Читать книгу I've been a Gipsying. Rambles among our Gipsies and their children in their tents and vans онлайн

6 страница из 70

The gipsy father was partially blind through having been in so many gipsy combats. A kick over the eyes had not only nearly blinded him, but as B. said, “I feel at times as if my senses were nearly gone. Thank the Lord, I can see best when the sun shines clear.” On my approaching nearer to where they were sitting the man got up and kindly offered me his chair, which I accepted, notwithstanding the disagreeable surroundings. On the walls of their dwelling pieces of pictures and old newspapers were pasted. There were parts of The British Workman, Band of Hope Review, Old Jonathan, The Cottager and Artizan, Churchman’s Almanack; in fact, they seemed to have upon the greasy walls a scrap of some of the pictorial publications published by the Wesleyans, Baptists, Church of England, the Unitarians, Congregationalists, the Religious Tract Society, Cassell, Sunday School Union, Haughton and Co., Partridge and Co., Dr. Barnardo, and others. I said to the poor man, “This is a very tumbledown old place.” “Yes,” he said, “people say that it has been built nine hundred years; and I believe it has, for the man who owns it now says he cannot remember it being built.” I said, “How old do you think the man is who owns it?” He answered, “Well, I should think that he is fifty, for he has great grand-children.” Their only table consisted of an old box, upon which, in a wicker basket, there were a young jay and a blackbird which the gipsy woman was trying to rear. As the young birds opened their beaks, almost wide enough to swallow each other, the woman kept thrusting into their mouths large pieces of stinking meat of some kind, about which I did not ask any particulars. These little gipsy attractions and observations being over, I began to inquire about things concerning their present and eternal welfare. I found on inquiry that the only food this family had had to live upon during the last two days had been a threepenny loaf and half an ounce of tea. When I asked them what they did for a living they could scarcely tell me. The man said, “I go out sometimes with a basket and a few oranges in it, and I picks up a bit of a living in this way. Some of the people are pretty good to me. As a rule we begs our clothes. Occasionally I catches a rabbit or picks up a hedgehog. If I can scrape together a shilling to buy oranges I generally manages pretty well for that day. Our firing does not cost us anything, and in summer-time the young uns picks up a lot of birds’ eggs out of the forest, which are very nice for them if they are not too far hatched.” Just at this juncture a practical demonstration took place as to how they dealt with the birds’ eggs. One of the boys, I should think of about seven years, came with a nest of blackbirds’ eggs—poor little fellow he was no doubt hungry, for he had had no Sunday dinner—which he placed into his mother’s hands. The mother was not long before she began to crack them, and into the children’s mouths they went, half hatched as they were, just as she fed the young jay. I really thought that one of the youngsters would have been choked by one of the half-hatched young blackbirds. With a little crushing, cramming, and tapping on the back the poor Sunday dinnerless gipsy child escaped the sad consequences I at one time feared would be the result. To see a woman forcing food of this description down a child’s throat is a sight I never want to see again. Hunger opens a mouth that turns sickening food into dainty morsels. None of these poor gipsy children had ever lisped a godly prayer or read a word in their lives. The father said he would be glad to send the children to school if they would be received there and they could go free. The whole of these children were born in a tent upon a bit of straw among the low bushes of Epping Forest. Some in the depth of severe winter, others in the midst of drenching rains, and even when the larks were singing overhead, with “roughish nurses and midwives” as attendants.