‘They come out of habit, like their grandparents and great grandparents,’ an old farmer from Penrith, who’d been coming to the Appleby Horse Fair all his life, told me. ‘The young people come to court. They’re scattered throughout the four corners of Britain the rest of the year and Appleby is the only place where they can meet up.’ Perhaps he was thinking of gypsies and travellers long ago because the gypsy and travelling youths on Gallows Hill outside Appleby now don’t look constricted, dressed in Hawaiian shirts, the girls in frilly flamenco skirts, often their midriffs bare, dresses emblazoned in silver, overweening plate earrings. On the evening of 11 June, St Barnabas’s Day – ‘Barnaby Bright, the longest day and the shortest night’ – Gallows Hill beside the Roman road, where the last execution took place in 1828, was a city to itself; modern, dashing, silver caravans, yes, but also the bow-topped Leeds wagons, the rectangular Reading wagons, the ornate Bill Wright’s pot carts. Painted bouquets of cornflowers and pansies on some of them. Arabesques of gold on a liquorice background. A recurrent motif of golden nightingales, golden, joyous horses, black grapes. Then, among all this flamboyance, a sudden plain aquamarine vardo.
Cages with blue budgies, cinnamon canaries in them placed above caravans. Clusters of pansies in urns at caravan doors. A ghetto blaster on a 1975 van for sale united the entire scene in one song:
‘You don’t have an ounce of Lee blood in you, Nathan,’ one man, with a daintily knotted kerchief around his neck, accused another. The name Lee was apparently competitive, fortunetelling Lees advertised everywhere. A Kathleen Lee, an Annabelle Lee. A Gypsy Lee from Blackpool, one from South Wales. A Lee whose sign declared her great-aunt had informed Lady Bowes Lyon she’d become the Queen of England. I had my fortune told by Gypsy Rose Mary Lee. ‘You’ve been to America and will be going back soon.’ I was due to go to Alabama shortly.
A woman with face dark as blackened bananas emerged from a Reading wagon to stand against the sunset; a boy, against virtually the same stage of sunset, crawled around on his hunkers in pursuit of a goat and its kid; a boy admired the ring of a girl in a frilly flamenco skirt, holding her finger.
At the bottom of Boroughgate, the main street in Appleby, young evangelists from local villages had ensnared a few Romanies with renditions of hymns like ‘The Old Rugged Cross’. There was a notice on the front of one of the vardos on Gallows Hill saying: ‘I have decided to follow Jesus.’ There’s going to be a conference in Airdrie, beginning 27 July, for travellers who’ve found the ‘truth of Jesus’ and a similar, more global one beginning 3 August in Amsterdam.
Very often gypsy women withhold baptism from their children until they get to Appleby and then have it performed, either in St Lawrence’s Church or in Appleby Catholic Church under the sanction of the wooden Lady of Appleby, her child beside her and she dressed in blue and mulberry, the happy portent of an apple in her right hand.
I had arrived in Appleby on the Settle–Carlisle train, coming through womblike valleys, dramatic river-shapes of rocks on the hills, white hawthorn always growing in scintillating isolation, boarded-up houses suddenly thrust up at intimate distances to the railway line. Eric Tracey, Bishop of Wakefield, a famous pastor to railwaymen in Liverpool, dropped dead while photographing a steam train on Appleby platform in May 1978, just before the fair.
There is an almost lavender glow from the red sandstone houses on Appleby’s slanted main street, lime trees lining it, bloomers of leaves at their base. One house is not made of red sandstone. It is called the White House, perhaps because many of George Washington’s relatives went to school in Appleby. John Robinson, secretary to the Lord Treasurer for some years at the end of the eighteenth century, lived here. The expression ‘Before you can say Jack Robinson’ comes from his antics in parliament. At the top of the street, the south of it, stands a Norman castle, in whose grounds, among the many examples of rare breeds and species, is a collection of disabled owls and a particularly lavishly bedecked peacock who keeps hissing and brandishing her feathers at entrapped pheasant fowl and salmon favorelles. The distance between the cross at the top of the street and that at the bottom was once a distance of punishments, men and women whipped between the posts.
To begin with a Danish settlement, Appleby was burned twice in the Borders wars. It was the strongly royalist Lady Anne Clifford who restored this ‘poor village with a ruinous castle’, creating the beautiful enclave of widows’ houses off the main street, defying the Commonwealth to give special attention to the Norman church of St Lawrence. Perhaps because of the success of her work with the church Carlisle Cathedral gave its organ to St Lawrence’s in 1684. In mid-Victorian times it was moved from the west end of the church to the east end, some of the pipes cut to fit under a lower ceiling. The floods of 1968 partly ravaged the organ and in 1976 it was renovated by Nicholsons of Malvern, aluminium pipes placed above the metallic grey ones to restore them to their original height, put back in its original position, this time on an eighteen-inch plinth, the first recital to mark the cultural redress given with aplomb, by all accounts, by Francis Jackson, organist to York Minster. On 12 June 1989 the church clock was stopped, the six bells with their ancient Whitechapel peal, which have been giving trouble, being sent back to Whitechapel to be recast.
