About the Book

‘I needed to get to the stopping places, so I needed to get on the road. It was the road where I might at last find out where I belonged.’

Damian Le Bas grew up surrounded by Gypsy history. His great-grandmother would tell him stories of her childhood in the ancient Romani language; the places her family stopped and worked, the ways they lived, the superstitions and lore of their people. But his own experience of life on the road was limited to Ford Transit journeys from West Sussex to Hampshire to sell flowers.

In a bid to understand his Gypsy heritage, the history of the Britain’s Romanies and the rhythms of their life today, Damian sets out on a journey to discover the atchin tans, or stopping places – the old encampment sites known only to Travellers. Through winter frosts and summer dawns, from horse fairs to Gypsy churches, neon-lit lay-bys to fern-covered banks, Damian lives on the road, somewhere between the romanticised Gypsies of old, and their much-maligned descendants of today.

In this powerful and soulful debut, Damian le Bas brings the places, characters and stories of his to bold and vigorous life.

About the Author

Damian Le Bas was born in 1985 to a long line of Gypsies and Travellers. He was raised within a network of relations who taught him how to ride and drive ponies, tractors and trucks, sing melancholy cowboy ballads and speak the thousand-year-old Romani tongue. He was awarded scholarships to study at Christ’s Hospital and the University of Oxford. Between 2011 and 2015 he was the editor of Travellers’ Times, Britain’s only national magazine for Gypsies and Travellers. The Stopping Places is his first book.

Damian lives and works mostly in Kent, with his wife (the actor Candis Nergaard); and Sussex, where he grew up and where his nan – who taught him the old Romany Travellers’ little-known routes and ways 𕱻 still lives.

1

There is a road that runs from the salt coast of Sussex, back to the green hop gardens of rural Hampshire. It is an old road, a road of black and white; a road composed of many roads. Some of them have half-memorable names: the Valley, the Long Furlong, and Harting Down, a hill of many stags. Most have no name but a faceless coda of letter and number: the A27 westbound, the A286 out of Chichester, the B2141 from Mid Lavant to Harting. But in me all these disparate roads add up to just one: the road from the world I grew up in, to the world of wagons and tents that passed in the decades before I was born.

It was a road we took twice a week throughout my childhood, from the yard where we lived to a cobbled old market town called Petersfield. We had a ‘pitch’ there – a spot on the main square where four generations of my family would take turns to stand out in all seasons and sell bunches of flowers. We made the journey in a growling old white Ford Transit van, lined with rattling plywood and heavily laden with flowers. There were boxes of daffodils packed squeaky tight; tall green buckets of chrysanthemums, yellow and copper and pink; stargazer lilies that burst into purple and white streaked with orange. There were little black buckets of freesias, their buds like fruit humbug sweets sucked to a tiny, bright core. Spray carnations, the white ones frill-edged with light red, yellow ones tinged with peach. Ferns in dark greens jostled against the million tiny white stars of gypsophila.

In one corner of the van were stashed the less interesting tools of the trade: cellophane, secateurs, reams of tissue-thin wrapping paper in pale pastel shades, and boxes of tape and elastic bands to hold all our arrangements together. And I learned the jargon and abbreviations of the trade – the long, plummy, tongue-twister names of flowers truncated to working-class forms: ‘spray cars’, ‘daffs’, ‘sprig of gyp’, ‘pinks’, ‘chrysants’ and ‘stocks’. And occasionally we’d use our own words when we didn’t want customers listening: ‘Kekker, they’re dui bar a go.’ ‘Atch on, the mollisha’s dinlo.’ ‘Kur the vonger in your putsel.’ ‘Dordi chavi, mingries akai.’ I had no idea where these words came from, or why we understood them and almost nobody else did. But I’d learned not to use them at school. If I did, a long silence would follow, turning my mood from light to dark, and I would feel lonelier once the silence had passed.

I had already been making this journey for years before I began to think about how it had started. Of course, we went to Petersfield to sell flowers, but why there? Why this twice-weekly trip, an hour each way, to a little town miles from where we lived? Why didn’t we just sell flowers closer to home? We had smaller pitches in other towns, too, dotted around the vicinity: Lancing, Broadwater, Emsworth, Godalming, Selsey. A roll call of places that no one outside the region had heard of. But there was something special about Petersfield. I could tell that my elders all felt it; they looked forward to going there more; there was anticipation each evening before we set off.

