The Priest's Tale

by Reverend Roger Redding, MBE,
retired Chaplain to Gypsies, Travellers and Showmen

My introduction to the Gypsy Traveller world began in 1996 when I was selected for the post of Team Vicar in the Chalke Valley in the diocese of Salisbury. The parishes bordered the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset. I had been working in urban areas where there were large housing estates and vast parishes so arriving in rural Ebbesbourne Wake came as quite a shock. After about a month I began to wonder why God had chosen me for this isolated post. However it was at this point that I was invited to officiate at my first Romany funeral.

Mr Cooper had not travelled for many years but had bought a piece of land above Salisbury where he constructed a small site for his family to live.

I was invited by the family on the evening before the funeral to see the body into the family home where the deceased would lie in state. The family were in deep mourning and there were many relatives all gathered to pay their respects. I was ushered into a room where Mr Cooper was lying and was asked to pray for his soul and his family also.

I prepared to leave them to their watching when a Romany lady addressed me with the words—“You haven’t had much to do with Travellers have you vicar?” In my heart I heard a voice saying to me, 'That is all going to change from now on.'

Like most Traveller funerals it was huge with around 400 people attending and masses of wonderful flowers.

The family requested that their great friend Eli Frankham, a Gypsy counsellor, should be able to speak about Mr Cooper as a Travelling man. This was the first time that I had come in contact with a Traveller activist. Eli told me something of the spirituality of this much loved man. He was very generous of heart and if you admired anything that belonged to him he would insist that you take it. I am a Franciscan, so this kind of spirituality was of great interest to me. I began, over the following months to be drawn to studying this fascinating nomadic tribe of people.

One of my parishioners told me that there were Travellers who came to camp on the downs above Alvediston and that she would call me when they arrived. On new year’s day 1997 I received the call from Laurie Bissett to tell me that Dave Rawlings and his family had arrived on the drove road.

Romany musician and his wife
from an oil painting by Roger

I drove up just a little apprehensive as I had not encountered itinerant Travellers before. I approached a man who was cold shoeing a horse outside his Gypsy vardo. I asked if he was Dave Rawlings and he answered yes, I am but who are you? I told him that I was the local vicar and he said, “Good, my daughter wants to get married.”

This extraordinary day was to be the start of a wonderful friendship. Dave opened the doors into the Traveller community and introduced me to some amazing people.

Within a year of meeting the Rawlings family I had spent time living on the road with them and become involved with the Great Dorset Steam Fair.

As time went by I came to know of the real suffering of the Travelling people and also gained an insight into their deep spirituality.

I remember Dave saying to me once, “ You know the story in the new testament about the kingdom of heaven having many mansions? Well I look at it like this, I am one of those mansions, a dwelling place for God’s spirit.” That to me was a very special insight into Traveller spirituality.

The thread of nomadic spirituality runs right through the bible form Abel to Abraham, Moses and to Jesus himself who was the ultimate nomad.

I often felt that I was being ministered unto rather than being the one ministering.

It has been a great joy to live and work with my adopted nation and to share in their joys and sorrows.

I would like to offer you God’s blessing as you continue to read on.

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
The rains fall soft upon your fields and until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Traditional Gaelic Blessing

Dokumenti!

by Esmond Chorlton

The police car, lights flashing, seemed to come out of nowhere. I was concentrating on trying to avoid becoming terminally lost in the maze of roads that is Katowice, a big industrial town in the south of Poland and the last thing I was going to be doing was speeding. They had already caught me twice for that. I was nabbed on my second visit in 1991 and then again in 1996. It was now 1997 and I was determined to avoid the hat trick.

In my defence, it is not easy to tell what speed you should be doing in Poland. There were no motorways at that time and you spent most of the time travelling cross-country on long roads with hundreds of little villages strung out along them. Outside of villages you can travel at 90 kmph (about 56 mph). At the entrance to each village or town there is a sign with a little urban silhouette and the name of the place, usually featuring an unfeasible number of ‘z’s and ‘k’s. You immediately have to slow down to 60 kmph (about 37 mph). Just as well there’s a sign because it is not always obvious that you are in a Polish village. There could be acres of fields with only a house or two, then maybe a shop, more fields, a few more That works fine - unless of course there is a hay wagon parked in front of the sign, or you are distracted by a combine harvester lumbering towards you taking up 90% of the road or the village drunk doing the same, or you are just plain mesmerised by the unending rolling countryside. Then you can find yourself hurtling into town at a death defying 56 mph and there are no indications you should be going slower. They don’t do lampposts a lot in the Polish countryside.

