A fair bit of England lies below the latitude of London. For many, the capital city is synonymous with the south: it’s the bottom terminus of the country, an encapsulation of the region. But London was a 90-minute train journey north from where I grew up, and many people never went there. “What, London? Nah, couldn’t live up there. Couldn’t do it mate.” They rarely explained why, so have a guess.
I grew up in Worthing, a West Sussex seaside town. To its north, the green slopes of the South Downs gently bulge: the three highest points in the area are the ancient hill forts of Chanctonbury, Cissbury and Highdown, where my parents and I would walk. Earthen ramparts and old flint mines were visible, but most of what had once been there had long since disappeared. You had to imagine a lot. This sowed in my mind an interest in the ghostlier traces of history, which has fed into my writing on my Gypsy and Traveller heritage. It’s a past that’s easy to ignore unless you know it’s there.
At the seafront, the Channel rasps away at flint and shingle beaches portioned into slithers by wooden groynes. When there’s a spring tide, the cycles of life and death are revealed when the shallow veil of the sea is drawn away: crabshells pecked hollow; eyeless dogfish corpses flung ashore by storms and squabbling gulls. The birds stalk rock pools, gleaning for winkles, blennies, crabs and worms.
The tide sometimes deposits large mounds of seaweed on the beach. They fester in the sun and produce an odour of decay, of the sea and of home. It’s not a nice smell but I miss it when I’m away. Like most people who grew up near the sea, my mood can dip severely when I spend too long inland, and I’ve always gone back to the sea to refocus when stress becomes overbearing. As a kid I’d sometimes collect limpets and mussels for stews. As an adult, I discovered the magic of winter swims, the way cold water seems to reset the body, and prime the mind for a more positive reassessment of its surroundings.
Growing up in the Gypsy community tends to add nuance to a childhood. Laurie Lee had described interwar Worthing as “a kind of Cheltenham-on-Sea, full of rich, pearl-chokered invalids”, but it no longer felt like that by my time. After the war, large council estates were built, the easy Victorian tourist money that once flooded the place was gone.
Tensions simmered. During the summers, Gypsies and Travellers from outside the area often pitched up by the seafront and recreation grounds. My grandparents had bought land outside a local village for our extended family. They were welcomed by flyers saying Gypsies weren’t wanted in the area, which got decades of uneasy coexistence off to a frosty start.
Sometimes I’d go ferreting with the older men of the family, Romanies who were proud to safeguard the old knowhow of living off the land. Like the women, they’d all done various trades in their lives: “rag and boning”, fruit picking, flower selling, lorry driving, tarmacking, buying and selling horses, gritting roads.
They believed that when one job dipped you could always pick up another and live. Their resourcefulness and optimism inspired me to believe I could survive.
• The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain by Damian Le Bas is published by Chatto. He will be speaking at Essex Book Festival on 7 March.