On the way, my elders would point and nod at empty spaces by the sides of the road, flat areas on verges and slightly raised banks, vacant pull-ins and lay-bys, and make comments as if things were there, things that I couldn’t see. The references were muttered and coded, their significance unclear to a child’s ears, but they stood out against the rest of the conversation like a broken trail of breadcrumbs in the mud of the woods. ‘That was where Uncle and they used to stop, look.’ ‘I can still see me granny sat there.’ ‘Cousin’s lay-by, look, Dee.’ I tried hard to tune in to the meaning, but never felt brave enough to ask what these phrases meant. They were glimmers of another world, but it felt as distant as the stars. I knew the places they were pointing out had something to do with the time they were ‘on the road’ – most of my family were settled now, living in houses or caravans and mobile homes on private bits of land. But in spite of my interest, I wouldn’t ask questions. Twin dictums ruled over my childhood, austere morals that had survived the transition from nomadic to settled life, remnants of a less indulgent, almost bygone time. One was a saying I’ve heard many people use: ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’ Another was specific to my family and their relations, and was drummed into me as the only right way for a child to behave when in company: ‘Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut.’ And while I was a young boy, when it came to this half-secret world, that was just what I did.

Alongside selling flowers, the family had roofing and car-breaking businesses. We had a big field and a ‘yard’, a word that seemed to mean a place where all things might, and did, happen. Terriers, geese and perturbed-looking cockerels roamed in between the legs of cantankerous horses. Stables were stacked full of the musty paraphernalia of horsemanship, flower-selling, roofing and car respraying. Bits of cars lay everywhere, named as if they were the parts or clothes of people or animals: bonnets, boots, seats, wings, belts. There were brass-handled horsewhips, jangling harnesses, buckets of molasses-sprayed chaff and milled sugar-beet, bales of sweet-smelling fresh hay. But all of this old rustic stuff was stacked and wedged in amongst the hard and greasy gear of the family economy: gas bottles, blowtorches, leaky old engines, spray paint, rolls of lead, felt, and seemingly infinite stacks of every conceivable type of roof tile. A heavy boxing bag swung with barely perceptible creaks, keeping time in the half-light of the dusty old garage.

There were caravans there that we sometimes lived in and out of, especially in the summer. We never considered this odd, even though we also had a big house on the land that my grandad had built with his men. And there always seemed to be heavy and dangerous things lying close to hand, with names that sounded like the hard noise they would make against flesh: bats and grub axes, claw hammers, club hammers, ‘four-bi’-two’ offcuts of wood, bits of scaffold pole. When people visited, they’d speak politely, with deference to Grandad who ruled this domain that was half Wild West, half-wild West Sussex. The hard stuff of motion was everywhere, though we were settled: cars, tractors and trucks, some brand new, others eaten by weather and time; horses, ponies, traps, sulkies and carts; scattered wheels and bolts from Ford and Bedford lorries. And, hung from a barn door like a pair of swords and scabbing to ochre with rust, there were two axles rescued from the ashes of the last wagon owned by our family.

We had a name for ourselves: Travellers, which was always pronounced with just two syllables – Travlers – as if to differentiate it from the regular sense of the word. In our case, it didn’t just mean anyone who travelled around, regardless of their race: to us it meant our people specifically, the Romanies of Britain. The first Romanies probably arrived on the British mainland towards the end of the fifteenth century, and had been a contentious presence ever since. At first they were believed to be Egyptians – some claimed to have been the Dukes or Princes of ‘Little Egypt’ – a term that would morph into ‘Gyptians’, ‘Gypcians’ and eventually ‘Gypsies’. Over the years, in England and across the Old World, other theories for their origins arose. The Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson referred to them as ‘Moon-Men’ in a play; others suggested the Gypsies were a lost band of Jews, or conversely, that their ancestors were survivors of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or the fabled lost city of Ur of the Chaldees. A connection to the Sigynnae – a tribe of charioteers mentioned in Herodotus – was suggested, based on a similarity with the Romanian word for Gypsies, Çigany.

Since most Gypsies seemed to be semi-perpetual wanderers, some thought they might be the last of the Druids, or priests of the old cult of Isis; perhaps even the sons of Cain, expelled from the biblical Garden of Eden and fated to wander the earth. In a similar vein, and because so many Gypsies worked as blacksmiths, a myth arose – both inside and outside Romany culture – that they had been cursed to roam for having forged the nails that crucified Jesus Christ. A few theories came nearer to the truth. There were educated guesses that the first Gypsies were the ten thousand musicians given as gift to the ruler of Persia by an Indian Emperor in 439 ad, as described in the epic poetry of Firdausi. Less glamorously, some suggested they were descendants of emigrant Sudras, members of the Hindu worker caste.

