The Nomadic Spirit
There were vintage buses, trailers and lorries, some botched, some cobbled, some cannibalised, into live-in vehicles. Many had sweeping mudguards and running boards, streamlined or jelly-moulded contours, split windscreens and chromium trim. On the grill of a particularly impressive old English truck its make, Albion, was emblazoned in chrome above a radiating rising sun motif. An overly muscular, wrecker, with bulging wheel arches and loops of heavy chain hung from its tow bar, was daubed with the words Fuck Pig. There were trucks fitted with window boxes, chicken coops and one even had a pair of goats living on its back veranda.
Whatever the style – quaint-cottage-garden or all-terrain-anarchist – there was something proud, and defiantly independent about the atmosphere in the field. An atmosphere that was missing everywhere else I’d been that day. In comparison, the rest of Glastonbury felt as flimsy and contrived as a Hollywood film set, the scenery as thin as the licks of paint and coloured lights that decorated it. The traveller’s field was no illusion. No illusion – but – the raw, solid, practical mechanics of life-in-a-truck, had a powerful magic.
Yes, there’s a romance and allure about the traveller, the gypsy, the adventurer. But there was something else too. Something about how all those shapely vintage vehicles had been brought back from the scrapheap of history. Beautifully designed and stoutly engineered, they’d transcended their intended purpose, driven across time into another era, not just as enablers, but also as part of the nomadic spirit, of an unforeseen, yet inevitable, new current in the British psyche.
(Glastonbury, June 1990)
Ah this is beautifully described…..it made me long for my old bus.
Thanks Debbie. Yeah, there’s nothing more evocative than a chunky vintage truck or a bubble-shaped bus!
Wonderful!
if i hadnt gone to twyford down i might never have known the traveller life..it was a real eye-opener for city yoofs like me at the time…in europe still on the road all these years later…thanks!
great writing n all
yes… this is good. I remember looking longingly at a bunch of travellers and their vehicles and thinking “I want that”…… yes, even me.
Brilliant !!!!!!!
twyford down…was that the villiage idiots gathering,sussex..?
i remember meeting spiral and geting a lift from wherever we were[?] back to watford,herts…great trip,cheers,followed by many more adventures……….. dove.
Hey Dove – Good to hear from you! Twyford down – Winchester, Hampshire – was the big road protest. We were there, at St Catherine’s Hill, before the protest proper began. That night there was a full moon and a big fire in the circle of beech trees on top of the ancient hill fort. We all held hands around the fire while someone (dressed in animal skins and wearing antlers on his head) gave an inspired speech about resisting the proposed motorway cutting. A development that would destroy ancient burial sites and a vast area of beautiful countryside.
The Village Idiot’s Festival was in Kent. We caught an undercover copper mingling with the crowd. He said he’d never had so much fun on an assignment. We left him alone. He danced in front of the speakers all weekend. I’m not sure what he was on – but he was really giving-it-some!
You paint the story so well… and leave me panting, yearning to go all the way …