Gypos

When I was young, one sometimes used to talk with older men who would reminisce about punch-ups outside dance halls at closing time. In terms of more or less civilised buttng sessions, as you might see among deer in the rutting season. And we certainly did not use glasses, bottles or knives in the way of youth today. Maybe a few bruises, but no-one got really hurt. Or, at least that was the story.

And since then, while I have come across the odd fight in and around pubs, they were the exception rather than the rule. And few people that I knew at all well ever stood ready to use their fists.

Then last night, a Friday night at around 1130, we were on a train to Dorking. In the open space between one of the sets of doors near us there was a group of half a dozen or so youths, who, it soon became clear had been hitting the drink. There was also talk of us gypsy boys (on the way to Leatherhead), cocaine and one of them, rather more drunk than the others, talked of celebrating the birth of a son. He was also very handy with his fists and looked eager to find an excuse to use them on someone. Quite a lot of loud & unpleasant obscenity, some of it concerning grandmothers - perhaps a serious insult in gypo land, fighting talk - and perhaps with the purpose of dominating the space, of shocking and of provoking. Like small children, they wanted a reaction, they wanted to exist. Plus a few unpleasant remarks about passing girls, perhaps deliberately pitched at the margins of their likely hearing.

A bit depressing that, at a time when most of us have been weaned off violence of this sort - or were never weaned on - violence had been bred into these youths from the off. Displays of aggression and violence were manly.

There were thoughts of intervention, of trying to calm them down a bit. But then one thought that at least some of them wanted a fight and that the rest of them would back the others up. No point in intervening unless you wanted a serious fight on your hands - something that they were going to be a lot better at than you were. One would have needed something that I certainly have not got to have faced them down without a fight. Perhaps the ex-military policeman whom I once knew would have managed. Or the ex-paratrooper hero of 'L'Art français de la guerre' (see reference 2). As it was, rather shamefacedly, one kept one's head down, one's mouth shut and got off at Epsom - in one piece.

PS: back home I gave thought to the people at A&E who have to deal with the likely consequences of this sort of thing. Pity the charge nurse who had the youth who was handy with his fists prancing around her waiting room, mouthing off. I also associated to the time when we came a across a convoy of traveler vans, somewhere on the A11 in East Anglia, the drivers of which thought it great fun to descend on a filling station and terrorise the young people, including several girls, manning it.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/they-wonder-why-we-hate-them.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=guerre+nasty.