Wherever the Gypsies went, they took with them their strange tongue, Romani, and it was through this that the mystery of their origins was solved. An eighteenth-century German linguist called Johann Rüdiger overheard Gypsies talking, and was struck by the similarity of their speech to Indian languages. Although he was not alone in noticing this, Rüdiger was the first person to put his observations to a systematic test. He translated a selection of phrases from Hindustani – as Urdu was then called – into German, then spoke the German versions to a Romani woman called Barbara Makelin. She then explained to him how she would say those sentences in her own language. Not only did many of the words match, but the grammatical similarities were so close that there could be no doubt: Romani was clearly an Indian tongue. Features it did not share with Hindustani, including the use of a definite article, had been picked up during the Gypsies’ westward journey.

In the case of the Gypsies’ word for ‘the’, it had been appropriated from the Greek language during their time in the Byzantine Empire. Later linguists, including the so-called ‘Romany Ryes’ – rye being the Romani word for a gentleman – such as the English writer George Borrow and the Irish academic John Sampson, would identify layers of borrowings from Persian, Slavic and Romance languages in the Gypsies’ speech, using these to trace a philological map of their long road into the West. English Romani had German-derived words in it, like nixis, meaning ‘nothing’, and fogel for ‘smell’; and the dialect of the Gypsies of Wales had a unique layer of Welsh. As for the name of the Romanies, it was derived from their own word for ‘man’ or ‘husband’, rom, and it had nothing to do with Romania, which got its name from the Roman military camps which once filled its territory. The Gypsies called their language Romanes, an adverb meaning ‘like a rom’. To ‘rokker Romanes’ meant, simply, to talk like a Gypsy and not like a gorjer – a non-Gypsy. And this is what my family were doing when they spoke to me in our secret language in the little market square of Petersfield.

Theirs was a culture in love with clear distinctions; with wanting to believe that a crisp, clean border exists between the black and the white, the light and the dark. For the Gypsies of Britain, black-and-white (and occasionally brown-and-white) animals seem possessed of a special importance, a different aura. It is thought that this stark differentiation in the colouring of an animal’s feathers or fur symbolises the separation of good and evil, and whether or not this is true, it is consistent with the Gypsy tendency to polarise: to draw a stark dividing line. With the exception of the magpie, with its cackling voice and ambiguous, fey reputation, an animal dressed in starkly contrasting dark and light colours means good fortune to a Traveller. Piebald and skew-bald cobs – black-and-white and brown-and-white patched, respectively – are amongst the Travellers’ favourite horses, and various explanations are tendered for this. It is widely believed that in days gone by, breeding ‘coloured’ horses would put off the army from taking them, because of the Establishment’s long-standing preference for horses of solid colour. But it’s likely that the division of darkness and light in the colouring also plays at least some role in the Gypsies’ preference.

Travellers sometimes refer to the pied wagtail as the ‘Gypsy bird’, and used to believe that if you saw a wagtail then you’d bump into fellow Gypsies later that day. Not only is the wagtail black and white, but it’s also one of the smallest birds that often walks instead of hopping along the ground, which gave the Travellers another affinity with it in their long past as largely pedestrian nomads before the acquisition of engines. To this day, whenever I see a Dalmatian, I remember the old line Mum taught me when I was little: If you see a spotted dog, spit for good luck. I raise my hands up to my face and spit a barely detectable, ceremonial amount of saliva onto the fingertips of each hand, then clap my hands together twice.

This love of binary clarity extends to people: in the old Romany tradition, you can only call yourself a true Romany Gypsy – one of the kaulo ratti, the black blood – if all your ancestors, as far as you know, are of the tribe. I can trace my Romany ancestry back at least six generations; I was brought up to know the Romani language; to learn the old tales and to keep the Romanipen – the cleanliness taboos of the old-fashioned Gypsies. I was raised, and still live, in a Romany psychological realm; a mental Gypsyland. But I have both Gypsy and non-Gypsy blood and so, in many Travellers’ eyes, I do not have the right to call myself a true-bred Romany. It does not matter that there is no such thing as a racially pure Gypsy: over a thousand-year migration it is virtually impossible that there will have been no mingling in the line.The mixing in my family had happened within living memory, and this meant I was at best a poshrat – a mixed-blood Gypsy – and at worst a ‘half-chat gorjie’ or, as a friend once memorably put it, a ‘fucked-up half-breed’.

I do not look like most people’s conception of a typical Gypsy, my blue eyes and fair hair belying my origins, my picture of myself. My identity was inside me and the outside didn’t match up. It imbued me with a tetchy defensiveness, and a resentment of people whom I then believed had simpler ethnicities: Scottish, Nigerian, Han. I felt so close to my roots, and especially to the Romany women who’d brought me up – my mum; her mother, Gran; and Gran’s mother, Nan. But this seemed to count for little in a world which, for all its modernity, still believed in labels like ‘half-caste’, ‘full-blood’ and ‘mixed race’. Later, as a teenager, I started carrying photographs of darker-haired family members in my wallet, to challenge the disbelief of those who thought I was lying about my Romany background. I lived in a world that wasn’t sure if I really belonged in it, and so I wasn’t sure either. Regardless, it was where I was. Our family were the mistrusted local Gypsies, the bane of the decent, upstanding Parish Council. We were ‘gyppos’, ‘pikeys’, ‘diddakois’, ‘them lot’. Locally, we were infamous. The divide was crystal clear.

