Many gipsies frequented the neighbourhood, where there were certain roadside dells which they used as camping-grounds. These, for weeks together, would be silent and deserted, with only circles of black ash to show where fires had been and scraps of coloured rag fluttering from bushes. Then one day, towards evening, tents would be raised and fires lighted, horses would be hobbled and turned out to graze, and men with lurchers at their heels would explore the field hedgerows (not after rabbits. Oh, no! Only to cut a nice ash stick with which to make their old pony go), while the women and children around the cooking pots in the dell shouted and squabbled and called out to the men in a different language from that they used for business purposes at cottage doors.

“There’s them ole gipos back again,” the villagers would say when they saw blue smoke drifting over the treetops. “Time they was routed out o’ them places, the ole stinkin’ lot of ‘em. If a poor man so much as looks at a rabbit he soon finds hisself in quod, but their pot’s never empty. Says they eat hedgehogs! Hedgehogs! He! He! Hedgehogs wi’ soft prickles!”

Laura liked the gipsies, though she did sometimes wish they would not push with their baskets into the office, three or four at a time. If a village woman happened to be there before them she would sidle out of the door holding her nose, and their atmosphere was, indeed, overpowering, though charged as much with the odours of wood-smoke and wet earth as with that of actual uncleanliness.

There was no delivery of letters at their tents or caravans. For those they had to call at the Post Office. “Any letters for Maria Lee?” or for Mrs. Eli Stanley, or for Christina Boswell, they would say, and, if there were none, and there very often were not, they would say: “Are you quite sure now, dearie? Do just look again. I’ve left my youngest in Oxford Infirmary,” or “My daughter’s expecting an increase,” or “My boy’s walking up from Winchester to join us, and he ought to be here by now.”