One of my resolutions for this new year is to post on my blog. I am still interested in any comments you wish to make. I never thought I would be this busy at this point in my life but I am grateful that I can enjoy the involvement. Here is a piece that I wrote for my third volume of Memoirs." We were warned not to speak to the Gypsies, "They carry little girls away" my mother spoke emphatically. I was fearful but their glorious apparel beckoned to me, the bright scarf wrapped tight around the long black hair, the ends of it flying in the breeze as they gypsy girl walked down our street. Her long voluminous skirt made a swishing sound as she seemed to float airily toward me. The Gypsies of my childhood in England brought their painted caravans with their hooded roofs and scattered into our streets with their wares. I don't know what they were selling I only know that they were beautiful to me and they were enveloped in an air of mystery that caught my fancy. I wouldn't mind so much if they carried me away in their decorative caravans, I thought, if I could wrap a red kerchief around my bobbed haur and swish a long patterned skirt around my ankles. Mother spoke of them as though they were 'bad' and I felt afraid so I sat in the worn hollow of our stone step, my eyes filled with longing, spellbound by these bewitching gypsies so out of place midst the concret and brick - the reality of my child's world.
They were woodland creatures I was sure, dancing where the fairies danced. Once I heard the melodic streams of music, bouncing off the houses, emanating from a caravan at the end of the street. I knew by instinct it was the kind of music my gypsies danced to, the kind you could twirl a skirt with, faster and faster as the music rose. Later I learned it was a concertina with perhaps a fiddle. Forever afterward in my mind equating the two as isepersble with my gypsies.
"Don't speak to the gypsies they steal little children away" I can hear my mother's voice, it forbad me to follow my yearning, to feel, just for a little whilw, like a gypsy girl in a long rustling skirt with and with quick twinkling feet in flat red slippers. In that repositary where my memories reside, lies that image still - I can see her - my gypsy girl, so lovely in her dark beauty. I wonder what would have happened if I had not yielded to my mother's warning voice. I feel myself beginning to drift into a cloud of memories and i hear the gypsy music and the voice of the concertina; my world of fantasy, perhaps not wishing to leave the gypsies behind me. I hear my mother's voice and listen.
Photo via Crazy 4 me. Original source from Gypsy Wagons UK.