Compared with the insults and slurs, the words ‘Romanies’, ‘Gypsies’, ‘Travellers’ were dignified, and we used all of them interchangeably.The greater part of our family owned their own yards and bungalows, but the name ‘Travellers’ still seemed to make sense. There were wheels everywhere, and we were always on hair-trigger alert to hook up trailers and go when the need arose: we drove miles for a living, even further to the fairs, and had family who lived on the road. Still, the word ‘Gypsy’ wasn’t often heard back then. When it was, it was usually as part of a story about the old days, where someone had shouted out ‘dirty Gypsies’ and nine times out of ten a fight had ensued, which the ‘dirty Gypsies’ – who, in my grandad’s words, were ‘rough, tough and made out of the right stuff’ – almost always won.

In spite of my confusion over who I really was, I loved our world. It felt as though we did whatever we wanted: rode ponies, rode quad bikes, poured petrol on huge stacks of wood ripped from building jobs, and burned them as kestrels rode currents of air high above. Sometimes our relations would come from their scattered homes across the south coast, and join in. I noticed the features that picked them out against the backdrop of everyone else in the world: the massive gold rings and tan boots, or faunis and chokkers as we called them; the 1950s hairstyles; the trucks that they drove, sporting chrome horseshoes, miniature boxing gloves and – in a little gesture to a different kind of masculinity – their daughters’ or granddaughters’ baby shoes hanging from their rear-view mirrors.

And there were the different faces. Not all, but most of them, looked very different from the surrounding families in this very white corner of the country: the South Downs, built on oceanic chalk. They had darker skin, harder features. Their eyes seemed forever a-squint from natural forces, perpetually half-closed to keep out the smoke and the sunlight, the rain and wind. The men had big arms and hands, often big bellies too. They spoke in gravelly, lilting tones, in a continuum of accents that weren’t from round here – more rural, farmerish, sometimes very West Country, occasionally with a hint of Australian. The corners were softened off consonants; vowels were blended into instantly recognisable diphthongs, ‘oe’s and ‘ae’s. And always their speech would be peppered with our secret words. I learned more every week, and made lists of them. Shushi and shero for ‘rabbit’ and ‘head’; waffadi and wudrus for ‘sickly’ and ‘bed’; jukel and jigger for ‘dog’ and ‘door’; lowvul and loovni for ‘money’ and ‘whore’; gilly and geero for ‘song’ and ‘strange man’; and vardo for ‘wagon’, sometimes ‘caravan’. For certain things there were several words. By my teens I knew four Traveller words for ‘punch’, five for ‘money’, and seven for the ‘police’.

When Traveller friends or relatives visited they would bring tales of the special places linked to our family – a roll call of place names, most of which I’d never visited, that were burned onto their consciousness like a network of unseen roots that made them who they were. Shalden Green, Pagham’s Copse, Shripney Corner, Jack’s Bush, Messenger’s Meadow … A list of locations as meaningless to most people as the shipping forecast is to the non-fisherman. Still, hearing them so many times, I couldn’t help learning the names; knew them by heart, though I couldn’t be sure if I’d ever seen any of them. Were any of these the places that had been pointed out to me on the old road to Petersfield? Which ones were still there? Had they all been built over? Did they have any meaning for me? I learned that there was a name for all of these sites, a way that my family referred to where they had lived. They called them ‘stopping places’, or atchin tans.

My great-grandmother on my mum’s side, Nan, told me what the ‘stopping places’ were. She explained they were the diverse places where she and her family used to live, in the days of the wagons and ‘bender’ tents. On occasion they would be there for years, other times just a few days. Often they had permission, granted by a farmer they worked for or some kindly landowner. Sometimes they had no permission and had to lie low. Some atchin tans, were places of happiness. Nan described Messenger’s Meadow as a miniature land of perpetual summer, all yellow with buttercups, edged by a crystal-clear stream. A place of tap-dancing on old boards and playing the spoons and harmonica, an enchanted corner of England. Other places, I learned, had been very different. Butler’s Down sounded the worst: an isolated hilltop exposed to perennial storms, the tormenting night-voices of crows, and the hell of the mud and the cold, the hunger and the rain.

