As spring eases into summer one can't help but think about what lies beyond one's immediate surroundings. With the sun comes the urge to travel. In late May last year I was high up in the Yorkshire Dales watching small convoys of travelling families as they slowly made their way across the moors into Cumbria to converge on the town of Appleby for the annual horse fair – and the start of the roaming season for Gypsies.
To my city-tired eyes it was reassuring to watch a 400-year-old ritual still being adhered too. Seeing the ornate Gypsy vardos parked at the roadside while their owners watered and fed their horses, still days away from the horse fair, certainly appealed to the romantic in me – and the literature lover too.
Because as thoughts turn to the travelling season, so too they turn to depictions of this archaic but enduring way of life. As in society, Gypsies occupy a unique role in Britain's literature. Always on the fringes, they're portrayed as enigmatic outsiders, unknown others, or passing figures in a rural idyll.
Gypsies have been at the receiving end of prejudices, misinformation and bigotry for centuries now, and this is reflected in fiction. For many readers of a certain age, their first introduction to Gypsies will have been more positive: the heroic character of Kizzy in Rumer Godden's award-winning 1972 children's book The Diddakoi, a frank and powerful piece of writing about the prejudices aimed at Gypsies that also functioned as a wider allegorical tale about racism. More often than not, though, the Gypsy appears as a dark, brooding force, as epitomised by Emily Brontë's portrayal of Heathcliff, the tempestuous and swarthy outsider in Wuthering Heights whose origins are unknown and whose looks are described as "gypsy". As the antagonist in the book, it is Heathcliff – "the black villain" – who upsets the proverbial apple-cart.
In British fiction our literary Gypsies tend to be vagabonds, tinkers, pugilists, horse-dealers, traders and heartbreakers. They are the characters of George Borrow's Lavengro (first recommended to me by a reader on one of these blogs last year – thank you) or Joe Boswell in DH Lawrence's story The Virgin and the Gypsy, each providing a glimpse into a past that is long gone, but pleasing to revisit today.
But the impact of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act and the changing face of agrarian life on which many Gypsies once relied for work have irrevocably changed their itinerant culture, a shift not yet acknowledged in fiction.
Perhaps the most accurate depictions Gypsy life, then, are to be found in the multitude of non-fiction works out there. Despite often making for the most memorable fictional characters, past fictional portraits of Gypsy culture have relied on speculation and urban myth as source material and suffered from cliché and stereotyping as a result.
It seems there is a great British Gypsy novel still to be written, possibly by someone of Gypsy heritage. Maybe they could go one further by writing in the Romany language - a feat that poet David Morley achieved in The Invisible Kings, a collection that drew heavily upon the little-known language, his poems peppered with alien phrases such as "asanòo mànoosh" (a smiling man).
Certain Romany words have now permeated mainstream society – "mullered" (beaten up or killed) is Romany, as is "chor" (to steal), "scran" (food), "chav" (child), "mush" (man) and khusti ("good", in the Del Boy sense of the word). If only someone could combine these to write a novel in British-Romany language they could have a unique literary work on their hands.
