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‘What’s this house, The Towers, like?’

I can still see the queer face of the old man, as he looked at me sideways and said:

‘That’s not what us calls it here. What sort of a name is that?’ He snorted disapproval. ‘It’s many a year now since folks lived in it and called it The Towers.’ He snorted again.

I asked him then what he called it, and again his eyes shifted away from me in his old wrinkled face in that queer way country folk have of not speaking to you direct, looking over your shoulder or round the corner, as it were, as though they saw something you didn’t; and he said:

‘It’s called hereabouts Gipsy’s Acre.’

‘Why is it called that?’ I asked.

‘Some sort of a tale. I dunno rightly. One says one thing, one says another.’ And then he went on, ‘Anyway, it’s where the accidents take place.’

‘Car accidents?’

‘All kinds of accidents. Car accidents mainly nowadays. It’s a nasty corner there, you see.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if it’s a nasty curve, I can well see there might be accidents.’

‘Rural Council put up a Danger sign, but it don’t do no good, that don’t. There are accidents just the same.’

‘Why Gipsy?’ I asked him.

Again his eyes slipped past me and his answer was vague. ‘Some tale or other. It was gipsies’ land once, they say, and they were turned off, and they put a curse on it.’

I laughed.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘you can laugh but there’s places as is cursed. You smart-Alecks in town don’t know about them. But there’s places as is cursed all right, and there’s a curse on this place. People got killed here in the quarry when they got the stone out to build. Old Geordie he fell over the edge there one night and broke his neck.’

‘Drunk?’ I suggested.

‘He may have been. He liked his drop, he did. But there’s many drunks as fall – nasty falls – but it don’t do them no lasting harm. But Geordie, he got his neck broke. In there,’ he pointed up behind him to the pine-covered hill, ‘in Gipsy’s Acre.’

Yes, I suppose that’s how it began. Not that I paid much attention to it at the time. I just happened to remember it. That’s all. I think – that is, when I think properly – that I built it up a bit in my mind. I don’t know if it was before or later that I asked if there were still gipsies about there. He said there weren’t many anywhere nowadays. The police were always moving them on, he said. I asked:

‘Why doesn’t anybody like gipsies?’

‘They’re a thieving lot,’ he said, disapprovingly. Then he peered more closely at me. ‘Happen you’ve got gipsy blood yourself?’ he suggested, looking hard at me.

I said not that I knew of. It’s true, I do look a bit like a gipsy. Perhaps that’s what fascinated me about the name of Gipsy’s Acre. I thought to myself as I was standing there, smiling back at him, amused by our conversation, that perhaps I had a bit of gipsy blood.

Gipsy’s Acre. I went up the winding road that led out of the village and wound up through the dark trees and came at last to the top of the hill so that I could see out to sea and the ships. It was a marvellous view and I thought, just as one does think things: I wonder how it would be if Gipsy’s Acre was my acre… Just like that… It was only a ridiculous thought. When I passed my hedge clipper again, he said: