THE POGGADO DROM
I read today of a Gypsy funeral in North Hampshire. A huge turnout, apparently – a hearse festooned with black plumes & drawn by two black horses, the dead man’s name picked out in flowers on both sides & plenty of Coopers, Wenmans, Lees & Smiths in attendance. Although it’s been nearly 20 years since I saw them last, there would have been people in that cortège that once I knew well.
My life has changed so much since those fraught days in the mid-‘80s when we were battling for a site for all those families trapped on the road. Their lives have changed so little: still that battle continues & still, in the face of even more resolute pressure to eliminate Gypsies as a distinct ethnic group, they resist & gain strength in solidarity.
I remember Ellen Collins. She was a remarkable woman. She taught herself to read & write as a girl back in the ‘waggon days’, when Gypsies still travelled in family groups in horse drawn living wagons. When I visited her of an evening she would be reading a newspaper, The Sun or The Daily Mirror & smoking a thin rollie in liquorice paper. Amongst a disparate, frequently embattled group of families, Ellen was universally respected & her counsel was sought by all. When she died of cancer in her early 70s, Gypsies came to her funeral from all over the South. Georgie, her son, honoured me greatly be asking me to attend her wake.
I wrote this poem – or an earlier version of it – at the time. I never shared it with Georgie or his sisters, Tilda & Olive. I couldn’t have competed with their choice of valediction for Ellen – Slim Whitman singing Rose Marie.
BEBEE ELLEN'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 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 Ellen 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 her pint of tea.
Arms folded and his eyes
unfocussed, he dreams awake,
pondering 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.
pic from: www.albertomelis.it/ nrom2.12.htm
10:52:11 PM 
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