Wearing a tight white cotton top that
shows every curve of her pregnancy, Jane Lee stands at the door of her caravan
on a pretty Staffordshire town’s playing fields.
It is a perfect summer evening and the
27-year-old is puffing relentlessly on a cigarette just a few days before
having her fifth baby.
A tall blonde, she watches contentedly
as her children (aged eight, six, four and two) play on the grass.
Occasionally, one of them darts into the caravan to sit on the sofa and watch
the cartoons blaring out from a big flatscreen TV inside.
They say they are sick of the pitch
being besieged by gipsies, who they claim use the bushes for lavatories, drop
litter and churn up the grass with the wheels of their caravans, lorries, quad
bikes and large cars.
There is also the constant hum of generators feeding power into the
caravans, with cables spread across the ground.
One woman with a house overlooking the pitch has made unproven claims of
theft — which the gipsies indignantly denied to me. There is talk of house
prices nosediving.
A football match scheduled during a
previous visit by the travellers in March was abandoned, and a one-day
children’s tournament later this month, involving 90 teams from all over the
country, must be cancelled if the gipsies don’t move on. No wonder tempers are
running high.
One of the tournament’s organisers,
Roland Hulse, has criticised the local Newcastle Borough Council for failing to
stop the gipsies getting on the land in the first place, then failing to kick
them off once they had arrived a fortnight ago.
Yesterday he said angrily: ‘This is the
biggest one-day football tournament of its kind but it’s in jeopardy if the
gipsies don’t leave soon.
‘More than 400 kids will be without their football. If these were
ordinary people on this land, they would be arrested for criminal damage and
have their quad bikes confiscated. What makes them any different?’
