Wednesday 7 March 2018

Roma Alan

There's always a story in graffiti, too often it's hidden from us, although sometimes we can gleam something. I'm going to assume that Alan was of the travelling community. Was Alan using the prefix 'Roma' so the local community knew it was him, he wouldn't have known himself as Roma Alan, surely he was just Alan. The prefix serves an identifying purpose, they always do. I think that's a reasonable assumption. The travelling community, contrary to suggestion, mixed, traded and worked with the settled population.  Clearly Alan travelled this way in 1948, '49 and '50, and would have been travelling through the twilight of a traditional lifestyle, as modernity increasingly demanded uniformity and under a variety of pressures that traditional way of life became marginalised made increasingly inaccessible to the point of untenable. Sad. The period saw travellers move from Vardo to motor drawn caravan, and saw the community buy their own land in the face of reduced stopping sites. I wonder what happened to Roma Alan, what was his story? Did he travel through this way at other times not recorded? Was he forced off the road into settled life by imposed restrictions? I'll never know.

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