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Sunday, December 06, 2009
Knowle West people turn out to bid farewell to a local man Barry Pool | Bristol News
Knowle West people turn out to bid farewell to a local man Barry Pool Bristol News
Tracey has been a very dear friend of mine for many years, and sadly her husband died last week. There are not many people who leave this world who have contributed as much as Barry has to continuing and upholding a culture which has often been looked down upon with sneering and distain.
Romany stock, or Gypsies, may mean many things to different people, but in South Bristol, this term was often applied to the hardworking people who "got things done" - moving coal, milk and bread around the city. Nothing was beneath them to do, (as long as it was legal or at least vagually moral !!) and this is where my family originated, before circumstances gave them perceived opportunities and they became "elite". (The closing of the mine and the invention of the motor car, not forgetting a couple of wars in between)
To get from a) to b) you didn't have the luxury or motorised vehicles and their horses where vital to their existence, so were treated as friends (and often better than relatives!!), integral to earning a living therefore earning a place at their "table". I can remember my grandmother being sent out in all winds and weathers to sort out the horses - and she was a tiny person who looked as if a sudden draught would knock her over...
Not sure when hard graft and decent working ethos became a nasty smell, but it did very definitely in the 60s as the now socially-mobile (my parents) bought houses in the new housing estates, desperate to escape the poverty of their parents. In their haste, they also lost a lot of the values and very essence of what makes a "good person". Mine spent a lot of time re-inventing their history and atecedents. Came quite as a shock last year when I uncovered many skeletons and some still living relatives who knew about me, but not I about them.
I am very upset as I am writing this, not just because of Barry's death, I did not know him as well as his wife, but with his death something quite nebulous and difficult to describe has been lost...
I am upset because I won't pass his van and see his cheery wave which brightened our days, even for a moment. Another link with my family's myth and forklore has now gone. Very complicated emotions, all tied up with a way of life long since gone.
I am not looking at this through rose-tinted spectacles, as I am not sorry that I have relative ease from the day to day hard graft, and even though my world is a nightmare, I am not ever short of food on the table or a warm bed at night (well not as long as Pizza hut do takeaways that it...). I didn't have to worry about my children going down the pit, or my sons going off to war. I have many things to be thankful for, not least the ability to get an education and the luxury now of being able to use my brains. But as I have said before, in the haste to grab the good things, I feel acutely the sense of loss the other more simpler ways of living offered. Not least the ability to sleep at night cuz you were shattered physically.
Having said that I use the horse-trading my grandfather taught me at Priddy Fair (and other such shady places that a girl of 6 or 7 should not have attended... ooh if only my parents knew !!) almost every day of my working life... including the ability to swear... !!
Barry Pool. RIP .. Your like will not pass this way again, but I am a better person for having known you.
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