They do radar though. Back in the 90s the Polish state had hit upon a new way to fill the national coffers. They found villages with edges that looked just like the identical open fields on the other side of the small sign. Then they stationed a couple of police armed with a radar gun carefully out of sight round a

bend of behind a tree. They would point their radar gun at the passing traffic and if you were over 60kmph they would jump out and wave a little lollipop shaped stick at you. This was their signal to pull over while they extracted heavy on the spot fines from you.

The first time it happened to me I hardly spoke any Polish at all. ‘Hello, goodbye, I don’t understand’ and ‘Please don’t feed me any more food’ were the limit of my bilingual ability. If you’ve ever had Polish hospitality you’ll know why I needed the last phrase. The cop who had stopped us immediately headed over to my wife, Chris in the passenger seat.

He gave an almost comical double take when he realised she had no steering wheel, in front of her but recovered himself and sauntered round to my side. I wound the window down. He said something to me that is a mystery to this day so I smiled sweetly at him, selected the appropriate phrase and gave him my best Manchester Polish.

“Nie rozumie, mate”. I said, I don’t understand. I could see he was struggling not to arrest me on the spot for mangling his beautiful native language but he said something else equally mysterious. Chris is bilingual so she started to tell me what he had said until I gave her a warning jab with my elbow.

“Still nie rozumie mate.” I said.

“Dokumenti” he said. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t understand that, so I opened the glove compartment and gave him the passports, the car registration document, the insurance documents, the green card, our ferry tickets, our National Trust membership, RAC breakdown cover and anything else I could find, all in English and all as incomprehensible to him as he was to me.

He looked at the passports and realised he could not even pronounce my name. Oddly enough I understood him when

he handed me the documents back and told me to get out of his sight before he changed his mind.

The second time was a lot more difficult as the cops were a shady looking pair and we didn’t trust them one little bit. They wanted 300 zloty on the spot. Not only did we not have the cash, we suspected it would end up in their pockets rather that the Ministry of Transport’s coffers. They offered to drive one of us into the town to get some money. That would have been a bit of a feat on a Sunday night before cash machines had hit Poland. Chris proceeded to do the most magnificent roadside strop in Polish, slapping her forehead and beseeching heaven, ranting on about how her father was waiting for us on the other side of Poland, he had fought the Nazis for the likes of them, and this was all the thanks he had to have his daughter ripped off.

One of them looked at our passports and noticed that he could understand one word, Chris’s Polish middle name ‘Jadwiga’ . He nudged his mate and showed him saying “She’s Polish”. This seemed to change their attitude and we ended up giving them what little cash we had on us and thought we had got away with it lightly.

Anyway, this was now and I was sure I wasn’t speeding; in fact, I was driving very carefully through the Katowice maze looking for the turnoff for Krakow. The police car window opened and a little lollipop was waved at me. As I pulled over I wondered whether it was the car that was the problem. We didn’t have a lot of money at the time but we had wanted a new car. The best option for us was a new shiny black Lada Samara. That was fine, it wasn’t flashy, it wasn’t fast, it wasn’t particularly comfortable, but it was reliable and we got 80 odd thousand miles out of it before we traded it in. For a Skoda.

Anyway it wasn’t the lack of trendiness or the reliability that was an issue here. The newly constituted Russian mafia had found that Poland was a vast repository of free spare parts for their national car, the Lada. Free because they stole the cars

and just drove them over the Russian border to be broken up for parts, or sold on. The border was only about three hours away from where we were but we knew that our car would be very unlikely to be nicked simply because the steering wheel was on the wrong side. Not because that would make it easily identifiable but because we had seen the horror on the faces of Poles at the thought of driving a car with a steering wheel on the right. We were fairly confident that horror would be matched by their Russian neighbours, however larcenous.

