At a rather less-than-well preserved 34, Conner is already a grandfather to four with another on the way.

An itinerant member of what is loosely called the Roma Gypsy community, he is shouting encouragement from an ancient stone bridge to the shallow, rock-strewn river below, where a series of younger men are attempting to control ponies beneath the vigilant gaze of officers from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The mounted men in the river move through the sunlight from the shade of one tree to another, across the shallows (hooves on wet stones, shouts and screams) to a deeper pool in the slower, black water where the horses rapidly become swallowed up to their necks.

The young men, flushed with testosterone, concentration and intense self awareness, pull tighter on the horses’ reins, pulling the beasts’ heads back to produce a series of whinnies and screeches that mingle with the noises of the crowd that stands, transfixed but in good voice, all around.

But for the football shirts upon their backs and the luminous tabards of the animal welfare officers, this could be practically any point since June 1505 – that being the date of the first mention of the Roma – the Gypsies – in England.

Conner is not thinking about that. He is not thinking of the history, the animal welfare, the fact that he is at one of the last remaining horse fairs in the country or even the cripplingly low life expectancy (average 49) he and other male British Gypsies have to endure today in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. (Women are, interestingly, more comparable in their life spans with the sedentary community).

He is more interested that a cousin of his is about to take his turn to “break” his pony; a champagne-colored beast with the most spectacular green eyes. Not tall but muscular, Conner pulls himself over the parapet of the bridge and pushes his cap onto the back of his head.

A half-smoked Lambert and Butler cigarette hangs from his mouth. On the back of his hand is a tattoo of a falcon, swooping from thumb (wrapped in dirty bandage) towards the knuckle of his first finger. He leans forward to within a millimeter of the tipping point, his feet revealed as sockless within the battered white sneakers as he moves to position.

His cracked lips part, silent, as though the words had not arrived in time to be assembled into a sentence. He pauses, looking down at his cousin, back to the shore, packed with Gypsy families, back to the younger man. The lips part again, this time he bellows in the tawny Irish brogue of the British Gypsy the almost indecipherable: “Cuon ta fuckin’ get in tha bawnie ketch,” and then, as though this encouragement were the conclusion to some magical incantation, he turns to me, smiles and spits on the ground.

Welcome to Appleby Horse Fair, the temporal favela which establishes itself but once a year in this north English town as the epicentrer of British Gypsy life: 2008 goes medieval, warts and all.

Conner is, of course, classic Pikey – a term that requires further explanation if we are to understand what it means to be a British Gypsy today.

Of all the terms of abuse daily directed towards towards the Roma in Britain – or Romanchal as they are officially called here – this word, the most abusive, is also the most widely used and tinged with a double, almost multi-purpose, meaning that reveals the plight of this still extremely marginalized culture.

To call someone Pikey was once a perfectly reasonable phrase. A pike was, in the southern English dialect, a toll road and thus a Pikey or a Piker was one who lived on the road. It was a synonym for Gypsy, itinerant and traveller.

In recent years however, the attempts of the left-of-center New Labour administration to cut the endemic class divisions in Britain have led if anything to an increasingly aspirational and divergent population where celebrity and success are seen as desirable and the lack of material wealth is no less a crime than at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s pogroms against the slothful.

Britain hates itself more than ever, and most of all it hates those unable or unwilling to try to get rich, “those who won’t pay their way,” as those who seek to justify their ill-informed slurs against the Roma usually put it.

Despite the seeming growth in intensity of the hatred in recent years, the abuse of the Roma in Britain is, as you might guess, nothing new.

As has happened since 1505, the Roma are today seen as the outsiders, the lowest of the low; to be Roma — to be Gyps — is to be Pikey; to be Pikey is to be the scum beneath the waves.

