My granny sung this verse to me one of the last times I saw her. I was sitting in her caravan at the council run Gypsy site that she had lived at for the last years of her life. The site was called "The Hatchin Tan", which means the stopping place in Romany. The site, of which she was the warden, proved to be her last stopping place. She had lived there with my granddad, the man she had eloped with when she was sixteen, but he had died 6 months earlier of a heart attack. Her last hatchin tan was similar to many other Gypsy sites in England - a concrete plot surrounded by barbed wire, a cultural Auschwitz where the last of my people live together to enjoy some sense of community with their culture under threat and way of life outlawed. With her died knowledge that I will never know and a story that I had just begun to listen to. When we lowered her coffin into the ground I realised that the thousand year trek of the Romany people will come to an end if we - her grand children - do nothing to ensure the survival of our people.

It’s difficult to know where to begin this story. Perhaps I should begin with myself. I am a didikai. Half Romany and half Gorjia (non-Gypsy) by blood - a real half breed. I spent little of my childhood living a Gypsy life. Although from the age of 13, when my Romany father introduced me to many of my 17 half brothers and sisters I began to have a lot more contact with traveller culture and people.

In August 1997 , I decided to honour the memory of my grandparents by living the way they had as young people. I came to England with my now ex-girlfriend Anna. We took with us some money I had saved in Sweden and began the process of finding a horse and a traditional bow-top wagon. I knew nothing about horses and even less about living in a traditional way on the road. Six weeks later I had spent £3,000 on a kushti grai (good horse) and a kushti vardo (good living wagon) and embarked upon a project that has transformed my life.

The horse was bought from Alf Selby, a horse dealer and breaker in Kent and the wagon from Eli Frankham, a Romany poet, activist and distant relation. The horse I bought was called Sally - a black cob mare measuring 14,3 hh (150 cm) at the withers. She is ¾ cob and ¼ shire and has everything I was told to look for. I needed a horse with a "bomb-proof" temperament, a "foot in each corner" and "four big hairy feet". I found Sally working for Alf where she and Alf taught people to drive. Sally had the patience of a saint and the strength of a tractor. She was exactly what a novice on a very steep learning curve required. As a cob she was also a traditional horse doing a traditional job.

The wagon was built in Sussex in 1926 and had travelled many miles through English lanes in the service of many Romany families. Eli had recently re-painted the caravan and replaced its canvas. Anna and I spent a couple of days with Eli and his wife Gert in Norfolk. I listened to his stories and poetry and heard him play the harmonica. A week later I fetched the wagon and was wished "Kushti bok" (good luck) by Eli. It meant a lot to me that I had bought my wagon from a distant relation and a traveller that is very well known and respected within the Romany community

We had a fair deal of "kushti bok" that summer but never really made it out on the road. This was largely because we had decided to start our journey from a village called Three Oaks, which lies in a very hilly area in southern England. The horse was totally unused to pulling a one-ton wagon through hilly terrain and the harness we had bought just wasn’t up to the job. Autumn was coming and by the time November came we decided to take the caravan and live the sedentary Romany life in a horse paddock outside Three Oaks. We did all the things my ancestors had done for hundreds of years, like gathering wood and eating wild food. The autumn was dark and cold, but living next to a railway embankment provided an almost limitless amount of well seasoned, ready chopped logs to burn.

That autumn I felt like a failure. I had invested thousands of pounds and 3 months of my life in a project that had covered a grand total of one mile. We were parked outside Three Oaks in a horse paddock. It was cold, damp, no one came to see us, and we had nearly run out of money. Even the horse looked miserable as she stood alone staring into the flames of the campfire. In hindsight, I’m glad that I was forced to perfect the skills that I learnt during that period, from handling and driving the horse to making a fire after a week of torrential English rain. It was anything but romantic but it was nothing compared to what my grandparents had experienced. It is nothing compared to what Gypsies face everyday from Wokingham to Wallachia. The police left us alone, the locals weren’t hostile and we were never short of money or food. Never forced to go out and knock on doors, never forced to beg or defend ourselves from physical attack. We had no children or elderly people to care for. There were no neo-nazis trying to kill us or Gestapo trying to find us. Life could have been better but also so much worse.

After Christmas, we decided to take the horse and caravan to Sweden. This was our long-term intention because we knew that travelling in the UK was hard. The Criminal Justice Act of 1994 basically criminalises a traditional nomadic lifestyle. Three months prison for "criminal trespass" and other executive powers have given local authorities the power to "culturally" cleanse the English countryside of travellers. I am full of admiration for those travellers who still travel in Britain today and maintain their right to do so. Their daily defiance is mind blowing and great proof that we are the most ungovernable people on earth.

