The Stopping Places
by Damian le Bas, Chatto and Windus, 320pp, £15
Where have they all gone? Well might you ask. There was a time when the Gypsies were a permanent feature of our landscape and a staple of our literature. Think of the remarkable figure of Meg Merrilies in Sir Walter Scott’s wonderful tale Guy Mannering or the Gypsies who frighten Harriet in Jane Austen’s Emma.
Or the various Gypsy folk who regularly feature in the works of 20th-century authors as different as Iris Murdoch and Enid Blyton. It is decades since I have read Blyton, or pored over her illustrations, but the pictures of those horse-drawn caravans and the look of the Gypsies she wrote about linger in the mind. But now, in modern Britain, Gypsies and Travellers are hardly visible; though, as this interesting book makes clear, they have not gone away, even if they have changed a great deal.