As for the wagons and tents themselves, I was told how these could be of various kinds, depending on the family, their customs and the extent – or modesty – of their wealth. The traditional Romany tent, the ‘bender’ tent, was a rounded structure made of long, thin hazel ribs, which were inserted into holes in the ground and tied together in a series of intersecting arches. It was then covered in waterproof canvas, or – if none was available – heavy blankets greased to keep out the rain. They varied in their complexity, from small and simple ladybird-shaped domes to longer, double structures with an open space in the middle for a fire, and a wigwam-like open flue above to let the smoke escape. One way of identifying Gypsy families in old census entries and birth certificates is by the frequent references to them dwelling ‘under canvas’, which meant that they were living in bender tents.

For over three hundred years following the coming of the Romanies to Britain the bender tent was the typical dwelling, as it had been of the isles’ indigenous nomads since long before. In spite of this, it was the horse-drawn wagon that would come to be synonymous with Gypsy culture, and to this day it remains many people’s image of the authentic Romany accommodation. The first wagons were simply bender tents placed on top of flat carts or ‘trolleys’ to keep them off the cold, wet ground: a cheap innovation that led in time to the creation of bespoke living wagons. The most common type of wagon to this day, the ‘bow-top’, is a development of this theme: a canvas roof over a hemisphere of arched ribs.

Other kinds of wagons soon followed. The ‘ledge’ wagon had staggered sides – ledges – that broadened out towards the roof, creating a little extra living space for the family inside. Some models had the specific needs of certain trades in mind: the ‘brush’ type wagon was made with sets of external racks and rails for storing and displaying the brooms, baskets and brushes that its owners made and sold for a living. But one of the most popular types was the ‘Reading’ wagon, named after the town where it was invented. It had a relatively simple box-like structure, but its high, flat wooden sides were harder wearing than the canvas shell of a bow-top: for most Gypsy families it was the practical choice, and it was a Reading wagon in which my nan was born.

Romanies (as well as other ethnic nomads like the Yenish of Central Europe) also lived in wagons in nearby countries, including Germany, Switzerland, Holland and France, but the art of wagon-making unquestionably reached its zenith in Victorian England, an era that Travellers call the ‘wagon time’. Family firms arose who became famous for their ability to construct the finest ‘vans’: H. Jones of Hereford; Thomas Tong of Bolton; William ‘Bill’ Wright of Rothwell Haigh, near Leeds. At first almost all of these firms consisted of skilled non-Romany carpenters and wheelwrights who were shrewd enough to capitalise on the Gypsies’ and Showmen’s desire for expensive mobile quarters, but later some Romanies mastered the trade, notably the Gaskin family.

Over time the design of the wagons became increasingly elaborate. For the right price, wagons could be commissioned with ornate cut-glass and hand-etched mirrors; bevel-edged carving and painted scroll-work; polished brass gas lanterns; exotic ceiling upholstery; and fitted wrought-iron ‘queenie’ stoves, tiny but perfectly suited to warming the small interior. Eventually, gilding the outside of the wagon – painstakingly, with gossamer-thin gold leaf – became standard practice. The Romany wagon soon evolved into a symbol of the lusted-after aspects of Gypsy life: its freedom and colour. It grew to be one of the most romanticised accommodations in the history of humanity.

It was the custom to burn a wagon when its owner died – due to the belief that a dead person’s possessions were infused with their presence, and keeping them would therefore extend and nourish grief. This only added to the wagon’s mysterious and unattainable aura, and, in the end, its cash worth: today, fine examples often command the price of real estate. But the wagon began as a pragmatic solution to the difficulties of nomadic life. A contemporary caravan, its gleaming white body engineered from the latest metals and plastics, is simply a modern response to the same old problems. To the Romanies, the painted wagon piques memory, nostalgia and pride, which is why so many still keep them, and sometimes commission new ones to be made. But as a Gypsy dwelling, it is no more authentic than a brand new twin-axle trailer, and requires a great deal more maintenance. Whether two hundred or two years old, a living van’s job is to keep out the rain and the cold.

Through everything my family told me, a dichotomy of summer and winter ran like a seam in old rock. The road could be heaven and hell; there was dark; there was light. I registered this, but as a young child I had no thought that any of this could impinge much on me and my life. I didn’t know the atchin tans. I wanted to know them, but I wasn’t sure how I ever could.

When I was ten years old, one of my classmates got wind that my family were Gypsies. He wasted no time making sure all the other kids knew, and when the teacher’s back was turned he quietly said to me that I smelt of cow-shit because I was a Gypsy. It was one of the first times I’d heard anyone use the ‘G’ word. I told the teacher, who shrugged and did nothing. I got in a fight after school, and my dad spotted it from afar and came running to pull me out. He carried me home on his shoulders, and I felt less sure-footed after this, as if I might not be able to last in school; as if the world might shift and I would fall. I drove with my great-uncle to the fields where he kept his cob horses. We fed them and watered them, picked blackberries and sloes, hunted rabbits. There was light in these places, and solace. I found myself pulled ever more towards them, especially since the bullies had tagged me a dirty Gypsy at school.