Driving an English car around Poland at the time was sometimes a hazardous occupation. No one had ever seen a right hand drive before and the kids just staring open mouthed through the back window of the car in front of you could be very distracting. You could almost hear their parents telling them not to be silly; cars didn’t have steering wheels on the right. If Chris was checking where we were, people would jump out waving because they thought the driver had the map spread out all over the wheel while she read it intently, completely ignoring the road. Whole bus queues of heads turned as one as we drove past. Drunks swore to take the pledge.

So, Russian car thieves didn’t really cause us any sleepless nights I wasn’t in the best state to meet the police. We had been staying with Chris’s cousin Teresa and her husband Zbiszek in a little town in the South West of Poland for a few days. They had taken us to a new bar that had just been converted from a shop. We had a couple of beers and I had wanted to go to the loo. Chris insists I was tipsy. I insist I wasn’t but that might be because I had absorbed the Polish attitude that drinking anything that isn’t vodka doesn’t really count. The tiny toilet had been built into the corner where the stairs were. As I opened the door I found that they had tiled the whole place, floor, walls and ceiling with white tiles. I have a slight visual disability and find it difficult to judge distances in some circumstances. This was one of those circumstances.

There was a step up into the toilet and as I took it I failed to see that the newel post from the stair case above projected diagonally into the corner of the room. They had helpfully tiled the sides and bottom of it so the whole thing just blended into the walls and ceiling for me. The tiles met in an extremely sharp ceramic point that scored across my forehead leaving a four inch gash which immediately started to pour blood. I couldn’t have been in better company to injure myself. Chris’s cousin is a nurse and her husband was an ambulance driver at the time. They gave me immediate first aid and then drove me straight to hospital where they fast tracked me through A&E and introduced me personally to the doctor who stitched up my forehead without delay - with bright blue thread. It was certainly eye-catching. I looked like I’d just come off worst in a razor gang dust up.

Although I was not in the best shape to meet the Polish police, the same could not be said for Chris. We had been on diets before the holiday and were looking particularly svelte. Also, we tended to dress up a bit for Poland because people dress more smartly in the towns than they tend to in England. There is a Polish saying “Pawn everything. Show off.” What we didn’t realise until we got to Poland and the family pointed it out, was that Chris bore a fairly close resemblance to the wife of the Polish President. We had wondered why people looked at her a bit strangely but we kept getting really good seats in restaurants so we weren’t looking a gift horse in the mouth.

The other person in the car was my father in law. After my mother in law died in 1995 we took him back to Poland each year to see the family as he still had two sisters alive. Like a lot of his generation who had years of poor nutrition before and during the war particularly, he had dentures. He had just got a new set before we set off for Poland and they were causing some trouble. As soon as we arrived he asked me to go to the chemist. He was a native Pole and Chris is bilingual but somehow it was me who had to go to the chemist – it was good practise for my Polish I was told.

So I checked in my dictionary, went to the chemist and later proudly handed him a nail file and a tube of the Polish equivalent of Bonjela. After that, every so often on the back seat of the car while we were driving across Poland, he would take out his denture, nail-file off a bit that was causing him gyp, squirt it with Bonjela and stick it back in. I tended to use my side mirrors a lot.

Chris’s dad also had macular degeneration so although he did have some peripheral vision he was registered blind. We had a difficult journey across Germany. When they originally designed the autobahns, they were only wide enough for the odd Panzer column heading to the border. They were completely inadequate for the constant stream of massive lorries, motor homes, BMW motorbikes and the odd Trabant or Wartburg left over from before the Wall came down, that now trundled down them day and night. It was becoming difficult for the Porsches and Mercs to travel at 150 mph down the outside lane. This was clearly unacceptable so that year the Germans decided to put an extra lane on their autobahns. This entailed long delays while they blew up bridges, cleared away rubble, put in contra flows, closed off lanes and generally put the whole autobahn system in chaos just as we were crossing Germany from west to east. It also entailed, every time we got stuck in a jam, a loud voice coming from the back seat “Why we no go?”

