A terrorist incident? The possibility is always in the back of your mind on the commute to London. Has something awful happened at Waterloo? A few months before the pandemic my local station is crawling with men in Hi-Vis jackets talking earnestly to people as they go in to catch their trains. Police too. What has happened? They warn of an incursion. Trespassers. All these people are here to protect us from danger. Cool. Shame all these helpful people are never present when you arrive home late at night and there’s a drunk guy who shouts at you outside Domino’s. But never mind they are here now.
And what are they here to protect us from? I look around anxiously but all I can see is about eight camper vans in the car park. Identical clean white camper vans, most with baby or kiddies’ clothes drying on the windscreens. A few deck chairs.
Ah now I see. The scales fall from my eyes. Gypsies, Travellers, Romanies are in town. Romany people have been in Hampshire since Tudor times if not before. As I know from my own father (a Romany speaking bricklayer born in 1920) for centuries the boundary between Gypsy travellers and other Hampshire rural working class people has been a porous one.
But never mind the history; feel the terror and hysteria at their “incursion”.
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