Dr Gerald Porter was born in 1946 and educated at Oxford. His interests lie in the field of popular culture, especially popular song, and he has written a book on the English Occupational Song. He has been lecturer at the University of Oulu, Åbo Academy and the University of Turku, and is at present senior lecturer at the University of Vaasa. He is docent in English literature at the Department of Modern Languages in Umeå, Sweden. He has recently been actively introducing popular culture into English studies in both schools and universities, and has set up a cultural studies website at the University of Umeå (http://www.eng.umu.se/culturec).
The travelling life has never been part of a British
national mythology in the way it has in America,
where “road movies” like Thelma and Louise
are a Hollywood standard and people move house
every five years on average. This mobility
has given rise to a new term, “snowbirders,” to describe Americans who
live in mobile homes and move round the country from job to job.
The growing number of snowbirders are often lumped together with “downshifters”
(people who accept a cut in pay etc. to improve their quality of life,
by moving to the country, for example) as a threat to the consumer economy.
In Britain, people’s lives have been complicated by new patterns of employment, where someone from the Liverpool area getting a job in London will often move into a bedsitter in Earl’s Court rather than transfer their whole family south where living and housing costs are far higher. This sense of a home rooted in a whole network of local relations is probably more widespread than the overworked idea that “an Englishman's home is his castle’.
Whatever the reason, popular suspicion of those who do not “settle down” has a long history. Girls still skip to the rhyme:
My mother said/ I never should/ play with the gypsies in the wood;One Romany, Ian Hancock, comments, “Gypsies are portrayed as being immoral, as thieves and sex maniacs with wagons, earrings, bonfires, black curly hair and scars around the eyes. You can even go into Safeways and buy a Gypsy mask. It's the only ethnic group whose national dress is a Halloween mask.’
If I did,/ she would say,/ “Naughty girl to run away.”
By association, this stereotype is often extended
to Irish travellers (“tinkers”). Present day nomads are likely to be other
groups (known collectively as travellers) who find life in a modern city
intolerable. These include the New Age travellers, latter-day hippies who
drive round in the summer in ancient vehicles and organise impromptu rock
festivals. These, and punk “tribes” like the Dongas, are the subjects
of periodic moral panics in the mass media because their parents are often
white and middle class. A central feature of all travellers’ lives
is conflict with authority in the form of bailiffs, police and other local
officials. They are constantly being moved on by the police, as the
singer Ewan MacColl recorded in one of his most famous songs about the
“travelling people”:
Born in the middle of the afternoon
In a horsedrawn carriage on the old A5.
The big twelve-wheelers shook my bed,
“You can”t stay here,’ the policeman said,You’d better get born in some place else;
Move along, get along,
Move along, get along,
Go! Move! Shift!’
Born on the common by a building site
Where the ground was rutted by the trail of wheels,
The local Christian said to me,
“You”ll lower the price of property.’
Roma children still have no enforcable rights
to education in Britain or America and as a result, a quarter of Romanies
are illiterate. Yet travellers have been among the most important transmitters
of our great narrative songs, such as the big ballads known in Scotland
as the “muckle sangs”. The most famous Roma was the Scottish folksinger
Jeannie Robertson, who lived in an Aberdeen council house until 1975, where
a constant stream of visitors came to hear and record her. Most Roma
are now settled: many live near my home town, Cambridge, and when I was
a student I used to work beside them on a local farm, sorting and packing
potatoes. Not only did I meet nothing but friendship and kindness
from them, but their constant singing while they worked aroused in me an
interest in singing which has never left me. The nomads of Britain
are not marginal groups but represent a key element of our national life.