Of course he could not see so he didn’t know why we had stopped. Unfortunately, apart from the fact that every car as far as I could see was stationary, neither did I. This was made worse as traffic started to move because it is an iron law of driving that if you are in queues, every other queue moves while yours stays stock-still. For some reason you discount the times that you are moving and they are not, but that was little help when the next question was “Why they go? Why we no go?” The first time I just said “I don’t know” and ”We’ll catch up in a minute” but somehow it seemed inadequate around the twentieth time and it certainly didn’t do anything for my already high stress levels. In fact they were only relieved by the fact that the exits on German autobahns are all marked ‘Ausfahrt’; a source of childish but constant amusement.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Katowice. The police car pulled up in front of us and a grim faced policeman got out and strode towards us. With a careful look at the passenger side he came to my window as I wound it down.

“Dokumenti” he demanded. No ‘prosze’ or ‘pan’ I noted, the polite please and sir that you get everywhere in Poland. Chris handed me the passports, the car registration document, the insurance documents, the green card, our ferry tickets, our National Trust membership, RAC breakdown cover and anything else she could find, all in English and all as incomprehensible to him as they were to his colleague years ago. My Polish was a bit better though. “What is the problem” I asked him in imperfect but understandable Polish – well everyone understands ‘problem’, it’s international even in my lousy accent. He didn’t answer but continued to riffle through the hieroglyphs on the pages we had given him, pausing only to peer into the car to compare the pictures in the passports with our guilty looking faces. I asked him again “Jaki jest problem?” He looked at me with mild disgust and said “Nie ma problema”, strode off back to his car and took off into the traffic without so much as a backward glance , or look in his mirror as far as I could see.

I turned to Chris, a bit shaken and said, “What the hell was that all about? I wasn’t speeding, why did he stop us?” Chris looked at me strangely and said “Why did he stop us? You mean why did he stop a mafia car with its steering wheel on the wrong side being driven towards the Russian border by a desperado with a massive slash across his forehead stitched together in bright blue thread, with the President’s wife apparently in the driving seat but reading a map while an old bloke files his teeth in the back seat shouting ‘Why we no go?’ I really can’t imagine.”

.

Connections

by Clare Fisher

I love how things connect, don’t you? Late summer, nearly autumn. I was in Southern France with my dear friend Sally. She and husband Andy live in a hamlet of some 100 souls, called Hounoux, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Their home is atop a knoll, and from the gardens you look down on the tawny sun-bleached landscape – for forty miles towards the Med to the east and round to the rise of the mountains, far to the south. We were chatting on the lower terrace of their suntrap of a garden.

Birds are my passion so I usually have my eyes on the skies, particularly here at Sally’s where all sorts of exotic birds come to visit – golden orioles, spotted flycatchers ,buzzards and sparrowhawks galore, and if I’m lucky,bee catchers with their turquoise, orange and lime green plumage. Sally indulges me and rejoices with me when we spot someone unusual.

So she was equally excited when, “Oh look Sally, to the east! That’s one big fella – likely a raptor of some kind.”

“Might be one of our eagles. Andy says he sees them a lot, but I always seem to miss them.”

It held the air. A distant form, flowing closer.

Then, “Look, look Sally, there’s another, no there are one - two - three – four - FIVE of them!”

The distant forms revealed themselves. Definitely eagles, but what sort?

“More Clare. There are more! Andy! Andy! Come and look!”

In all twelve eagles flew from the eastern haze into our view. They rode the air currents, not a wing flap between them. All too quickly, they followed the flow round our knoll on their migration to their over-wintering grounds in Southern Spain. But before we lost them from sight, their turn to the sun revealed them for what they were. The sun caught their ‘landing lights’ and we knew them for Booted Eagles. Booted Eagles have a patch of white feathers on their shoulders, and as they fly, this startlingly white patch flashes in the sunlight and hence the name ‘landing lights’.

Much rejoicing in Hounoux. Eagles, Eagles! A significant bird. The king of birds. He catches the sun, he rules the skies. His legends match with King Arthur.

