The hop-pickers seemed to be of three types: East Enders (mostly costermongers), gypsies, and itinerant agricultural labourers with a sprinkling of tramps. ..
Out of 200 pickers at Blest's farm, 50 or 60 were gypsies. They are curiously like oriental peasants - the same heavy faces, at once dull and sly, and the same sharpness in their own line and startling ignorance outside it. Most of them could not read even a word, an none of their children seemed ever to have gone to school. One gypsy, aged about 40, used to ask me such questions as, 'How far is Paris from France?' 'How many days' journey by caravan to Paris?' etc. A youth, aged twenty, used to ask this riddle half a dozen times a day - 'I'll tell you something you can't do?' - 'What?' - 'Tickle a gnat's arse with a telegraph pole.' (At this, never-failing yells of laughter.) The gypsies seem to be quite rich, owning caravans, horses, etc., yet they go on all the year round working as itinerant labourers and saving money. They used to say that our way of life (living in houses etc.) seemed disgusting to them, and to explain how clever they had been in dodging the army during the war. Talking to them, you had the feeling of taking to people from another century. I often heard a gypsy say, 'If I know where so and so was, I'd ride my horse till it hadn't a shoe left to catch him' - not a twentieth-century metaphor at all. One day some gypsies were talking about a noted horse-thief called George Bigland, and one man, defending him, said: 'I don't think George is as bad as you make out. I've known him to steal Gorgias' [Gentiles'] horses, but he wouldn't go so far as to steal from one of us.'
The gypsies call us Gorgias [gadjo] and themselves Romanies, but they are nicknamed Didecais (not certain of spelling). They all knew Romany, and occasionally used a word or two when they didn't want to be understood. A curious thing I noticed about the gypsies - I don't know whether it is the same everywhere - was that you would often see a whole family who were totally unlike one another. It almost seems to countenance the stories about gypsies stealing children; more likely, though, it is because it's a wise child etc. p. 88-89
Orders to the L.D.V. That all revolvers are to be handed over to the police, as they are needed for the army. Clinging to useless weapons like revolvers, when the Germans have submachine guns, is typical of the British army, but I believe the real reason for the order is to prevent weapons getting into the 'wrong' hands.
Both E. and G. [E = Eileen] insistent that I should go to Canada if the worst comes to the worst, in order to stay alive and keep up propaganda. I will go if I have some function, e.g. if the government were transferred to Canada and I had some kind of job, but not as a refugee, nor as an expatriate journalist squealing from a safe distance. There are too many of these exiled 'anti-Fascists' already. Better to die if necessary, and maybe even as propaganda one's death might achieve more than going abroad and living more or less unwanted on other people's charity. Not that I want to die; I have so much to live for, in spite of poor health and having no children. Volume 2, p. 403
Constantly, as I walk down the street, I find myself looking up at the windows to see which of them would make good machine-gun nests. D. says it is the same with him. [25 July 1940 and a looming German invasion]
I have now been in the B.B.C. about 6 months. .. Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless. ...
All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don't think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why. Volume 2, p. 466
German propaganda is inconsistent in quite a different way - i.e. deliberately so, with an utter unscrupulousness in offering everything to everybody, freedom for India and a colonial empire for Spain, emancipation to the Kaffirs and stricter race laws to the Boers, etc. etc. All quite sound from a propaganda point of view in my opinion, seeing how politically ignorant the majority of people are, how uninterested in anything outside their immediate affairs, and how little impressed by inconsistency. A few weeks back the N.B.B.S. was actually attacking the Workers' Challenge Station, warning people not to listen to it as it was 'financed from Moscow'. Volume 2, p. 467
Nearly everyone appears still to think that gratitude is a factor in power politics. .. many people talk as though the power to decide policy when a war has been won were a sort of reward for having fought well in it. Of course the people actually able to dominate affairs are those who have the most military power, cf. America at the and of the last war. Volume 2, p. 476
We are all drowning in filth .. Everyone is dishonest, and everyone is utterly heartless towards people who are outside the immediate range of his own interests and sympathies. Volume 2, p. 478