From the bell tower of the church, when Appleby was county town of Westmorland, the vicar who was also mayor used to spy with a telescope, during Fair Week, to help the police. Now that Appleby is part of Cumbria (although officially it retains Westmorland in its name) there is a different style of vigilance, police coming from all over the country, from as far away as Whitehaven and Kendal.
An Irish traveller from Wolverhampton suggested to me that the powerful police presence was due to the fact that two famous traveller boxers had planned to take part in an illegal fist fight. Large sums of money would be involved by way of gambling, but gambling there would be anyway, games of ‘spinning’ outside the Grapes Inn by the river Eden, a seventeen-year-old boy said to have collected £6000 under his jersey this way, coins tossed in the air, heads or tails supported. If the games by the river were eventually stopped, they continued all over Gallows Hill.
In the days when the vicar was mayor, in the early 1970s, horses were raced up Boroughgate. Further back, thirty years ago, the gypsies used to camp on the roadsides leading into Appleby, coal smoke coming from the caravans, creating an industrial-type smog over the hawthorn trees and the corn chamomile.
But traditions continue defiantly. On the morning of 13 June horses were taken on a little circuit, through the shoulder-deep part of the river, under the bridge; a gypsy in bermudas enthroned on a strawberry roan mare for the ritual. A little boy chased a skewbald pony by the river edge, squirting him with Jeyes Fluid. Fairy Liquid and Jeyes Fluid were used to shampoo after the saunter through the water. Some heavily tattooed skinheads, after having gone for a swim themselves, borrowed some Jeyes Fluid to lather their heads and torsos.
Later in the day, on Gallows Hill, horses that had just been sold were shod by a blacksmith in a jockey cap. A little sand-coloured old man, in an adjacent spot, his shirt off, bent an iron bar and put it back into shape again, rippling his arm muscles as a prelude to his act. ‘I’m not skint. Me daddy left me six hundred thousand, but where he left it I don’t know,’ he declared by way of explanation for the hat placed, for some reason, beside a copy of The Modern Woman’s Home Doctor. Staffordshire and Chelsea pottery was sold, china ensembles of Italianate gypsies. A little girl offered to sell me a tame magpie perched on her fingers, but said she’d have to wait until her father returned to decide on a true price. Three little gypsy children rode off on a Shetland gelding they’d just purchased for £200.
In the late afternoon there was harness racing in St Nicolas’ Holme, the horses and chariots, with the jockeys in ambers and clarets, speeding around under a wooded hill, the bookies from Carlisle, Bishop Auckland, Dalton-in-Furness standing on milk crates, the stench of venison burgers in the air.
Already that evening, although the main trading day is not officially until the final Wednesday, much of the trading already done, vans and caravans were leaving from Gallows Hill. This city, against the azure Cumbrian mountains, however spectacular at its unpredictable zenith, was a wondrously transient one.
An Irish traveller tried to sing a song with a vaguely Republican message to some Romany ladies in the Grapes Inn. The ladies walked away. ‘It’s a lovely song really. But me voice is broke,’ said the man by way of apology when his audience had deserted him.
But another Irish traveller, his shirt off and his expansive belly protruding, saved the day by singing a country and western number which moved everyone. ‘I cry, Mister. There’s something in my eye.’
‘I’ll race you in Woolwich,’ a man told his friend as they were parting at the end of the evening.
Outside in the night there was a jack-o’-lantern flash as a gypsy man began filming his wife and children on the river bank. ‘Do you think you’re from the BBC?’ his wife shouted as he ordered them into a stricter proximity. On Gallows Hill quieter groups still sat around fires, children reluctant to withdraw from their elders. An accordion started up with a few bars of ‘Spancil Hill’ and then was silent. A boy rode a long-tailed cob in the dark, high above the allyssum-draped rock gardens of Appleby-in-Westmorland, among the caravans, the strewn-about harnesses, the alternative, makeshift gardens – the little urns of pansies.
The farmer from Penrith had told me scornfully about people who came to Gallows Hill from the Northern towns, ‘travellers for a week’. Maybe these were some of the people I saw boarding a private bus for Middlesbrough the following morning.
At the Jobcentre window a group of itinerant boys were studying the advertisements for posts as plumber’s mates or labourers. I thought of another line from the country and western number the previous night. ‘OK, Mister. It only lasts for a while.’