01 September 2003

BEBEE HELEN'S MERRIPEN*         Sometimes they would stand in twos and threes at the edge of the road, arms folded, eyes unfocussed, expecting nothing but more of the same.   Dogs bark staccato over the pulse of the generators. Washing flickers between the vans, random semaphore, and clocks run slow.  Sun rises over the warehouse, sets behind the chain link fence.   But on Sunday old Aunt Helen died. Inside her trailer mourners fidget, watched by the gold haloed faces of her best Crown Derby plates. No-one speaks but half-words form in the gas fire's popping, in the wind around the broken door.   Holding flowers and a card he cannot read, brush-headed Johnny, the boxer hero, racks tears into a cushion. Sister Lizzie glances sideways, gnaws a fingernail.   Traffic raises curtains in the rain and Georgie stands where his mother used to sit at night with her rollies and a pint of tea. Arms folded, eyes unfocussed, he dreams awake - atavistic visions of the fires of Little Egypt, of the briar and the gorse, of slower tides than these that pull them all from history and into the new lands.   *AUNT HELEN'S DEATH in Anglo-Romani, the dialect of Britain's Gypsies.   The Romany population of Britain prevails in spite of widespread ignorance concerning their culture & the active informal & institutionalised prejudice that arises from it.  Relatively enlightened legislation passed in the late '60s concerning the provision of permanent sites that would not require Gypsies to abandon entirely the nomadic lifestyle that is at the centre of their culture was repealed by the last Conservative administration.  The present government shows no signs of recognising in practical ways the ethnicity of the nation's Romanies (whose numbers are on the increase) & they remain a target of legitimised racism    12:19:54 AM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2004 Dick Jones. Last update: 24/01/2004; 23:08:17.