Gypsy Saxons, Etc.

You could hear the Gypsies comming from a long way off. The pots and pans and other metal implements banging against the side of their wagons could be heard long before they arrived. At the time I first met them, I was living in the remote farming hamlet of Wehe, a place that was so far off the beaten path that it was beyond the outback. Wehe was an absolutely pure, 100% Saxon hamlet. Absolutely NO ONE spoke German, only the Low Saxon language. Our parents warned us to stay away from the Gypsies. My grandmother warned me that they would break my arms and legs and make me beg for them. But when they arrived, they were the warmest, friendliest human beings you could ever hope to meet. I cannot speak about Gypsies in general. They are given a hard time by most Europeans.  When I speak about the Saxon Gypsies, I can only speak with approval. We children were attracted to them like iron filings to a magnet. No child to my knowledge ever came to harm through the agency of the Gypsies.  They spoke our language, Low Saxon, like natives, which they probably were.

Our attraction to the Gypsies is somewhat remarkable.  We were deeply suspicious of foreigners. Our concept of foreigners was somewhat rarefied. We lived at the tip of a peninsula of Westphalia that jutted deeply into Lower Saxony. I remember when a woman from Lower Saxony moved into our hamlet. We children would follow her (at a considerable distance behind her).  We saw her as an alien little different from the way we might have regarded an alien from Mars with green skin and antennas drooping from the forehead. This in spite of the fact that she spoke our language (Low Saxon) but with dialectical differences.  Perhaps we were conditioned by local sayings such as the one that held that Lower Saxony was a land so strange that women there grew from trees. In fact, she came from a village right next to ours but separated from us by vast and endless peat bogs. Practically though, she might as well as have come from the opposite end of the planet. Our view of life was so conditioned that, had we been asked, we would probably have volunteered that the whole planet was inhabited by Saxons.  I sometimes feel like I am the last Saxon on the planet. Kind of like the Indian found in the California desert in the 1940's, the last member of his tribe, who had never encountered a white man before. My father was a Hungarian from Transylvania.  I tended to regard Hungarians as people who were from a fairy tale. after all, they were clearly not Saxons and you could not take non-Saxons for real.