But there was no question of me leaving school early – as many of my relatives had – because my parents believed in education. Alongside doing typical Traveller jobs – selling flowers and labouring – Mum and Dad were both artists, and had managed to go back to college and get their degrees after interrupted schooling. They saw that I was bright, and Mum had a friend whose husband had gone to a nearby boarding school called Christ’s Hospital, and who suggested I might benefit from going there. There was no way on earth that we could have afforded to pay, but they did offer scholarships. Mum sat me down and we talked it all over. I could go up there, take the entrance exam, and then, if I passed, decide whether I wanted to go. I sat the paper, and managed to win a full scholarship: if I chose to attend we would have to pay nothing at all.

The family was split. Nobody had ever done anything like this before, gone to live – whilst a child – somewhere else. But then, in what seemed half a miracle, Mum also managed to get a job at the school teaching art part-time.This softened the blow, but the consensus remained that this was a weird and unwise move, and that unforeseen harms might befall me. Yet I had some idea, dim and distant, that education was what I needed, and lots of it. And so that was that. Off I went.

I worked hard, mostly, and things seemed to go well. The dark fear that my roots would be dug up and used as weapons against me began to subside. But there were close shaves. A teacher got hold of a newspaper cutting that showed Mum at Appleby Horse Fair wearing traditional Romany clothes – long skirt, plaits, fancy creole gold earrings – standing next to a bow-top type wagon in red, green and gilded gold. He pinned the article onto a noticeboard in a busy corridor, got a bollocking from the deputy head, and all was calm again. Then there was a one-off tense moment two years later, when a kid twice my size, who had grown up around Travellers, spotted that I was wearing a buckle ring, a dead giveaway to those in the know that its wearer is a Gypsy.

‘What are you wearing that ring for?’ he said.

‘What ring?’

‘That fucking ring. That’s a pikey ring. What you wearing it for?’

I was scared, partly of him, but mostly that this might set off some bad chain of events that would lead to the end of my time at boarding school.

I fudged a response. ‘My dad got it off someone,’ I said. ‘Why, what is it? What’s pikeys?’ I held just enough courage together to look him straight in the eye as I played it naive.

‘Fuck it, don’t worry,’ he said.

That was the last time that ‘pikeys’ were mentioned at school, but I had already realised that the land I lived in would never allow me to forget that it saw the Gypsies as a people apart, but equally that my life’s path might have diverged too much from them for me to be seen as one of their own. Equally, I knew that my Gypsiness would never leave me: that every time someone said ‘gyppo’ or ‘pikey’ within earshot, I’d still get that terrible feeling, like a physical punch in the gut. I dreaded being asked if I was a Gypsy or not, but it was a question that was unlikely to go away. If I wanted to stay sane, I would have to find my own answer one day, and make my peace with it.

In the holidays I still went and sold flowers with the family, and occasionally laboured on building and roofing jobs with my mum’s brothers. I loved flying about down the old country lanes in vans and trucks – always Ford Transits, the Traveller’s choice – in a daily cycle of hunting for cash, girls and laughs. I smoked fags and laughed nervously as my uncles hollered and ululated at hapless pedestrians. They drove with great skill, blended with the kerb-mounting style of a maniac breed. I got to know landlords and barmaids. We buttered them up, anything to secure better service or access to free drinks or long, deferred tabs. Charisma was key: it was how Traveller men got things done. All in the moment, and making the world burst with laughter and fall for their tricks. And wherever they went, they never forget the old stopping places that lay beside the hedgerows, stabbed like splinters between roads and fields, between highway and countryside. My uncles still knew where they were, although they had hardly stopped in any of them. I tried to remember them all. I tried to absorb it all into myself, sensing that I might need this information in some distant time of crisis, poverty or adventure.

Now, though, I had one foot in a different place. Not only was my ancestry tainted: my education was changing me too. I worried about consequence, shied from using the Romani language in public. I doubted whether I still belonged in the Traveller world, though I so badly wanted to. On one occasion, a cousin caught me down the yard on the phone to my girlfriend, talking in more cut-glass tones than the ones that I spoke in at home, crossing Ts, hanging Gs. He shouted, ‘Oh yes, hello, I’m Damian Le Bas, yes, I’m too bloody good for you lot,’ in an absurdly posh, brigadier’s accent that, for him, summed up my betrayal, before walking off in a rage. I put the phone down and tried to run after him to explain, but he got in his van and sped off. I was desolate. What was this world that refused to just let me belong? Would I ever find some way to be English, educated, but a Gypsy? I couldn’t even be sure where the crux of my discomfort lay, and I wondered how many people on earth felt torn in different directions the way I did. If there was an answer to all this, it lay far off, and who knew where. The stopping places of my future, some resolution to the unease: these were far out of sight.

