# Raggle-Taggle (1933)/Chapter 1

Part 1
Chapter 1
Off with the Raggle-Taggle Gypsies
IT was in January 1919 that the idea of journeying to Hungary as a wandering minstrel came to me. I had been in Italy in the concluding months of the War with the British forces, travelling about from one unit to another in the mountains of the Venetian province, giving concerts in huts and barns and tents, with a Fiat lorry as a Thespian chariot to carry my vagabond minstrel companions.
One day I gave a violin recital in a Y.M.C.A. hut near the little town of Montebello and at the end after the audience had departed, I noticed five men loitering near the door. They were Austrian prisoners who were employed in rough jobs in the camps by the British Army authorities until they could secure their repatriation. One look at them convinced me they were Gypsies, for they were brown-skinned and they had the queer, penetrating eye of the Tzigan. One of them, acting as spokesman for the others, asked me timidly in Italian to let him see my violin. When I handed it to him they all crowded round and started to speak excitedly in Magyar.
After a few minutes the spokesman asked me whether I could do them a favour. They were Hungarian Gypsies who had been called up as conscripts into the ​Austrian Army, and they belonged to the musician class of Romanies. Could I possibly ask the Y.M.C.A. hut leader to give them some pieces of wood—any old Woodbine cigarette packing-cases would do? When I inquired the reason for this strange request, the Gypsy replied: “Ah, Signore, if you give us the packing-cases we shall make violins out of them and then bashavav. We are Hungarian Gypsies dying for want of music, and our blood runs cold for lack of a lassu and a friss to make us dream of the Puszia.”
Then I remembered that among Gypsies the word bashavav, to play the fiddle, has a magic connotation, for it means the dance of life, the expression of the slow, sad lassu and the quick, rhythmic friss that lead to the wild csárdás. A Hungarian Gypsy prisoner will die of melancholy in gaol unless he is given wood to make himself a fiddle. I gave them the wood and took leave of them.
Ten days later, having occasion to visit the town again, I went to see the five Gypsies, and to my surprise I found that out of the packing-cases they had fashioned violins and bows, and they were playing away like demons. So contagious was their music that the stolid British soldiers became infected with Gypsy rhythms and began to dance like Dervishes. In the end the colonel had to give orders to use the Gypsy players as a dance orchestra.
They were grotesque objects, those raw-white packing-case fiddles, and they had only a string here and there, but they worked their spell when throbbing under the devilish fingers of the Gypsies.
In the intervals of feverish fiddling they would say to me: “Why don’t you come to Hungary, the country of Mulatni? You are a violinist and every door will be open to you once you play a Magyar tune. No need ​for you, Signore, to bring money or food: you can wander over the length and breadth of the Puszta, living on music alone.”
Then one who came from Transylvania said to me:
“You must come to Transylvania, the land of mountains and forests, where the fiddle originated. We Gypsies from Koloszvár know the secrets of the violin and how it came into the world. Tell me, stranger, do you know the story of the violin’s birth?”
When I declared my ignorance the Gypsy continued:
“It is a story told in Transylvania, where every Gypsy believes that the violin has a miraculous origin. Once upon a time there lived in one of the villages of Transylvania a girl whom all the peasants thought bewitched because no man would ask her in marriage in spite of her great beauty and rich dowry. She herself was in love with a farmer, but he would never cast a look her way, though she sighed for him from morn till eve. At last, finding all her efforts fruitless, she prayed to the Devil and he said he would give her a magic instrument which would bring the young man to her feet. ‘But, first of all,’ said he, ‘you must give me your father, your mother and your four brothers.’ The girl was bewitched, as I said before, and she gave them all up without a murmur. Then the Devil out of the body of the father made an instrument, and out of the white hair of the mother’s head he fashioned the bow, and out of the four brothers he made the strings and strung them across the fiddle. ‘Now off with you,’ said he, ‘and play that fiddle into yon youth’s ear and he’ll follow you to the ends of the earth.’
“When the girl played, the young man followed her with his eyes set on her as in a trance. And she took his arm and both were wending their way home full of joy when suddenly the Devil appeared in their path ​and said: ‘Now it is time for me to collect my dues: both of you have listened to the Devil’s music and you must come off with me to Hell’ And off they went. As for the violin, it lay on the ground in the forest until a ragged Gypsy happened to pass that way, and he found it. And he, stranger, is playing it yet through the world, and because it is the Devil’s instrument men and women go daft when they hear it, and the Gypsy alone knows its secret.”
Many were the Magyar Gypsy tunes that Transylvanian Gypsy taught me in those days of 1919. He used to call me pral or brother, for we had performed the Gypsy ceremony of blood-brotherhood together and I made a promise to him that I would go to his country as a vagabond fiddler and mix with his folk. But ten years were to elapse before I was able to fulfil my promise. All those ten years I remembered the promise I gave to that dark Transylvanian Gypsy and it would creep into my mind at the oddest moments when I least expected it, and generally associated with the ancient tune, “Off with the raggle-taggle Gypsies, O!” which I used to sing to him. In the middle of a serious lecture to a University class, the diabolical tune would steal into my brain and make my body tingle for longing to be away on the parched plain near the brown tents, listening to the sound of fiddles played at night beneath trees.
The dream would soon fade away before the grim realities of modern city life with its toga of respectability, its duties to the common weal, its self-conscious mediocrity.
Then one day at the end of the Summer University term in 1929 I decided that the gypsy’s promise must be fulfilled and I left Ireland for Europe.