SWEDEN – A PROMISED LAND FOR TRAVELLERS ?

In January 1998, I loaded Sally onto a horse lorry bound for Sweden. Behind the lorry, on a trailer generally used for transporting cars, sat my vardo, my home and container of all my worldly goods. I travelled with them and John Ryan - an Irish horse dealer who exports piebald and skewbald Irish cobs to Sweden. After four sleepless days and nights we made it to Sweden, where the caravan was parked in a barn and Sally was transported to Ostersund. Anna and I had decided to live there for the remainder of the long winter as Anna had a university course to continue.

Winter has always been a tough time for travellers in northern Europe. Harsh weather drives the hardiest of people indoors, many animals choose hibernation or fly south for the winter. Such luxuries were not available for Romany people traditionally and they would establish winter camps where they would wait for the dark cold months to pass. The coming of spring would mean freedom to move on because it brought the beginning of the agricultural year and fresh grazing for the horses. Finnish Gypsies are known to have continued travelling through the winter in open horse-drawn sledges obtaining hay for the horses where they could. Swedish winters are every bit as severe as Finnish ones and the thought of travelling with a horse and wagon in temperatures that often drop to –20C was not one I relished.

Because of it’s high latitude, spring does not come to southern Sweden until April and good grass growth cannot be guaranteed until May. So in May, I took Sally back from Ostersund to the farm where the caravan had been stored during the winter. It felt really good to finally be able to see all my plans about to come to fruition. After transporting the caravan 15km to a farm where I could stay as long as I liked, I set about getting Sally, the caravan and myself ready for a summer of travelling. This included getting Sally used to pulling heavy loads, painting and cleaning the caravan and making myself fit. Anna and I knew that we would spend a lot of time walking beside the caravan and we intended to travel at least 300km.

Our goal was a little town in western Sweden called Tidaholm. I had been accepted at an art school there to study silversmithing. I needed a skill that could easily produce crafts that could be transported and sold from the wagon and silversmithing seemed to fit the bill. Right from the time the Romany people left India they are reported to have worked as smiths. Indeed a very common name amongst British Gypsies is Smith and one of the largest Romany groupings in Sweden and across much of the world are the Kalderasha, which means Coppersmith in Romany.

One of the biggest reasons for the decline in traditional Romany culture, aside from forced assimilation and genocide, is the fact that much of Europe no longer has an agricultural economy.

Traditional Gypsy skills, such as herbalism, horsemanship, entertaining and craftsmanship have become redundant in an industrial age. In many countries, Romany people are becoming assimilated into society as unskilled labour where they, having lost their unique culture, lifestyle and language, face a future of being nothing more than industrial canon fodder. Our survival therefore depends as it has always has on finding an economic niche for ourselves so that we can maintain our economic and cultural independence from mainstream Gorjia (non-Gypsy) society. For me, silversmithing is one way of doing this because it is both traditional and modern. Jewellery will be wanted as long as human vanity exists, and that shows no signs of disappearing!

Silversmithing, however is unlikely to make you rich and at this moment in time I am not a skilled enough craftsman to support myself with it. I therefore earned my living throughout the summer by editing and translating documents for the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson. It was great to "tele-commute" from a bow-top wagon whilst on the road. I worked in fields and layby’s whilst the people I was working with sat in factories and office blocks. Perhaps information technology is a possible economic niche in the modern world for Gypsies that wish to remain nomadic. Unlike many of my brothers and sisters I was fortunate enough to have received a school education that allows me to take advantage of such oppurtunities.

Our trip from eastern to western Sweden attracted a huge amount of attention. Every local newspaper whose area we passed through wrote about our journey. We were photographed and video filmed every step of the way and we were always well treated by farmers we asked to camp with for the night. In fact we only met one truly unpleasant landowner the whole summer.

I know of no travellers in Sweden living a nomadic or traditional horse based lifestyle. The Swedish welfare state has given everybody the opportunity to move into houses in it’s desire to create the "Svenska Folkhemmet" (Swedish People’s Home) which, depending on your politics and perspective, can either be seen as an attempt to create a socialist utopia or an Orwellian nightmare. Swedish Gypsies themselves, led by the Romany author Katarina Taikon campaigned very effectively in the 1960’s for access to housing and education. I was lucky enough to meet her uncle Aljosha Taikon at the end of the summer. He lives in a flat in an immigrant suburb of Stockholm. He was born in a tent and lived as a traditional Kalderasha until the second world war.

