A Shepherd's Life: Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs Part 12

Now Joseph, being a single man, had no "sticks"; all his possessions went into a bundle, which he carried tied to his crook, and with his sheep-dog following at his heels he set forth early one morning on the most important adventure of his life. Then occurred an instance of what we call a coincidence, but which the shepherd of the downs, nursed in the old beliefs and traditions, prefers to regard as an act of providence.

About noon he was trudging along in the turnpike road when he was met by a farmer driving in a trap, who pulled up to speak to him and asked him if he could say how far it was to Winterbourne Bishop. Joseph replied that it was about fourteen miles--he had left Bishop that morning.

Then the farmer asked him if he knew a man there named Caleb Bawcombe, and if he had a place as shepherd there, as he was now on his way to look for him and to try and persuade him to go back to Dorset, where he had been his head-shepherd for the s.p.a.ce of a year.

Joseph said that Caleb had a place as head-shepherd on a farm at Bishop, that he was satisfied with it, and was, moreover, one that preferred to bide in his native place.

The farmer was disappointed, and the other added, "Maybe you've heard Caleb speak of his elder brother Joseph--I be he."

"What!" exclaimed the farmer. "You're Caleb's brother! Where be going then?--to a new place?"

"I've got no place; I be going to look for a place in Dorsetsheer."

"'Tis strange to hear you say that," exclaimed the farmer. He was going, he said, to see Caleb, and if he would not or could not go back to Dorset himself to ask him to recommend some man of the village to him; for he was tired of the ways of the shepherds of his own part of the country, and his heart was set on getting a man from Caleb's village, where shepherds understood sheep and knew their work. "Now look here, shepherd," he continued, "if you'll engage yourself to me for a year I'll go no farther, but take you right back with me in the trap."

The shepherd was very glad to accept the offer; he devoutly believed that in making it the farmer was but acting in accordance with the will of a Power that was mindful of man and kept watch on him, even on His poor servant Joseph, who had left his home and people to be a stranger in a strange land.

So well did servant and master agree that Joseph never had occasion to look for another place; when his master died an old man, his son succeeded him as tenant of the farm, and he continued with the son until he was past work. Before his first year was out, his younger sister, Hannah, came to live with him and keep house, and eventually they both got married, Joseph to a young woman of the place, and Hannah to a small working farmer whose farm was about a mile from the village. Children were born to both, and in time grew up, Joseph's sons following their father's vocation, while Hannah's were brought up to work on the farm.

And some of them, too, got married in time and had children of their own.

These are the main incidents in the lives of Joseph and Hannah, related to me at different times by their brother; he had followed their fortunes from a distance, sometimes getting a message, or hearing of them incidentally, but he did not see them. Joseph never returned to his native village, and the visits of Hannah to her old home had been few and had long ceased. But he cherished a deep enduring affection for both; he was always anxiously waiting and hoping for tidings of them, for Joseph was now a feeble old man living with one of his sons, and Hannah, long a widow, was in declining health, but still kept the farm, a.s.sisted by one of her sons and two unmarried daughters. Though he had not heard for a long time it never occurred to him to write, nor did they ever write to him.

Then, when I was staying at Winterbourne Bishop and had the intention of shortly paying a visit to Caleb, it occurred to me one day to go into Dorset and look for these absent ones, so as to be able to give him an account of their state. It was not a long journey, and arrived at the village I soon found a son of Joseph, a fine-looking man, who took me to his cottage, where his wife led me into the old shepherd's room. I found him very aged in appearance, with a grey face and sunken cheeks, lying on his bed and breathing with difficulty; but when I spoke to him of Caleb a light of joy came into his eyes, and he raised himself on his pillows, and questioned me eagerly about his brother's state and family, and begged me to a.s.sure Caleb that he was still quite well, although too feeble to get about much, and that his children were taking good care of him.

From the old brother I went on to seek the young sister--there was a difference of more than twenty years in their respective ages--and found her at dinner in the large old farm-house kitchen. At all events she was presiding, the others present being her son, their hired labourer, the farm boy, and two unmarried daughters. She herself tasted no food. I joined them at their meal, and it gladdened and saddened me at the same time to be with this woman, for she was Caleb's sister, and was attractive in herself, looking strangely young for her age, with beautiful dark, soft eyes and but few white threads in her abundant black hair. The attraction was also in her voice and speech and manner; but, alas! there was that in her face which was painful to witness--the signs of long suffering, of nights that bring no refreshment, an expression in the eyes of one that is looking anxiously out into the dim distance--a vast unbounded prospect, but with clouds and darkness resting on it.

It was not without a feeling of heaviness at the heart that I said good-bye to her; nor was I surprised when, less than a year later, Caleb received news of her death.

