Stories from the Past

I can tell you one or two little incidents that struck me as extremely strange at the time and I’ve had sort of the time to think about it now. But once I went out and found a wagon pulled up near a strawberry picking field and the little lad was out there with a magnet, as I would call it and he came over to me and said “Powerful lodestone Mr.”, he said to me, and I thought lodestone, how many people would call a magnet a lodestone today, I mean the original magnet was a lodestone but that was a word from the Middle East and I thought, well there’s a line of the Romani’s right down through, that came to this young lad and he said “Powerful lodestone I got here”, and there he was holding a horseshoe magnet up, that was no more looking like a stone and yet he still called it a lodestone.ooo

Courtesy of Jack Loveland

And another time I thought was a very, very nice scene, I went out quite early, transport being on a bicycle and I could come along quite silently and I got down to the caravan, actually it was on the same farm that I spoke about previously there and underneath the wagon was this smallest child of the lot I presume, or at least anyway, a kiddie of about two or three, snuggled up and there was the big dog lying across the end of this little fellow, unfortunately I didn’t have the camera there to take the picture at the time, of course immediately the dog heard me, it was up then and of course the little fellow woke up, then but it was such a nice thing to see and these people I thought, how nice to be so close to the earth and not so many worries in that sense and it was a really nice thing to see.

Courtesy of Jack Lovelan

Another thing that did strike me was when I went down to Shave Green and I would have to cycle across the grass and so I approach quite quietly and in front of Shave Green there a big area of sort of heather and gorse and what not and there was three or four of these kiddies running around with these hazel twigs and every now and again these hazel twigs would be brought down, but they weren’t chasing each other and when I got closer, I asked one what they were doing and she opened her hand, in her hand was a butterfly and that was how they would catch their butterflies whereas the Gorgio’s would have a butterfly net and the poor old butterfly would be tangled up, they would simply bring down a piece of birch look at the butterfly and let it fly away again and I thought you know we’ve got a lot to learn from the Gypsies.

The only other thing that I was just saying that it wasn’t a thing that happened to me but I was amused by the story of the Gypsy who had moved into a house and then when they went to evict her because she hadn’t paid any rent they found that she had a big bender put inside the house and every bit of wood from the house was taken out and had been burnt on the fire but that wasn’t exactly anything I’d seen by me, it was told to me.

Courtesy of Jack Loveland