by Graham Jones
4
Even when my mother was a little girl it was clear the end of tinkerin was upon us. Although she camped at O'Donnell Bridge with her parents and even tried to sink that same rectangular boat my grandfather had targeted years earlier, Ireland had genuinely started to industrialise since the Second World War had ended. You could feel it. It was really difficult when plastic hit kitchens. When a family trade is handed down from generation to generation, nobody expects the world will someday dismiss it. Yet thanks to all those Tupperware parties in suburban livingrooms across America, tin ceased to be such a currency. No longer held such potency. Meanwhile, thanks to the arrival of farm machinery there was also much less need for hand work and much less need for horses.
It was frightenin how quickly these changes occurred and it meant other difficulties which were normally sewn into the hem of our existence soon proved trickier for my parents and grandparents. Like what I suppose you would call 'town planning'. The whole notion of public and private space had become more clearly defined in the twentieth century and now that we weren't fulfillin a definite role, people started to feel we were campin in their garden rather than merely the same area.
There was the dole, too. We started to get the dole in the sixties. Well, the end of the sixties really - although for years beforehand many of us had been cleverly claimin it anyway. As soon as they allowed us have it officially, we all grabbed it. We would have been mad not to! Needless to say, nothing is free in this world and by takin their money we became somewhat beholden. It was originally in voucher form for those of us who didn't have a house. They wouldn't pay cash. That was a trick. To cage us like birds. Maybe even a way to get some of the dole back, because the only houses we could move into were government houses. I honestly can't be sure once we get onto the subject of the government because I hate politics, but the dole was definitely something that slowed my parents and uncles down because they had to be there once a month to sign on. In fact, in the early years it was once a week. Weekly signin - just for the travellin community! That was totally discriminatory and they got rid of that. Worst of all, though, was that everyone had to start conductin their business in secret or benefits would be stopped. That took our pride and independence away.
Even in 1965, when my mother and father jumped over the budget, it was obvious things would never return to the way they had been - indeed things looked set to change a whole lot more.
At the start of that decade skirts had been knee-length, but when they married minis were the rage. There was no way Francie would have worn a mini but she was certainly married in a furry, green knee-length number with a belt and buttons and collars. Our granny found it shockin anyway. Ma managed to pull off a sort of Ronette beehive, in an attempt to look like Veronica Bennett although I very much doubt she did. Unfortunately, there are no photos. I know her hair was so brown it seemed black and that her face was rounded by dimples. Can tell you that even nowadays her eyes always seem one step ahead of things. She would have looked great on her weddin day I think. As for my father John, he remains a huge man even now. You could park a lorry on his chest. Back then his black hair dribbled down over his forehead, sellin oily black irises. Quick on the uptake, he wore white vests as consistently as my great grandfather had worn that suit I told you about. Even when it was freezin. My da just had to be in his white vest.
Ma and da - two young, married first cousins - continued travellin the road passionately for a few years after tyin the knot. At O'Donnell Bridge tellin my sisters Stephanie and Josey all about the rectangular wooden boat from our grandfather's day and Francie's own day but which unfortunately was there no longer. They didn't travel in a barreltop wagon, but rather the kind of caravan settled people used for holidays and while John was certainly a craftsman on the inside - clingin to carpentry, flower-makin, shoemakin, umbrella repair and the odd bit of weldin - on the outside he seemed destined to become a collector of waste. Maybe it wasn't so bad, he reasoned with my mother. All part of bein on the road. Adaptin.
They were afraid of Dublin. Too many strange people and in the old days it was hard drivin a pony and cart with all the motorcars. But my da now argued there was metal in the city. A hoard you would never find in the country. He also talked about suburbia. How the houses were stacked up against one another. In the country they were so far apart ma couldn't cover many in a day, but in suburbia it would be easy to do a hundred. She smiled at that after beggin all her life. There was anonymity in the city, he added. He could collect and sell metal yet still sign on and nobody would know.
Besides, they had started to get awful trouble off the guards about bein by the side of the road in recent times. The authorities were always bangin on their door and sayin it was dangerous for them to be parked where they were. Slappin them with court orders. What else could he tell her? They would get into cinemas and pubs much easier! There was street lightin! It would be a far cry from the dark country road where you needed a fire or you wouldn't be able to see your own hands.
Francie, mother of those fires, was unconvinced. Although she couldn't articulate it, she was worried about John's drinkin. He had gone savage over the handouts. Become absolutely stupid with alcohol. What you have to understand is that once upon a time our people never had the money. Now him and his brother lived in the pubs. It was ridiculous, ma said. He didn't need money. He needed work. Yet what could she do? She had my two sisters and two brothers to take care of. Da was the man. At the end of the day, she would respect his decisions about how to spend the dole, where to live, what work to pursue. Everything was decided by him. That was it. On the few occasions she challenged him out of sheer desperation with their deterioratin situation, he roared at her so ferociously that she thought long and hard before doin so again. It was his world. You could be sure of that.