CHAPTER XIX

THE DARK PEOPLE OF THE VILLAGE

How the materials for this book were obtained--The hedgehog-hunter--A gipsy taste--History of a dark-skinned family--Hedgehog eaters--Half-bred and true gipsies--Perfect health--Eating carrion--Mysterious knowledge and faculties--The three dark Wiltshire types--Story of another dark man of the village--Account of Liddy--His shepherding--A happy life with horses--Dies of a broken heart--His daughter

I have sometimes laughed to myself when thinking how a large part of the material composing this book was collected. It came to me in conversations, at intervals, during several years, with the shepherd. In his long life in his native village, a good deal of it spent on the quiet down, he had seen many things it was or would be interesting to hear; the things which had interested him, too, at the time, and had fallen into oblivion, yet might be recovered. I discovered that it was of little use to question him: the one valuable recollection he possessed on any subject would, as a rule, not be available when wanted; it would lie just beneath the surface so to speak, and he would pa.s.s and repa.s.s over the ground without seeing it. He would not know that it was there; it would be like the acorn which a jay or squirrel has hidden and forgotten all about, which he will nevertheless recover some day if by chance something occurs to remind him of it. The only method was to talk about the things he knew, and when by chance he was reminded of some old experience or some little observation or incident worth hearing, to make a note of it, then wait patiently for something else. It was a very slow process, but it is not unlike the one we practise always with regard to wild nature. We are not in a hurry, but are always watchful, with eyes and ears and mind open to what may come; it is a mental habit, and when nothing comes we are not disappointed--the act of watching has been a sufficient pleasure: and when something does come we take it joyfully as if it were a gift--a valuable object picked up by chance in our walks.

When I turned into the shepherd's cottage, if it was in winter and he was sitting by the fire, I would sit and smoke with him, and if we were in a talking mood I would tell him where I had been and what I had heard and seen, on the heath, in the woods, in the village, or anywhere, on the chance of its reminding him of something worth hearing in his past life.

One Sunday morning, in the late summer, during one of my visits to him, I was out walking in the woods and found a man of the village, a farm labourer, with his small boy hunting for hedgehogs. He had caught and killed two, which the boy was carrying. He told me he was very fond of the flesh of hedgehogs--"pigs," he called them for short; he said he would not exchange one for a rabbit. He always spent his holidays pig-hunting; he had no dog and didn't want one; he found them himself, and his method was to look for the kind of place in which they were accustomed to live--a thick ma.s.s of bramble growing at the side of an old ditch as a rule. He would force his way into it and, moving round and round, trample down the roots and loose earth and dead leaves with his heavy iron-shod boots until he broke into the nest or cell of the spiny little beast hidden away under the bush.

He was a short, broad-faced man, with a brown skin, black hair, and intensely black eyes. Talking with the shepherd that evening I told him of the encounter, and remarked that the man was probably a gipsy in blood, although a labourer, living in the village and married to a woman with blue eyes who belonged to the place.

This incident reminded him of a family, named Targett, in his native village, consisting of four brothers and a sister. He knew them first when he was a boy himself, but could not remember their parents. "It seemed as if they didn't have any," he said. The four brothers were very much alike: short, with broad faces, black eyes and hair, and brown skins. They were good workers, but somehow they were never treated by the farmers like the other men. They were paid less wages--as much as two to four shillings a week less per man--and made to do things that others would not do, and generally imposed upon. It was known to every employer of labour in the place that they could be imposed upon; yet they were not fools, and occasionally if their master went too far in bullying and abusing them and compelling them to work overtime every day, they would have sudden violent outbursts of rage and go off without any pay at all. What became of their sister he never knew: but none of the four brothers ever married; they lived together always, and two died in the village, the other two going to finish their lives in the workhouse.

One of the curious things about these brothers was that they had a pa.s.sion for eating hedgehogs. They had it from boyhood, and as boys used to go a distance from home and spend the day hunting in hedges and thickets. When they captured a hedgehog they would make a small fire in some sheltered spot and roast it, and while it was roasting one of them would go to the nearest cottage to beg for a pinch of salt, which was generally given.

These, too, I said, must have been gipsies, at all events on one side.

Where there is a cross the gipsy strain is generally strongest, although the children, if brought up in the community, often remain in it all their lives; but they are never quite of it. Their love of wildness and of eating wild flesh remains in them, and it is also probable that there is an instability of character, a restlessness, which the small farmers who usually employ such men know and trade on; the gipsy who takes to farm work must not look for the same treatment as the big-framed, white-skinned man who is as strong, enduring, and unchangeable as a draught horse or ox, and constant as the sun itself.