Twelve. Twelve! On returning home I set about that number. Twelve: an abundant number, the first of the abundant numbers, for its factors (2 6 3 and 4) add up to more than its cardinal value. Twelve: a number which signifies completeness: the twelve months of the year; the twelve signs of the zodiac in so many cultures. Twelve is also significant in many world religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism. In antiquity the Twelve Olympians formed the principal gods of the pantheon; the Norse god Odin had twelve sons. King Arthur is said to have subdued 12 rebel princes. (And much more of course.)

And then. I belong to a Druid Grove in the New Forest and I was enthusing about my sighting of twelve significant birds, when lo and behold, it turned out that the grove was about to celebrate its twelfth year. Would I do a write up for the newsletter giving my personal connection to the twelve eagles and the twelve years of the grove.

So at the Winter Solstice 2016 the Grove had completed its own twelve year cycle. Winter Solstice: twelve years before, first light of Sunday 27^th December 2004. The newly nascent grove gathered to celebrate its first ceremony at Burley, up the hill and into the trees there: the founding group of druids opening the way for the twelve years to follow, each susurration of the seasons, each turn of the year marked and honoured.

I looked up that date to see what the natal chart foretold for the grove that day in December, little dreaming what I should find.

Energy. Force. Magnetism. Power. Vitality. A burst of energy had been travelling for 50,000 light years and on the morning of 27^th December 2004, as the grove celebrated its first ceremony together, that wave enveloped the earth. In that brief instant, came a wave of power equivalent to the light from our own star, the Sun, shining for half a million years. The source of the power was a magnetar: SGR 1806-20 on the other side of the Milky Way, 50,000 light years away. A magnetar, I learned, is a vast star, collapsed and condensed, which was, nevertheless, not quite massive enough to become a black hole. Magnetars have a magnetic field 1000 times more powerful than ordinary pulsars. When their crust twists and the magnetic fields attempt to realign themselves, it is like our tectonic plates shuddering and moving. But on a cosmic scale. The death zone of their tsunami, the ensuing shock wave stretches for several light years (!)

In this force field our grove had its beginning. The energy burst came from the region of Sagittarius – the archer. The flight of the arrow projecting our minds towards new horizons, expanding our awareness, entering new environments, absorbing new facts and points of view, expanding our consciousness and becoming aware of the basic laws of nature. We are forever on a quest to search for meaning, with faith in our ideals and holding always to our fundamental principles.

Visualise the bow shape on this cosmic scale arcing from the magnetar to Earth: how like the Rainbow Bridge, allowing energetic shifts and reality switches. This arc may have been in existence for but a moment in space-time, but its power remains for us to access as we seek entrance to another world.

The media reports of events surrounding Magnetar SGR 1806-20 relate its destructive power and danger – it knocked out satellites and electronic systems on Earth – but I found this event amazing, exciting, affirming. While those with other view points might quiver and quake at the power and might of this magnetic burst, I like to think we can celebrate our place in the Cosmos and align ourselves with the wonder of nature’s forces.

Connections. I love them.

With thanks to Google and Steven Forrest: The Inner Sky.

Bingo

by Helen Zanni

My ex-husband comes from a tiny village, 2000 feet up in the Italian pre Alps, close to the Swiss border near to Lake Maggiore. At the time we used to visit, there were still about 250 people living there, no shops, one bar, the church, a bus twice a day (but not on Sundays) and a “market” on a Thursday. The market consisted of a fruit and veg van, a general food van with salami and cheeses, and a clothes van selling the corduroy trousers and chequered flannel shirts favoured by the men of the village, plus a wide array of vests, knickers and woolly socks. And an occasional “Moroccan” who sold tat from the back of a car and called everybody Maria. As Maria is the most common name in Italy, he would strike lucky at least once each visit.

Each summer we would make the annual visit to see Mamma. My ex-pat husband would turn truly Italian for a couple of weeks and his mother would lovingly feed him with all sorts of concoctions, some of which were truly disgusting. Nervetti to name one! To be fair, she used to make her special “zucchini” for me. I have never been able to emulate that particularly tasty dish. I’m sure she left out a crucial ingredient in the recipe she gave me, just so that I couldn’t make it like Mamma.