They will correct me if I am wrong but it seems to my memory that uncle Joseph and his wife Charlotte shifted down to Dublin first. Each time they came back and visited our camp they were takin another couple off with them. That was the way of it. Before long all the brothers, sisters and their families were stoppin here on this green in Longcommon where I was born. Like everyone else, my parents insisted their first trip to the city was temporary. Yet after livin here a few months they would never really leave again. Heartbreakin. Inside, they were so torn. In the city you had less freedom, after all. You had to camp where the government said.
The more da drank, the less he spoke. He might tell Francie that Dublin was the place to be, but deep down he knew it was the end of the road. I think that was one of the reasons he became so hard to live with.
My mother put up with awful shite from him over the years. Throughout seven pregnancies he drank, came back to the trailer and took out all his frustrations, failures and anger on her. He would throw stuff around. Curse her. Hit her. She would take my sisters and brothers to our Auntie Roslyn's trailer when it was really bad. Of course, Roslyn and Gerry were often havin problems of their own. In those days men in this community knew the women would take it and so came home pukin, with bloody noses, behavin like wild beasts and it didn't matter. They did whatever they wanted to top off an evenin. Treatin my ma and auntie's like parts of themselves, with which they could do as they pleased.
Over the years it made my mother so very low. The way he spent almost all their spare cash on stout and left her sittin at home every night. Then came back and forced her to have sex. I think it broke her.
My sister Josey, graspin the Tommee Tippee mug she refused to abandon at age five, once watched her make a run for the door. Back then little Josey's blonde hair was straighter and her eyes weren't so wide. She was a dreamer. Always somewhere else. Perhaps because of what she saw. She explains in great detail how that night our father grabbed our mother by the hair, while our mother wrapped her arms around the doorway.
Steph tells the story even more colourfully - says ma's hands began to bleed from holdin on.
They both agree that once he got her inside he t
hrew her against the wall with such force she needed seven stitches.
I told ma a hundred times had it been me, I would never have put up with that. Steph says the same. I think our ma knows us girls are serious. These days my sisters and cousins don't take that kind of thing off their husbands. Not in this camp. They might have gotten away with it once, but they sure as hell don't get away with it now. We give as good as we get. That was the silver-linin of settlin in Longcommon. Even though the older generation talked about movin around, we knew they never would again. Once we copped that, around the age of nine or ten, it occurred to us they might be mistaken about other things too. We started to question them. So, I suppose, there were some advantages to slowin down. Only some. Like I say, one reason my father was such a brute in the first place was that he wasn't on the road. It obviously works both ways.
'For the rest of my days I will live here in the camp,' he said to me outside the church when I made my confirmation. 'But my heart will always be on the road.'
It's well nigh impossible for someone who is not nomadic to understand. Such a trick for you to value who we truly are. I have sympathy for the fact that you are wadin through so many half-truths and untruths. Have heard some people say we used to be settled but were starved or burnt out of our homes. Some of us were. I do have relatives whose ancestors left houses rather than give their daughters to landlords. But we were never a shower of failed settled people who just needed to be re-settled. Your parents were wrong about that. Seriously. Most of us have been travellin since ancient times.
We lived in Celtic times. We lived in pre-Celtic times. We weren't wanderers for any negative reason. Yet the government were indeed takin that position around the time my parents moved permanently to Longcommon. Treatin them like victims of colonialism or something! I can't tell you how upsettin that was for my father.
'That's not our history,' he used to sigh.
We have existed for a long, long time. Traditionally, we have been on the right side of things too. No, it wasn't a red-haired tinker who made the nails to crucify Christ. We weren't forced to wander the world without a home as a result. That's a settled person's myth. Nor did tinkers steal one of the four nails, meanin there's a day every year when we can steal without sinnin. That's a traveller myth.
However, my father explained that we were around at the time of St. Patrick and did help him when he was a boy slave. Described in great detail how we freed him from his cruel master and I do believe that to be the case. He told me we hated any form of bein tied down. That durin the Black and Tan days we were great friends to the nationalists. Known everywhere as the best hunters and soldiers. People were frightened of us. We are constantly mentioned in Irish mythology. Have a look. We are part of your history. Part of your country. You should not be ashamed of us. We are God's own people. The true Irish. With a right to live where and how we please.
We believe life is meant to be lived on the road. That settlin down is akin to dyin. Life is about new things, new horizons. If you reject that by boxin yourself in, you're already dead.
It's the most natural thing in the world to meet up with family and anyone who admits how big their family is will be forced to move. Yet one also moves to avoid people. That's another reason it's so important. To get away from people you are fightin with before it becomes too serious. We are not confrontational like the settled Irish. They would spend thousands of Euros goin to court and stubbornly live beside neighbours they hate forever and ever. That's not the nomadic way. There is always conflict in life. You can't avoid it. But you can move on.