One day, when I’d just turned sixteen, I was sitting in a van outside a Travis Perkins builder’s merchants while my uncles went inside to buy sand and cement. My phone rang, and I knew by the area code that it was school: they were going to tell me the results of my GCSEs. I breathed in deeply and listened as the lady’s voice read them out slowly. I had got nine A stars and one A. I said thanks, put the phone down, then hollered out in a mixture of shock and relief as I slammed my fist up into the roof of the van. A few moments later, I realised what these results actually meant: I would stay at school and do my A Levels now, and eventually go off to uni like everyone else there. Another five years of half-in, half-out. Until this moment I had tried to fool myself that I could return to the Gypsy world as if nothing had happened, as though this time spent somewhere else were a slight aberration that time would wash out.

I was living in a trailer when I got into Oxford to study theology, and Oxford was also the place where I first encountered the enormous wealth of books about my people. Up until this point I’d found that libraries lacked almost any materials about Romanies. In the Bodleian library, by contrast, there were dozens of volumes stretching back hundreds of years. They made constant reference to India, and to the customs which had defined my childhood, especially that of avoiding mokkadi – unclean – habits, which include mixing articles related to the body with those used for preparing food. This was why we boiled our tea towels and dishcloths on the hob and never put them in the wash with our clothes; why animals must not share a bowl or a meal or a kiss with a human. I read about the customs of bringing a dead person’s body back to their home, the vigil of ‘sitting up’ awake with it for nights on end, and opening the windows and curtains when the body was taken away to be buried to let their soul out. Things began to make sense: why my mum stopped to have her picture taken with Rajasthani dancers in London, and felt an affinity with them, their clothes and their style; why some of my relations were dark-skinned: ‘black-faces’ as Travellers call them, an affectionate term that sounds harsh to outsiders who don’t know that being ‘real dark’ is often a mark of great pride amongst Gypsies.

I learned about the contact and intermarriage between the Romanies and the ethnic nomadic peoples of Britain and Ireland, particularly Irish Travellers. I was surprised to learn the etymology of Needies, a favourite term of self-reference among the Romany Gypsies of the south, used only amongst themselves. I had always thought it was a reference to the old days of hardship in wagons and tents, as in ‘the poor and the needy’. It turned out it had nothing to do with needing anything, but was in fact a word from the Gamin – the old Celtic tongue of the Irish Travellers – made by reversing the consonants of daoine, the Irish word for ‘people’. I smiled at the thought of how certain Romany people – who can sometimes be as prejudiced against other Travellers as anyone else – would react if they learned this.

All this made me feel I was part of something far-flung and mysterious, a diaspora scattered across the wide earth out of the East that few knew anything about. Not all Gypsies yearned for India – some did not even believe their ancestors had originated from there at all. But others, like Clifford Lee, who had accompanied a 1970s National Geographic expedition retracing the migratory route of the Romanies back to the subcontinent, spoke of it as their spiritual home – ‘that fabulous land where my forebears originated’.

When I read these books about Gypsies, it often felt as though something was missing. The more I thought about it, the more I realised it was the stopping places with their secret names that often returned no results when I looked them up on the internet. The atchin tans were what rooted my family here, there, wherever they’d been. They gave the lie to the notion of Gypsies as footloose and clueless marauders, moving in arbitrary fashion from place to place. The reality was the exact opposite. They frequented these places with good reason, and that reason was usually work, or the fairs, or their family.

How far all this might be connected to some sort of inherited wanderlust, I had no idea. But I knew that without a sense of the individual people and where they and their language lived, and had lived, there could be no understanding of who they were as a group. Without visiting these locations, I couldn’t hope to understand who I really was, either: so crucial was the role the stopping places had played in shaping the characters of the people from whom I had come. These sites rooted the people I knew in reality, in the geology of their environment. They bound them to the crops that grew out of the earth, and to the people who farmed them.

In places, the hops and potatoes were to the Travellers like buffalo were to Sioux hunters or oil to Texans: they were why the Gypsies were there; in some eyes, why they were. Alongside the particular roadsides of each place and the tenderness, or malice, of the local people, police and councils, these things tied them to the seasons and weather, the accents and dialects, the regional customs and ballads and by-laws, and the folklore and ghosts of a place. I began to wonder if the atchin tans were the missing key to understanding the psyche, the soul, of my people. It was all reducible to a simple truth: you can never understand Gypsies unless you understand where they live, and where they have lived. In my work as a journalist, people told me the reason Gypsies were unwelcome everywhere was because they did not belong anywhere. And the stopping places proved that this assertion was a lie.