The gipsy element is found in many if not most villages in the south of England. I know one large scattered village where it appears predominant--as dirty and disorderly-looking a place as can be imagined, the ground round every cottage resembling a gipsy camp, but worse owing to its greater litter of old rags and rubbish strewn about. But the people, like all gipsies, are not so poor as they look, and most of the cottagers keep a trap and pony with which they scour the country for many miles around in quest of bones, rags, and bottles, and anything else they can buy for a few pence, also anything they can "pick up" for nothing.

This is almost the only kind of settled life which a man with a good deal of gipsy blood in him can tolerate; it affords some scope for his chaffering and predatory instincts and satisfies the roving pa.s.sion, which is not so strong in those of mixed blood. But it is too respectable or humdrum a life for the true, undegenerate gipsy. One wet evening in September last I was prowling in a copse near Shrewton, watching the birds, when I encountered a young gipsy and recognized him as one of a gang of about a dozen I had met several days before near Salisbury. They were on their way, they had told me, to a village near Shaftesbury, where they hoped to remain a week or so.

"What are you doing here?" I asked my gipsy.

He said he had been to Idmiston; he had been on his legs out in the rain and wet to the skin since morning. He didn't mind that much as the wet didn't hurt him and he was not tired; but he had eight miles to walk yet over the downs to a village on the Wylye where his people were staying.

I remarked that I had thought they were staying over Shaftesbury way.

He then looked sharply at me. "Ah, yes," he said, "I remember we met you and had some talk a fortnight ago. Yes, we went there, but they wouldn't have us. They soon ordered us off. They advised us to settle down if we wanted to stay anywhere. Settle down! I'd rather be dead!"

There spoke the true gipsy; and they are mostly of that mind. But what a mind it is for human beings in this climate! It is in a year like this of 1909, when a long cold winter and a miserable spring, with frosty nights lasting well into June, was followed by a cold wet summer and a wet autumn, that we can see properly what a mind and body is his--how infinitely more perfect the correspondence between organism and environment in his case than in ours, who have made our own conditions, who have not only houses to live in, but a vast army of sanitary inspectors, physicians and bacteriologists to safeguard us from that wicked stepmother who is anxious to get rid of us before our time! In all this miserable year, during which I have met and conversed with and visited many scores of gipsies, I have not found one who was not in a cheerful frame of mind, even when he was under a cloud with the police on his track; nor one with a cold, or complaining of an ache in his bones, or of indigestion.

The subject of gipsies catching cold connects itself just now in my mind with that of the gipsy's sense of humour. He has that sense, and it makes him happy when he is reposing in the bosom of his family and can give it free vent; but the instant you appear on the scene its gracious outward signs vanish like lightning and he is once more the sly, subtle animal, watching you furtively, but with intensity. When you have left him and he relaxes the humour will come back to him; for it is a humour similar to that of some of the lower animals, especially birds of the crow family, and of primitive people, only more highly developed, and is concerned mainly with the delight of trickery--with getting the better of some one and the huge enjoyment resulting from the process.

One morning, between nine and ten o'clock, during the excessively cold spell near the end of November 1909, I paid a visit to some gipsies I knew at their camp. The men had already gone off for the day, but some of the women were there--a young married woman, two big girls, and six or seven children. It was a hard frost and their sleeping accommodation was just as in the summer-time--bundles of straw and old rugs placed in or against little half-open canvas and rag shelters; but they all appeared remarkably well, and some of the children were standing on the hard frozen ground with bare feet. They a.s.sured me that they were all well, that they hadn't caught colds and didn't mind the cold. I remarked that I had thought the severe frost might have proved too much for some of them in that high, unsheltered spot in the downs, and that if I had found one of the children down with a cold I should have given it a sixpence to comfort it. "Oh," cried the young married woman, "there's my poor six months' old baby half dead of a cold; he's very bad, poor dear, and I'm in great trouble about him."

"He is bad, the darling!" cried one of the big girls. "I'll soon show you how bad he is!" and with that she dived into a pile of straw and dragged out a huge fat sleeping baby. Holding it up in her arms she begged me to look at it to see how bad it was; the fat baby slowly opened its drowsy eyes and blinked at the sun, but uttered no sound, for it was not a crying baby, but was like a great fat retriever pup pulled out of its warm bed.

How healthy they are is hardly known even to those who make a special study of these aliens, who, albeit aliens, are yet more native than any Englishman in the land. It is not merely their indifference to wet and cold; more wonderful still is their dog-like capacity of a.s.similating food which to us would be deadly. This is indeed not a nice or pretty subject, and I will give but one instance to ill.u.s.trate my point; the reader with a squeamish stomach may skip the ensuing paragraph.

