they couldn’t shoot all a what was left of our company. And we was all out of the Transvaal by the end a the month and on our way back home, Leo, the lot of us. Why they branded me a deserter, I believe it was a joke, Leo. They thought it comical to brand the gyppo. So they did.’
Samson puffed on his pipe. Again it seemed to stoke the bellows of some fire inside his ample chest. ‘We came to this country from Hindustan. Over five hundred year ago.’ He paused. ‘Six hundred now. The first king a the gypsies was a man by the name a Zindl. I wear the golden sovereigns on my jacket, Leo, but I’m no king a the gypsies, no matter what anyone says . . . don’t believe them, boy. We’ve not got one now. I’m only the shero of my tribe. We’re vagabonds, that’s what they call us. Priggers and pilferers.’ He opened his shirt once more. ‘Have a good look, Leo, you’ll not see it again. I was told I’m the last man alive from the British Army to carry this brand, and I believe it.’
*
It was dusk when George came out of the wood, his two rough-coated dogs barking about him, carrying what looked like a bundle of grey fur. In a moment all stopped what they were doing and looked to the big man coming into the clearing. George’s wife Rhoda stood up beside her fire and said in a loud voice, ‘There’s my man, isn’t he, there’s my man. Truly I’ve married meat and bread. And don’t you all worry, there’ll be a piece a meat for every pot.’
They gathered around the fires in the dark. They had to wait longer than they would have if George had not caught the badger but George and Rhoda’s children assured Leo that it would be worthwhile, for the rich dark meat of a badger was far superior to rabbit or pheasant, almost as good as that of a hedgehog.
When they’d finished eating, the women washed their cutlery and plates and other implements. The men gathered around Samson and Kinity’s fire. They passed a bottle round. What it contained Leo had no idea. The old woman and then the old man sang songs unaccompanied. Edwin produced a fiddle. He was almost as tall as his brother George but thin as wire and nervous where George was calm. Yet on the fiddle he played lilting lullabies. Children crawled into the benders and slept when they chose. The women came over to the fire. Some smoked clay pipes with longer stems than Leo had ever seen before. Edwin upped the tempo on his fiddle while his wife Arabella beat a tambourine and a lad who was perhaps his son set a dinner plate upside down and danced upon it.
When the tune ended the lad who’d danced stepped off the plate. He bent and picked it up and backed away from the fire.
Of the three brothers, Belcher most resembled their father, Samson, thickset and swarthy. He stared at the fire, then spat into the flames. ‘He’s not broke the plate, Edwin,’ Belcher said, ‘and that’s good. He can step-dance to yer fiddle, but it’s only single-steppin.’
‘Aye,’ said Edwin.
‘I could dance the double-steppin to yer fiddle, could I not? I danced the nails out a my boots to yer fiddle, brother. I licked em, didn’t I? I beat em all. There was none so light on his feet as me.’
The women smoked their pipes and the men gazed into the flames.
‘Now listen here, Leo,’ Samson Orchard said. ‘See yon brother a mine.’ He nodded towards the horseman, old Gully. ‘He was born in the sawdust and brought up on the back of a horse. Our parents had a travellin circus, see. They trained me in vaultin and globe jugglin, and then the boxin after. Young Gully there was a trick rider. Bareback and all. There was no money. Circuses got bigger, see, people could watch all manner of amazement of an evenin. Why’d they go to a teeny family circus like ours? But what I’m tellin you, Leo, is my brother yonder could ride a horse . . . he could make a beast do things you wouldn’t believe. I’ve seen none since as good.’
‘What stopped you dancin, then?’ Edwin said. He addressed his brother. ‘If you was so fuckin good? If you was so fuckin better’n my son.’
‘I don’t know, brother,’ Belcher said. ‘Yer fiddle playin, was it? Did it lose its soul there? You played it out of tune, did you?’
Edwin stood up and stepped across to Belcher and raised his violin
and brought it down upon his brother’s head, shattering the delicate instrument. He walked away towards his tent. Belcher removed his crumpled hat and rubbed the crown of his head, grinning, his teeth bared in the firelight.
The boy grew sleepy, but he saw Gully rise stiffly from the ground and turn and walk away from the fire and disappear into the dark. Some little while later Leo heard one of the draught horses neigh. He rose and followed the sound. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he was able to see all that was not in shadow for there was sufficient moonlight. He followed the sound of hooves and saw Gully lead one of the big horses towards a high hedge. It was Samson’s, the largest, sixteen hands high by the boy’s reckoning. Gully did not stop or turn but walked on into the hedge. He disappeared. The horse did not hesitate but followed the man leading it and the hedge swallowed the great horse too. Leo stared. Gully soon re-emerged alone. He fetched another horse and led it in the moonlight through the hedge as he had the one before. He left them grazing in some farmer’s field.
Leo stood waiting for the old man to request his help but he did not do so. When Gully had taken all the horses and ponies into the field he returned to the fire. Leo took his blanket and laid it on the ground beneath George and Rhoda’s waggon and slept.
*
In the morning, with much yelling and commotion, the gypsies went to work. Now they had a base women gathered certain objects and implements about them and, with their baskets, headed off along the lane; others remained in their roadside camp making things. Old Kinity, Samson’s wife, carved walking sticks. Edwin cut withy saplings and from them two of his children made clothes pegs. Girls gathered wild flowers and strung them into bouquets using bramble twine. It was as if all awoke from a dream of indolence to fanatic industry. Leo watched in amazement. All, even young children, had a job to do. One of the girls filled her basket with boxes of matches and shoelaces stored in the waggon, and set off. Gully gathered two ponies and led them away by their bridle straps.