Gypsies have always been abstracted from our environment, or placed in one that doesn’t reflect our reality. The Gypsylorists had always managed to find their favourite Gypsies in the finest of wagons on beautiful windswept heaths, by the shores of picturesque Welsh lakes, or slumbering in first-class tents among sheltered dunes. Eighteenth-century landscape painters placed Romany families in the gently cupping roots of great willows and beech groves. Later, the painters Dame Laura Knight and Sir Alfred Munnings depicted ‘their’ Gypsies at country fairs, dressed in elaborate clothes, smiling and smoking cigarettes, dancing: at leisure.

It was not that all this was untrue, but it was askew, lopsided. It was only a part of the picture. The rest was the reality I knew, partly first-hand, partly from the smoke-dried memories of my relatives. Yes, the Gypsy reality was partly composed of fairgrounds and showgrounds, picturesque lakeside halts, sheltered commons, bright heaths. But it also comprised frozen copses and hilltops. Old maintenance roads with potholes and bad light. Scrap yards. Council waste ground. Lay-bys near the edges of tips. Slag heaps and drained marshes. Fen ends. Chalk pits, yards and quarries.

These are the stopping places, these fringes and in-between places.They are the places that nobody lives except Travellers – or nobody but those who share ancient connections with them: gamekeepers and poachers, scrap-metal men, horse-women, rangers and shepherds. They are the old nomad’s haunts of the island. Many are smashed and built over; some – magically – are more or less just as they were in centuries long past. They form the hidden Gypsy and Traveller map of the country we live in: the bedrock of our reality and, perhaps, the antidote to unending cycles of romanticisation and demonisation.

A plan was beginning to form within me, to visit these places, to live in them in my own way, and see what I might learn. Perhaps I might even solve the bizarre contradiction of Britain’s love affair with caravanning, camping and ‘glamping’, and its hatred of those who were born to this life, and who largely inspired its adoption as a non-Gypsy pastime. As one Scottish Gypsy Traveller put it, ‘There are eighty thousand members of the Caravan Club, but I’m not allowed to travel?’

There is more to this Gypsy geography than a list of physical places. The stopping places themselves are an outgrowth of something non-physical, something that is ancient, unseen yet important; precious and reviled, envied and feared. This thing is the Gypsy belief – the core belief of the culture – that it is possible to live in a different way; in your own way, part of the world, but not imprisoned by the rules. That you can know the ropes and yet not be hemmed in by them. That you can dwell alongside the mainstream, whilst not being part of it. Otter-like, you can live in the bank of the river and swim and hunt there when you need to, and then climb back out with equal ease and alacrity. There is no better symbol of this belief than the network of atchin tans laced across Britain; they are historical, topographical proof that the Gypsy philosophy has existed here, that it still does, that it still can.

I began to ask Gypsy friends and relations about stopping places. As soon as I started asking questions, it became clear that this map was bigger and more complex than I could have imagined. Half a millennium of Romany life in Great Britain had bred thousands of atchin tans, of which I could only hope to visit a tiny fraction. They wrote themselves out slowly in dendritic structures as I spoke to the people who’d stopped there – wagon painters and musicians, farm workers and florists, wealthy horse dealers who owned big plots of land; and also the roofers, tree surgeons and block-paving men who are more common nowadays. First they’d mention the main stopping places, where much work was done, where they’d stayed for months, known a kind farmer, where babies were born. Then others would crop up: ‘A few days there, oh yep, that’s right, we stopped there for the night, what a mullerdi place.’

I would even find a few of my own atchin tans, mentioned to me by no one, sniffed out as dusk came down or seeming to beckon to me through rain, the last secret fruits of a free way of life that is no longer meant to be there. I learned how each place was defined by the season, could be heaven or hell or a slow purgatory of damp, simply due to the month. Through my searches, I’d find that a few stopping places still held an enticing magic, seemed enchanted by slow interactions of Gypsies and locals; of history, weather and time. The little tin church in the woods near Bramdean in Hampshire. The area around Bala Lake in North Wales, last redoubt of the oldest form of the Romani language to survive in Britain. The shifting sands of Blackpool’s south shore, a haunt of the old fortune tellers. Rommanobridge, on the road up to Stirling, where two clans of Scottish Gypsies once drew swords and fought to the death. And the Tinker’s Heart of Argyll, where the travelling people of Scotland were wed at the crossing of ancient roads.

Other places had simpler links to the Travellers, and were less easily romanticised. The sides of the M1, the A1, the A303 and the M25 are peppered with modern-day atchin tans. They are sites with access to opportunities to earn money, and –