An old shepherd of Chitterne relates that a family, or gang, of gipsies used to turn up from time to time at the village; he generally saw them at lambing-time, when one of the heads of the party with whom he was friendly would come round to see what he had to give them. On one occasion his gipsy friend appeared, and after some conversation on general subjects, asked him if he had anything in his way. "No, nothing this time," said the shepherd. "Lambing was over two or three months ago and there's nothing left--no dead lamb. I hung up a few cauls on a beam in the old shed, thinking they would do for the dogs, but forgot them and they went bad and then dried up."

"They'll do very well for us," said his friend.

"No, don't you take them!" cried the shepherd in alarm; "I tell you they went bad months ago, and 'twould kill anyone to eat such stuff. They've dried up now, and are dry and black as old skin."

"That doesn't matter--we know how to make them all right," said the gipsy. "Soaked with a little salt, then boiled, they'll do very well."

And off he carried them.

In reading the reports of the a.s.sizes held at Salisbury from the late eighteenth century down to about 1840, it surprised me to find how rarely a gipsy appeared in that long, sad, monotonous procession of "criminals" who pa.s.sed before the man sitting with his black cap on his head, and were sent to the gallows or to the penal settlements for stealing sheep and fowls and ducks or anything else. Yet the gipsies were abundant then as now, living the same wild, lawless life, quartering the country, and hanging round the villages to spy out everything stealable. The man caught was almost invariably the poor, slow-minded, heavy-footed agricultural labourer; the light, quick-moving, cunning gipsy escaped. In the "Salisbury Journal" for 1820 I find a communication on this subject, in which the writer says that a common trick of the gipsies was to dig a deep pit at their camp in which to bury a stolen sheep, and on this spot they would make their camp fire. If the sheep was not missed, or if no report of its loss was made to the police, the thieves would soon be able to dig it up and enjoy it; but if inquiries were made they would have to wait until the affair had blown over.

It amused me to find, from an incident related to me by a workman in a village where I was staying lately, that this simple, ancient device is still practised by the gipsies. My informant said that on going out at about four o'clock one morning during the late summer he was surprised at seeing two gipsies with a pony and cart at the spot where a party of them had been encamped a fortnight before. He watched them, himself unseen, and saw that they were digging a pit on the spot where they had had their fire. They took out several objects from the ground, but he was too far away to make out what they were. They put them in the cart and covered them over, then filled up the pit, trampled the earth well down, and put the ashes and burnt sticks back in the same place, after which they got into the cart and drove off.

Of course a man, even a nomad, must have some place to conceal his treasures or belongings in, and the gipsy has no cellar nor attic nor secret cupboard, and as for his van it is about the last place in which he would bestow anything of value or incriminating, for though he is always on the move, he is, moving or sitting still, always under a cloud. The ground is therefore the safest place to hide things in, especially in a country like the Wiltshire Downs, though he may use rocks and hollow trees in other districts. His habit is that of the jay and magpie, and of the dog with a bone to put by till it is wanted.

Possibly the rural police have not yet discovered this habit of the gipsy. Indeed, the contrast in mind and locomotive powers between the gipsy and the village policeman has often amused me; the former most like the thievish jay, ever on mischief bent; the other, who has his eye on him, is more like the portly Cochin-China fowl of the farmyard, or the Muscovy duck, or stately gobbler.

To go back. When the buried sheep had to be kept too long buried and was found "gone bad" when disinterred, I fancy it made little difference to the diners. One remembers Th.o.r.eau's pleasure at the spectacle of a crowd of vultures feasting on the carrion of a dead horse; the fine healthy appet.i.te and boundless vigour of nature filled him with delight. But it is not only some of the lower animals--dogs and vultures, for instance--which possess this power and immunity from the effects of poisons developed in putrid meat; the Greenlanders and African savages, and many other peoples in various parts of the world, have it as well.

Sometimes when sitting with gipsies at their wild hearth, I have felt curious as to the contents of that black pot simmering over the fire. No doubt it often contains strange meats, but it would not have been etiquette to speak of such a matter. It is like the pot on the fire of the Venezuela savage into which he throws whatever he kills with his little poisoned arrows or fishes out of the river. Probably my only quarrel with them would be about the little fledgelings: it angers me to see them beating the bushes in spring in search of small nesties and the callow young that are in them. After all, the gipsies could retort that my friends the jays and magpies are at the same business in April and May.

It is just these habits of the gipsy which I have described, shocking to the moralist and sanitarian and disgusting to the person of delicate stomach, it may be, which please me, rather than the romance and poetry which the scholar-gipsy enthusiasts are fond of reading into him. He is to me a wild, untameable animal of curious habits, and interests me as a naturalist accordingly. It may be objected that being a naturalist occupied with the appearance of things, I must inevitably miss the one thing which others find.

In a talk I had with a gipsy a short time ago, he said to me: "You know what the books say, and we don't. But we know other things that are not in the books, and that's what we have. It's ours, our own, and you can't know it."