Christmas Eve and the ground is white this morning. Not deep crisp even snow, but a hard frost. Just right for an eviction.
Have you ever been to the eviction of a Gypsy encampment? The police attend to see that there is no breach of the peace.
Once in Sandhills, a Gypsy couple were arrested and taken down the nick, and the bailiffs proceeded to pull the caravan off, preparatory to taking it to the pound. They couldn’t have known there were two little girls asleep inside. Of course, the beds would have been down at that time of the morning.
Apparently the stove toppled over.
A caravan burns in seconds. It makes a spectacular funeral pyre.
We all know about Gypsy funerals. A quaint custom, torching the vardo.
Now it is custom and practice to check inside, to see that the stoves are out and cold before the eviction is started.
So the stoves are cold and everyone is shivering. Someone will have done the health needs assessment before the eviction, but we know one family has a toddler with a ventricular septal defect, and the health visitor has arranged open access to the paediatric department at the nearby hospital. Just in case.
The family is registered with a local GP.
The locals have been giving them water.
The other children aren’t old enough to understand that anything unusual is going on, so there is no running around and screaming. And it is early in the morning so the men are there to drive the rigs.
No possibility of repeating the incident with the Irish family, where the police made the mistake of trying to hurry things and asked a fifteen year old to shift the van.
You can’t tell the age of these Gypsy kids, you know, and anyway you would have thought he should have been in school.
Suffice it to say he couldn’t have seen his eight year old cousin behind the van when he backed it up and everyone had been so shocked by the kid’s death that they let them stay another week.
No everyone is being very careful today, and the council’s solicitor has been able to convince the magistrate that the Human Rights Act applies equally to the householders who park their cars on this piece of land.
So the families will be moving on.
One of the bailiff’s men temporarily breaks ranks. He strides up to the woman cuddling the little girl.
‘Now you, now you…’ his voice lowers to a mumble. ‘You…. look after that baby of yours. OK.’
And he stands back as the rig moves on.
Comments