The Stopping Places by Damian Le Bas

Author:Damian Le Bas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

7

In 2006, a team of archaeologists working in Norwich city centre unearthed a human skeleton, buried in an Anglo-Saxon churchyard during the eleventh century ad. Its bones were carefully exhumed, brushed clean of earth, and sent away to laboratories for routine scientific analysis.

When the results came back, the team were astonished. Preserved in the skeleton’s teeth was a rare gene: a gene which has only ever been found in the descendants of Romany people. Prior to this discovery, it was believed that the earliest Romanies had arrived in Britain as many as five hundred years later, towards the end of the fifteenth century.

I sit in the cab and wonder what this isolated specimen of Gypsy DNA might, or might not, mean. I try to argue myself out of overestimating its significance. It is hubris to think we can know where everyone was in the distant past. People sailed the seas, they came and went: why should anyone be surprised to find out that these fragile remains, plucked from the dark earth of an older England, had Romany roots? Besides, the skeleton was so old that it might not even be reasonable to refer to it as ‘Romany’, an ethnic identity that probably took many years to coalesce on the long road out of India into the west.

But I can’t get it out of my mind. A lone south Asian figure, buried according to Christian law; enveloped in Anglo-Saxon ground a thousand years ago. I think I know where I am going. I start the van up and head east.

I stop for the night in Harlow, the first town in Britain to take out a district-wide injunction against unauthorised encampments by Travellers. Anyone who breaches the ban could be found guilty of contempt of court and fined or imprisoned. The council leader has told journalists that ‘this is not and never has been about persecuting a particular group of people or their way of life’.

I pull into the town and approach Latton Common. It was once the site of the Harlow Bush Fair, a favourite haunt of the Gypsies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The fairs have always been dangerous places to get into a fight. In 1832, a Romany man called Elijah Buckley was mortally wounded here after an argument at the fair. He left behind a wife, Elizabeth, and two children, George and Leviathan. The common is empty now, and silent but for the susurration of the trees on its far side. I park in a gravelled space by the roadside and make dinner: new potatoes and cabbage flavoured with bacon. Not many people come past – a few drivers, one or two dog walkers.The sun sets out of sight behind the clouds. The distant treeline of the common bleeds up into the falling night. I roll a fag and whistle a bit of ‘The Star of the County Down’. Nobody comes to enforce the injunction. The night is quiet and cool. Despite my fear of transgressing an actual law, the darkness passes without incident.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.