Perhaps hatred has simply had a linguistic rebirth. The world “pikey” has recently appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary as both descriptive of a Gypsy and a term of out-and-out abuse. “Pikey, n, A vagrant, a tramp; a traveller, a Gypsy; (hence more generally) a lower-class person, regarded as coarse or disreputable. Also attrib. or as adj.: designating, relating to, or characteristic of such people; squalid, disreputable, vulgar.”

It is the appropriation of a culture – the Roma culture – by the forces of social contempt.

To look down on those who do not work hard, who do not aspire or achieve greatly is at the core of the social divides that prop up the capitalist West. People aspire as much out of fear of failure as of a desire to succeed.

But when capitalist society’s contempt for underachievers (defined by their lack of sedentary property through poverty) meshes conveniently with a culture (Gypsies’ lack of sedentary property through choice), the resulting snobbery must surely be classed as a form of racism, intentional or not.

Replace the modern connotation of the word piker – with a more familiar racist chants and you can understand the way in which the Roma, Conner, must feel.

Travellers, are the last group one can abuse in contemporary culture and still expect to raise a smile in polite company.

Guy Ritchie’s (Mr Madonna for those with better things to do) 2000 film Snatch featured Brad Pitt as an Irish Gypsy boxer named Mickey “The Pikey” who was “harder than the nails in a Gypsy’s coffin.”

The film included such lines as “I fucking hate Pikeys” and “the dirty Pikey scum,” yet is regarded as a comedy, albeit a dark one.

The film took nearly $30,000,000 in the US and £12,000,000 in the UK. That is, by anyone’s reckoning, a popular film to weave derogatory cultural stereotypes into its story line. If the comments had been directed against the Black or Asian communities do we suppose this would have been acceptable?

Of course the threat to the culture is frequently more serious than that, and takes on an insidious nature that makes the continuation of the Gypsy lifestyle more difficult, more tenuous.

In the 1960s legislation was passed by the Government to make temporary
encampments illegal.

In August 1977 Traveller children stopping in the London borough of Croydon applied to go to school, but were refused by the Local Education Authority, which said it would not take in any “roadside” children.

And in 1964 the leader of the Labour group on Birmingham Council referred to Gypsies when he called for “the extermination of the impossibles.”
Given that half a million Roma were gassed in the Holocaust just twenty years before this was a spectacular but not uncharacteristic assault.

Today healthcare, education and basic facilities are made difficult and inaccessible for the community and they are therefore encouraged to cash in their caravans and trailers, and become sedentary – to leave their culture behind.

Indeed the situation seems little moved from the reign of Queen Mary I Tudor, when the Egyptians Act of 1554 removed the threat of punishment to Roma, purely on racial grounds, if they abandoned their “naughty, idle and ungodly life and company” and adopted a settled lifestyle.

Presently in the UK, 200,000 cling on to their culture by their fingertips.

In his fascinating book The Destruction of Memory (2006) Robert Bevan argues for United Nations’ recognition of the phenomenon of cultural genocide.

His examples are specific to the destruction of architecture in war zones, the apparent efforts of the Bosnian Serbs to remove all mosques from the country as well as the Muslim population.

But if we believe the validity of this argument – that assaults on culture are the same as genocide – are the pressures placed on Conner, swinging from this ancient bridge at this ancient Gypsy festival, any less brutal?

***

Ignorance abounds about the culture of the gypsies — and about whether their lifestyle even warrants the title “culture”.

So what, indeed who, are the Gypsies? What is the story of the Roma, how did Conner come to be here, speaking to me? And how did we get to the point where this man and his people are so hated?

The greatest single clue to the origin of the Roma is the Haplogroup H-M82 Y chromosome in the community’s men. This mutation, found most abundantly in the Indian subcontinent, seems to confirm what much of the language and more material culture of the Roma suggests.

It is believed that the people that would go on to become the Gypsies of modern-day Europe were soldiers, a warrior caste in the north of India that found themselves cast in a wide diaspora first, perhaps 1000 years ago, into the remnants of the Byzantine Empire, and then further, on the wave of Islamic expansion into central Europe. They have mixed extensively with the native European population, but despite their slow ethnic assimilation have nearly always been despised by the sedentary peoples who have spied at them with suspicion – whether it be from castle battlement or suburban curtain.