We met many people that belonged to Sweden’s diverse Romany community on our journey. We met Finnish Kale Roma, Swedish Kalderasha Roma and many Swedish Tattare (similar to Irish travellers in ethnicity but with a language and culture that is very similar to Romany) but all lived sedentary lives. Gypsy communities in Sweden are to be found in larger towns living alongside immigrant communities. It seems as if official policy has been to assimilate travellers through generosity, yet past policy has often been brutal; up until the 1960’s travellers where sterilised in Sweden.

The effect of this assimilation has been to remove travellers from the Swedish rural landscape. Indeed the only person to recognise our wagon as a Gypsy wagon turned out to be an Englishman! Curious people were very happy to see our "circus wagon" and many were surprised to hear that the wagon and its owner had Gypsy origins. "You’re surely not a Gypsy!" many people would say after seeing my blonde hair and blue eyes. Gypsies, for most Swedes, are dark suspicious urban thieves, not blue-eyed, horse-drawn Englishmen encountered on dusty forest roads. This ignorance shows just how far assimilation has gone in Sweden and although sad, when you consider the thousands of Romany people that built up and maintained the Swedish rural economy, it is a situation that can be taken advantage of. The Swedish rural landscape is not only devoid of travellers, it is devoid of suspicion of travellers.

The fact that the inhabitants of the Swedish countryside are neutral towards travellers makes it a great place to travel, particularly if you are interested in living a traditional horse-drawn lifestyle. But there are also many other reasons to live and travel there. Sweden is a large country with a sparse population with enough living space for thousands of travellers. The roads are empty of traffic. It’s law of "allemänsrätt" (all man’s rights) is a model law protecting the "right to roam". Everybody has the right to camp, gather firewood and walk in the fields and forests - provided they do not destroy any property or harm the environment. Everybody has the right to bathe in any of Sweden’s many thousands of lakes and gather berries, herbs and mushrooms from the countryside. Although this law does not give the right to graze animals and park caravans, the spirit of it generally means that doing so is accepted, as long as landowners permission is sought.

In short, Sweden is a land where everybody has land rights. It is very far removed from Britain with its endless fences, Criminal Justice Act and feudal mentality towards land and class.

Whilst enjoying the open road in Sweden I began to feel alone. I was a long way from my family and friends - many of whom are struggling to enjoy the kind of freedom I was so easily experiencing. I began to wish that my caravan was part of a traditional group or kumpania as it is called in Romany. I felt the need to be part of a travelling community that could enjoy the secrets I had learnt. I had set out to live the life my grandparents had lived, but had not experienced the part that made them so strong – the community. I see now that my work has just begun and that a greater challenge now lies ahead. To build a traditional kumpania that can enjoy the things I have enjoyed.

The age of the kumpania came to an abrupt halt because of the Nazis. Before the second world war, a much greater percentage of european Gypsies were nomadic. They supported themselves with the same trades that had ensured their survival ever since they left India. Contemporary accounts describe how Gypsy wagon trains could consist of so many wagons, that they would stretch from one horizon to the other. It was a highly organised form of nomadic living, with scouts from every community going ahead to find suitable stopping places on the outskirts of rural communities. The diverse Gypsy nation was divided into tribes some of which have survived to this day. The Lovara, for example, supported themselves through horse trading and were master horsemen and animal healers. They bought sick horses from farmers, nursed them back to health with the help of herbal medicine from their natural surroundings, and then sold the horses to other farmers further along the road.

My dream is to ensure that the age of the kumpania can return, so that we, the Gypsies, can rise triumphant above the ruins of the third reich and become a truly transnational people. I personally would like to form a kumpania drawn from all corners of the Gypsy nation, practising all forms of traditional Gypsy craft, whether it be music, animal training or working with metal. It could work as a cultural showcase for our people and travel throughout Europe educating young Gypsies about their past and non-gypsies about the Gypsy plight. We are living in what is called a post-industrial age. Industrial society with it’s obsession with conformity, uniformity and monoculture wipes out all forms of diversity, be it biological, or cultural. The environmental crisis on our planet dictates that industrial society must change and that every nation must look to it’s history to find sustainable ways of living. For the Romany Nation this does not mean looking too far back for it was only a generation ago that we lived at the edge of society; as much a part of the forest and the heaths as the birds and the badgers. I am living back there again and would like others with Romany or traveller roots to join me in creating the first new horse-drawn kumpania since the second world war.