He’d stay in the bar playing cards and I would be home with a good book – at first on my own and then with our daughter.

In later years I managed to get out and about a bit more with my daughter – adventures on the bumpy bus to go swimming in the often icy lake. Anybody who has swum in freshwater will know the breath-taking feeling – we were essentially swimming in melted snow from the top of the surrounding mountains.

As we used to visit in August, we were there for all the village festivals, which all consisted of food and alcohol and church. Church was during the day and as the sun was going down people would gather in the church square or down at the school, where there was a covered, but open air party area. Great for the unreliable mountain weather. The village survives under the patronage of Saint Lawrence, a martyr who seems to have been grilled on a gridiron with gladioli. 

Candles were bought and delivered to the priest in church for blessings. When the candles ran out, Anna, the church busybody, would go and gather armfuls of the donated candles and recycle them for sale once more. Enterprising and profitable for the priest.

When evening came, people took their places on the church wall or at specially set up tables in the square, ready for the main event – bingo!

That year, Giuseppe and I were on holiday and sat in the square ready for action. It was my first experience of bingo, Falmenta style. I bought my tickets and awaited the start of the main event.

Half the village were present along with various holidaymakers – ex-pats from Milan who had houses in the village and came up regularly to escape the city heat, others who had bought a house for the same reason, but who were generally regarded with more suspicion as they didn’t “come from the village”. They just though they were a cut above everybody else.

Bona, married to Graziella, but not from the village (even though he had settled there) started the proceedings. “Silenzio!” several times, as there was not much hope of that – everybody was talking too much. “Ok, we are playing for a line and the prize is a bottle of wine. First number 25.” “Have you got that?” “No, I haven’t, have you?” “No, I haven’t, what about you, Piera?” “No, I haven’t got it.” “I have!” “Ooh, you lucky thing, Lucia! We haven’t got it” “Silenzio! Silenzio! And the next number is 48.! “Have you got that?” “No, I haven’t. Have you?” It’s going to be a long night.

I was on four numbers, just waiting for number 19. “And the next number is – Silenzio! – number 19” “Cinquina!” I shout. “Ooh, l’inglesina has won!” “It’s Zepin’s wife!” Wine bottle duly delivered once the ticket had been checked – and yes, the English one could actually understand the Italian numbers and had won fairly and squarely.

“OK, so now we are going for the full house. The prize is a salami, a plant and some towels.” Really? So, the numbers are gradually ticked off my card and I’m waiting for …. “58”. “Tombola” I shout. “No, it can’t be! She’s won again!” “ luck of the English, that is.” “I only needed two.” “Oh, I was nowhere near – I needed four.” “What about you, Piera?” “Has he finished?”

Card checked, the prize is delivered – a huge salami, two green striped towels and a green palm like plant, which will not be imported illegally into England. Neither will the salami. At which point Giuseppe appears from where he’d been socialising across the square. “For God’s sake, if you win again, just don’t call it or you’ll be lynched!” Spoilsport! I could have cleaned up there.

A few years later our annual holiday was shared by my older sister, my brother-in-law and young nephew. St Lawrence’s day was duly celebrated with church, followed by the bonfire and bingo! My brother-in-law, John, having partaken of a few glasses of red, decided to be friendly to some visiting German holidaymakers. “Come and sit down! My sister-in-law speaks German.” Thanks, John. It’s been a while. We carried on a stilted conversation. My German became more fluid, sorry fluent, as a direct result of the amount of red wine imbibed. “Why not join in with the bingo?” says John “Helen will translate.”

Bona starts. “Ventisei” “Twenty six” “Sechsund-zwanzig” “Trentatre” “Thirty three” “Dreiunddreissig” “Sessantaquattro” “Sixty four” “Ummmm…..” “Elen, Vierundsechsig” comes from the table of teenagers behind us.

They all learn German at school rather than English (more use than English for the tourists).

And so we limped through a game of international bingo. We didn’t win. I didn’t get lynched and I didn’t have the dilemma of whether to import plants and salami into England. I guess the huge block of Parmesan which Mamma bought us every year doesn’t count, does it?