Roma Fairies at Blackpool November 5, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
There is not much to comment on here, just a very unusual passage in a classic Roma book, The Book of Boswell: Autobiography of a Gypsy (1970). The edition referred to here is the 1973 Penguin. Now to the fairies. Notice how they jump in rather matter of factly. Our author is remembering an idyllic childhood.
We had all the sunshine from morning to night and we could play with hardly any clothes on: we were as brown as berries and as fit as fiddles. This in itself was something that other children didn’t get. We were free, and only came home when we wanted something to eat. And it was always there for us – Mother was waiting – never an angry word from her as I remember – and then off again, probably to play with fairies over the sandhills.
‘OK’ says the reader, and the author acknowledges some surprise.
I dare say you are going to call me light in the head. I have played with fairies on South Shore, Blackpool, and so did many other Gypsy children at that time. Many are living today that will back me up in this this. Sometimes my sisters, Laura and Linda, brother Lewis and myself, would land home a bit late, and Mother would ask us where we had been so long, and the answer would be: ‘We have been playing with the fairies!’ She never called us silly, or said: ‘There is not such thing as a fairy.’ Because we paid them a visit most days.
Love that line that suggests the kids just dropped in. Let’s play soccer, let’s ring Mr Jones’ bell, let’s run through the waves, let’s visit the fairies…
If we were getting a bit of a bore to her she would say: ‘Get off and go and play with the fairies!’ and we would go. It was always the same place too: several hundred yards over the dunes at the back of the tents and wagons to some sandhills covered with star grass we called it: a long reed grass. This was regular routins with us a children, and this was going on not just for a day or a week but all the time we stayed as children, and when we travelled after the summer season and returned to the South Shore we would be off to the fairies and they in turn would there too. I must say again: people must now be sure I am a head, case and need medical attention, but I am not ashamed to say that I and my brother Lewis, and sisters Laura, Linda and Ida, have played with the fairies on Blackpool South Shore.
More Roma fairy sightings: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
29 Nov 2014: Neil H, an old friend of the blog, sends in two pieces on the Boswells: death and Romani writing
