Blackberry Wine

20

Pog Hill, Summer 1977

JOE’S NEW DEFENCES WERE NOT THE ONLY CHANGE AT POG HILL that year. Nether Edge had visitors. Jay still went to the Edge every couple of days, attracted by its promise of gentle dereliction, of things left to rot in peace. Even at the peak of that summer he never abandoned his favourite haunts; he still visited the canal side and the ash pit and the dump, partly to look for useful things for Joe and partly because the place still fascinated him. It must have attracted the gypsies, too, because one day there they were, a shabby foursome of caravans, squared together like pioneers’ wagons against the enemy. The caravans were grey and rusting, axles sagging under the weight of accumulated baggage, doors hanging by a string, windows whitening with age. The people were equally disappointing. Six adults and as many children, clad in jeans or overalls or cheap bright market-stall nylons, they gave off an air of distant grubbiness, a visual extension of the smells which floated from their camp, the permanent odour of frying grease and dirty laundry and petrol and garbage.

Jay had never seen gypsies before. This drab, prosaic group was not what his reading had prepared him to expect. He had imagined horse-drawn wagons with outlandishly decorated sides, dark-haired dangerous girls with daggers in their belts, blind crones with the gift of far seeing. Certainly Joe’s experiences with gypsies seemed to confirm this, and as Jay watched the caravans from his vantage point above the lock he felt annoyed at their intrusion. These seemed to be ordinary people, and until Joe confirmed their exotic lineage Jay was inclined to think they were nothing but tourists, campers from the south walking the moors.

‘No, lad,’ Joe said as he pointed out the distant camp, a pale string of smoke rising from a tin chimney into the sky of Nether Edge. ‘They’re not trippers. They’re gypsies all right. Mebbe not proper Romanies, but gyppos, you might call em. Travellers. Like I was once.’ He squinted curiously through cigarette smoke at the camp. ‘Reckon they’ll stay the winter,’ he said. ‘Move on when spring comes. No-one’ll bother em downt Edge. No-one ever goes there any more.’

Not strictly true, of course. Jay considered Nether Edge his territory, and for a few days he watched the gypsies with all the resentment he had felt against Zeth and his gang that first year. He rarely saw much movement from the caravans, though sometimes there was washing strung out on nearby trees. A dog tethered to the nearest of the vehicles yapped shrilly and intermittently. Once or twice he saw a woman carry water in large canisters to her vehicle. The water came from a kind of spigot, set into the square of concrete by the dirt track. There was a similar dispenser on the other side of the camp.

‘Set it up years back,’ explained Joe. ‘Gypsy camp, with water an lectricity laid on. There’s a pay meter down there that they use, an a septic tank. Even rubbish gets collected once a week. You’d think more people’d use it, but they don’t. Funny folk, gypsies.’

The last time Joe remembered gypsies on the waste ground was about ten years previously.

‘Romanies, they were,’ he said. ‘You don’t get many proper Romanies nowadays. Used to buy their fruit and veg from me. There wasn’t many that’d sell to em in them days. Said they were no better than beggars.’ He grinned. ‘Well, I’m not sayin everythin they did was dead-straight honest, but you’ve got to get by when you’re on the road. They worked a way to beat the meter. It took fifty pences, see? Well, they used water and lectricity all summer, but when they’d gone and council came round to empty the meter, all there was at bottom was a pool of water. They never did find out how they’d done it. Lock hadn’t been touched. Nothin seemed to have bin interfered with at all.’

Jay looked at Joe with interest.

‘So how did they do it?’ he enquired curiously.

Joe grinned again and tapped the side of his nose.

‘Alchemy,’ he whispered, to Jay’s annoyance, and would say no more on the subject.

Joe’s tales had renewed his interest in the gypsies. Jay watched the camp for several days after that, but saw no evidence of secret goings-on. Eventually he abandoned his lookout post at the lock to hunt more interesting game, searching for comics and magazines from the dump, combing the railway for its everyday leavings. He worked out a good way of getting free coal for Joe’s kitchen stove. There were two coal trains a day, rumbling slowly along the line from Kirby Main. Twenty-four trucks on each, with a man sitting on the last one to make sure no-one tried to climb onto the wagons. There had been accidents in the past, Joe said; kids who’d dared each other to jump onto the trains.

‘They might look slow,’ he said darkly, ‘but every one of them trucks is a forty-tonner. Never try to get up on one, lad.’

Jay never did. Instead he found a better way, and Joe’s stove lived on it all through that summer into autumn, when they finally closed down the line altogether.

Every day, twice a day, just before the arrival of the train, Jay would line up a row of old tin cans on the side of the railway bridge. He arranged them in pyramids, like coconuts at a shy, for maximum appeal. The bored workman on the last truck could never resist the challenge they presented. Every time the train passed by he would lob chunks of coal at the cans, trying to knock them off the bridge, and Jay could always count on at least half-a-dozen good-sized pieces of coal each time. He stored these in an empty three-gallon paint tin, hidden in the bushes, and every few days, when this was full, he delivered the coal to Joe’s house. It was on one of these occasions, when he was fooling about by the railway bridge, that he heard the sound of gunfire from Nether Edge and froze, the coalbox dropping from his hand.

Zeth was back.