A youth, aged twenty, used to ask this riddle half a dozen times a day. – ‘I’ll tell you something you can’t do?’ – ‘What?’ – ‘Tickle a gnat’s arse with a telegraph pole.’ (At this, never-failing yells of laughter.) The gypsies seem to be quite rich, owning caravans, horses etc. yet they go on all the year round working as itinerant labourers and saving money. They used to say that our way of life (living in houses etc.) seemed disgusting to them, and to explain how clever they had been in dodging the army during the war. Talking to them, you had the feeling of talking to people from another century. I often heard a gypsy say, ‘If I knew where so and so was, I’d ride my horse till it hadn’t a shoe left to catch him’ – not a 20th century metaphor at all. One day some gypsies were talking about a noted horse-thief called George Bigland, and one man, defending him, said: ‘I don’t think George is as bad as you make out. I’ve known him to steal Gorgias’ [Gentiles’] horses, but he wouldn’t go so far as to steal from one of us.’

The gypsies call us Gorgias and themselves Romanies, but they are nicknamed Didecais (not certain of spelling). They all knew Romany, and occasionally used a word or two when they didn’t want to be understood. A curious thing I noticed about the gypsies – I don’t know whether it is the same everywhere – was that you would often see a whole family who were totally unlike one another. It almost seems to countenance the stories about gypsies stealing children; more likely, though, it is because it’s a wise child etc.

One of the men in our hut was the old deaf tramp we had met outside West Malling spike – Deafie, he was always called. He was rather a Mr F.’s aunt in conversation, and he looked just like a drawing by George Belcher, but he was an intelligent, decently educated man, and no doubt would not have been on the road if he could hear. He was not strong enough for heavy work, and he had done nothing for years past except odd jobs like hopping. He calculated that he had been in over 400 different spikes. The other man, named Barrett, and a man in our gang named George, were good specimens of the itinerant agricultural labourer. For years past they had worked on a regular round: lambing in early spring, then pea-picking, strawberries, various other fruits, hops, ‘spud-grabbing’, turnips and sugar beet. They were seldom out of work for more than a week or two, yet even this was enough to swallow up anything they could earn. They were both penniless when they arrived at Blest’s farm, and I saw Barrett work certainly one day without a bite to eat. The proceeds of all their work were the clothes they stood up in, straw to sleep on all the year round, meals of bread and cheese and bacon, and I suppose one or two good drunks a year. George was a dismal devil, and took a sort of worm-like pride in being underfed and overworked, and always tobying from job to job. His line was, ‘It doesn’t do for people like us to have fine ideas.’ (He could not read or write, and seemed to think even literacy a kind of extravagance.) I know this philosophy well, having often met it among the dishwashers in Paris. Barrett, who was 63, used to complain a lot about the badness of food nowadays, compared with what you could get when he was a boy. – ‘In them days we didn’t live on this fucking bread and marg., we’ad good solid tommy. Bullock’s ’eart. Bacon dumpling. Black pudden. Pig’s ’ead.’ The glutinous, reminiscent tone in which he said ‘pig’s ’ead’ suggested decades of underfeeding.

Besides all these regular pickers there were what are called ‘home-dwellers’, i.e. local people who pick at odd times, chiefly for the fun of it. They are mostly farmers’ wives and the like, and as a rule they and the regular pickers loathe one another. One of them, however, was a very decent woman, who gave Ginger a pair of shoes and me an excellent coat and waistcoat and two shirts.