Of course, after my mother and father settled on this camp in Longcommon, they remained travellers. In the end, bein a traveller doesn't only mean movin. Nor does bein settled mean stayin in one place. These are, ultimately, states of mind.
We look at life differently. We look at work and accommodation and a lot of things differently. We don't define ourselves by occupation like so many settled Irish. We define ourselves by family. I would say that's the problem with this world. It has become all about the individual. Not about the family you have, the path you're all on together and the mosaic you feature in. Instead, it's just whatever stupid idea you come up with all by yourself and manage to convince some woman of.
It was all fields here when they arrived in 1970. The council wouldn't start buildin houses like the one Josey ended up livin in until the eighties. I think my mother disliked the Dublin people. Thought they had their noses stuck right up in the air. Yet every newly arrived travellin family set up wherever there was space, irrespective of what the Longcommon people thought.
On the second day, a normally dressed woman and man approached Francie in the field.
'Hello!' the woman shouted. 'I'm a nun.'
Francie looked from the woman to her male companion.
'You're not a nun,' she smiled back at her.
At that very moment, she saw Michael's mother Bernadette passin by and marched off to get better acquainted. They spoke about the nun who hadn't really been a nun and after that day visited each other frequently durin the early weeks and bitched about how the government gave them so little support. About how if you were starvin or ill the council wouldn't help. Butterin batch, Francie related to Bernadette that one child in the camp was deaf and dumb and yet the local authority had done nothing until the St Vincent de Paul first got involved. Bernadette responded enthusiastically by agreein it was only when you were givin birth the powers that be helped - in the form of a midwife or doctor. Yes, my mother concurred. It was the St Vincent de Paul. Nobody else cared.
They were the first to believe we had the right to some help. The government took much longer. Even today it's not really that interested. Thinks we're stubborn. Causin problems for ourselves. It doesn't genuinely respect our ethnicity and culture. Says we die young because of the way we live - not because we were denied health care for so many years.
Yet it was around that time, when ma first moved to Longcommon, that things started to change. A raft of silly initiatives had been undertaken in recent years or were imminent. The Travellin People Review Body. Task Force on the Travellin Community. Commission on Itinerancy. The First National Convention of the Irish Travellers Community. The Itinerant Action Campaign.
None of them respected our traditions. That commission I mentioned, for instance, declared 'all efforts directed at improvin the lot of itinerants and at dealin with the problems created by them and all schemes drawn up for these purposes must always have as their aim the eventual absorption of the itinerants into the general community.'
You see what I'm talkin about?
There were actually fines for travellin. Francie and Bernadette shook their heads. Fines, no less! Mounds of clay and rubble. Deep trenches dug. Boulders to prevent us from campin.
If we weren't settled, they insisted, we could never be educated. There were many organisations in our future. Like Pavee Point - that was created by a traveller actually. Exchange House. National Traveller Women's Forum. The Irish Traveller Movement. I would eventually become very popular in such places because of my ability to write like a solicitor.
Now our two families had resumed contact, old stories of our great grandparents bein on the road years before were dusted off and tried on for size. The story of the magic potato swindle was recycled for the current generation, in the retellin comin across as far more lucrative and dramatic. The old competition between the men sketched as camaraderie.
There was a brief period after our parents moved into the camp when, come evenin time, the two families would visit one another. Michael's father Joe played cards with John who had acquired a television for our trailer which he connected to a truck battery. The McDonaghs thought this fantastic and watched football for about two months. My sisters and brothers often runnin back and forth between the two trailers.
Mum insists that durin those early years daily life on the camp was quite good. John would often be doin business with Joe an
d she would be in and out of Bernadette's trailer. They had met others, too, from stoppin here - all of whom ma had some olden connection to.
Our parents started to rely more on the suburbanites who gave them junk and food just like the farmers had once done. Except these days they gave money too. These days there was usually nothing for John or Francie to do in return. These days they were more like pure beggars.
Electricity, runnin water, bin collection and toilets were not available back then. It will therefore come as no surprise that our camp was dirty. Francie got water from shops or houses or petrol stations. When it was wet, things used to get difficult because so many people were movin around that it turned into a bog. I think da used to make little shacks out of rubbish for my sisters to play in.
The renewed connection with Michael's family did not endure. There were scores of trailers arrivin and within six months their bond had become enveloped by the more complicated politics amidst the multitudes. Within a year, the two families had stopped acknowledgin one another and by the time Michael and myself were born nobody even remembered there was history. We were all just faces livin in the same area. That's how it is for us travellers. Our world is always boilin over with forgotten connections - and the more settled we become, the more connections we forget.
It's the same for everyone. We were all nomadic once. Yet you've trapped yourselves in cement boxes. Seated yourselves in front of screens. I know. Even if you don't.