GYPSY LANE On the map the ancient green lane that leads from the river near The Druce and up to the junction with Highfield Lane, is called Chalkpit Lane, because chalk is near the surface here and in earlier times was quarried for local use. Its older name was Gypsy Lane and the late Eileen Holland used to live nearby and remembered playing here in a long-ago, pre-war village childhood: ‘We used to go up Gypsy Lane and get wood for the fire’, and leaves for what we called the ‘bumby’, because we hadn't got any drain, we'd got a big, round hole up the garden called a ‘bumby’ - everyone had a bumby!’ They particularly collected oak leaves on Oak Apple Day. 27 May, since unless you wore an oak leaf, you got ‘bumped’ in the playground - that is, kicked up the bottom! The lane was Eileen’s favourite place:

‘We used to go picking violets and bluebells up Gypsy Lane - there was a chalkpit, and on that bank there were just a few bluebells . There was a lovely lot of violets - we spent hours up there, when we came home from school. I used to go up on Saturday for chalk for Mum to whiten the hearth. ‘There used to be a lot of tins and rubbish and the gypsies used to come up Gypsy Lane, and take the tin to put round the pegs they made. They were real gypsies then - lovely flaxen hair and clean - they just had a tent, no conveyance, used to always walk. I remember them sitting up there by the plantation, chipping away, but they always cleared their rubbish up.’ So it really was a gypsies’ lane, and occasionally these travelling people were mentioned in the 19 century Clavering census - in 1871, for instance, there were tinkers’ families living in what was then called Shortland Lane in tents. Inevitably they were called Smith and came from all over the place - Hertfordshire, Northants, Cambs, London, giving their children colourful names like Cornelius, Moses and Borthy. The 1871 census also recorded children who led very different lives, such as William Henry Rolfe, then one year old and living with his parents on a farm in Clavering and destined to have his fate also linked with Gypsy Lane. William grew up to be a farmer, churchwarden, Guardian and district councillor, so was a prominent local figure. But one day in 1916 he went out with his gun to shoot rabbits, and never came back. A farmworker found him dead, with a shotgun wound in the head, in a ditch near the chalkpit in Gypsy Lane, his three dogs guarding the body. Married just four months, he was only 46 but had financial problems. Eileen and her friends were always frightened by the story of ‘the chalkpit field where Willie Rolfe shot himself’. But Time and Nature have overlain both the scars of old sorrows, and the playground of lost childhoods, and the chalkpit area is a refuge for wildlife where violets can still be spotted in spring. But still, Gypsy Lane keeps a certain atmosphere, a whisper of forgotten times, an echo of history and mystery. © Jacqueline Cooper 2007