Those other people without a land, the Jews, and the Roma have parallel experiences in Europe. Both had a uniquely alien racial background. Both were ostracized from society and both found careers open to their particular lifestyles that have molded their fate in Europe and beyond. For the Jews their freedom from the restrictions on Christian usury opened a career in money lending. For the Gyspies it was their preference for peripatetic living that started their careers in travelling fairs and mobile skills and crafts that would be taken from settlement to settlement.

Either way, both groups lived outside society, either in the ghetto or in encampments on the edge of town, arousing suspicion and resentment.

Of course I asked Conner – after he had climbed down from the parapet – why he thinks people hate gypsies.

“Because they think we damage things, because they believe we are likely to thieve.”

Had he experienced much abuse himself?

“For sure”.

I discovered that his first wife, Maggie, had died giving birth to their forth child on a traveller site (where medical care is often inaccessible) and he had raised the family himself with his second wife, Theresa.

It is the sort of tragedy that stokes the fierce loyalty of a father and Conner was no exception. He launches into a description of the abuse he has seen his children suffer.

“They are spat at, they are called names. They don’t want to go into the towns because of the names they are called. They were at the school but they would return home covered in spit and paint and I couldn’t stand for that.

“Sure that happened to me. It happens to us all. It’s how the Gadje [Roma term for sedentary people] do for us.”

Conner stares into the trees on the hillside above the village and draws heavily on his cigarette.

Children spat at, for their ethnicity, in Britain, in 2008?

Just over 15 years, before a 19-year-old black teenager was waiting for a bus in South London when he was set upon and stabbed to death by a gang of white youths. The murder of Stephen Lawrence that April day and the subsequent accusations of inaction from the police led to the most drastic overhaul of the British establishment to improve what at the time was seen to be institutional racism. But no emphasis was placed on the Romanichals.

“They treat us like animals. The people, the police, the councils, like animals,” Conner said.

“I’m not saying that there is none (sic) bad in traveller camps but it’s like anywhere, you get good and bad and because we is Roma we are treat the same see. They fear us and hate us.”

Anecdotes of traveller brutality and supposed fierceness could be straight out of the Dark Ages. It has been mythologized and has taken on an almost caricature.

For the same reason that Grendel triggered the imagination of those people huddled around ninth century fires to listen of beasts in Beowulf, so every account of traveller brutality, environmental destruction or theft is picked up by the tabloid press, and more often the local rumour mill, and confirms the horrors at the fringes of society for those sitting at the breakfast tables of middle England.

***

Sitting on the bridge watching the horses splash in the water below, Conner is taking part in the Appleby Horse Fair. Every June since the reign of James the First the horse fair has been held in this quiet village in the north of the country. A festival of travellers who come together to trade horses, to celebrate their culture.

Yet even here, in the strongest expression of British Romanichal culture, there are pressures to abandon the Roma way of life.

The animal welfare officers of the RSPCA are on hand because last year a young horse slipped and drowned. It was further grist to the mill of the middle Englanders who saw this as just a barbaric anachronistic event by a barbaric and needlessly anachronistic culture.

Despite this, Roma culture is proudly, scruffily, in the face of adversity, growing — from15,863 observed caravans in England in July 2005, according to official UK Government figures, to 17134 in July 2007.

Unless something fundamental within British society changes, Conner and his family are certain to continue their lives of poor education, poor healthcare, poor treatment, mockery and abuse.

As he swings down and calls to his cousin from this bridge, at this ancient event, part of a vibrant, growing community that is shunned, I cannot imagine how the Romanichals will fare in another 500 years. Well, I hope.

When the gadje replaced their wagons with automobiles, they called it progress. When the Roma did the same thing, they called it a pity.
— Dr. Ian F. Hancock, sociologist.