Abstract
In 1986, the year after the author of The Stopping Places was born, an 11-year-old Traveller boy called Richard, in a Sheffield school, wrote this short poem, which he called ‘Let Us Be’: I am a traveller, I travel round a lot. Sometimes police won’t let us stop. They are always picking on us, But I like living in a trailer. Travelling gives you knowledge about other places, And I can make friends wherever I go.
1
Richard’s worldly wisdom is not so different from that of Damian Le Bas, as expressed in The Stopping Places; his travelling and stopping carry a kindred heart of life and friendship. Le Bas’ early life as a Traveller was one of tractors, trucks, living in rural Kent and Sussex, selling flowers in local towns, singing Gypsy ballads and speaking in the Romani tongue to his relatives and friends. Much of that life changed when he won scholarships to Christ’s Hospital School and Oxford, and later became editor of the journal Travellers’ Times. His book takes him on an elegiac journey to trace the ‘aitchin tans’, the old camping sites and resting places that were the oases of the Travellers, where they met, palavered, celebrated and communed – as he describes their network, they were a ‘geography within a geography’.
It is a book of intense life, movement, historical memory and rendezvous, where the past meets the present in ever-changing existence. Beautifully written, it sets down many sights and sounds evocative of a travelling life. He describes the articulated lorry in front of his campervan, ‘its air brakes making a big deep hiss like the blowhole exhalation of a whale’; he frequently paints the natural world as if his words were the colours of a paint box – as when he plucks a sweet chestnut leaf from the grille of his van; tells of the fallen ash leaves ‘gleaming with brightness of fresh copper pipes’ or hears the ‘shimmering tweets’ of a robin.
On his journey he encounters suspicion and some hostility, as well as – like Richard – many new friends too. His part in the ‘Romany pilgrimage’ to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer gives him an emboldening sense of Gypsy solidarity, one that he feels all too rarely on his English travels. Like his ancestors, he knows that ‘the road could be heaven and hell; there was dark; there was light’, and as a reader you wonder, too, about the consciousnesses of the thousands of young urban Roma in now-times, in their permanent stopping places in English cities, excluded from school and shut out in the darkness. For The Stopping Places is about a mobile life, not about one trapped in cityscapes of poverty, an absence of education, hyper-low wages and zero-hour agony.
Le Bas briefly meets a group of Roma-Slovak boys on bikes in Gravesend just south-east of London. They exchange a few uncomfortable words in English and Romani before the boys turn to each other, speaking what Le Bas assumes is Slovak, mount their bikes and ride off. No ponies or horses now, and as they speed off on their wheels Le Bas can find little connection, as if his old world of stopping places and constant movement has gone. Their families have made the decision to stop permanently and build a new urbanised life. The incident makes a dramatic appendix to his story, as if another era is beginning.