by Mikey Walsh
But the most exciting time of year was Christmas. At that time of year my father would pursue another of his sidelines: flogging Christmas trees and wreaths at Borough Market in London.
Frankie, our mother and I would sit at the kitchen table making hundreds of festive wreaths out of twigs, holly leaves and fake snow spray. We would spend whole days working there, so that a stack of the wreaths would be ready for our father to collect them when he came home.
It was my fourth Christmas, when an earthquake throughout the trailer at 5 a.m. turned out to be our mother. She was as excited as a child, unable to wait a second longer. She rattled at the sides of the bunk beds.
‘Get up, you herbs, it’s Christmas! He’s been. Quick, go and look!’
We ran into the lounge, which had been covered with balloons and tinsel, diving into the pile of presents, screaming out for joy.
After much digging, I couldn’t help but notice that every single one was labelled with Frankie’s name. I felt as if I was going to vomit from disappointment.
‘I think he forgot me, Mum.’
My father took me in his arms and pointed through the window.
There, in the navy blue of 5 a.m. stood a brand-new bright red, big-wheeled, battery-operated quad bike, complete with shiny leather-bound boxing gloves that dangled from the handlebars like a bull’s testicles.
Mum grabbed her camera as we all made our way outside.
‘Get on it then,’ cried my father, with a joyful prod to my chest.
I eyed the monster cautiously, intimidated, by the testosterone that was seeping from every shiny inch of it. Hesitating, I stood beside it, flicking at the boxing gloves and sending them whirling around the handlebars.
Frankie marched over and gave me a boot up onto the driver seat. ‘Just press on that peddle and it’ll go,’ boomed my father.
I was terrified of the thing. I sat cautiously on it, and placed my foot on the pedal, looking back at the three of them. My father’s face was beaming through the dark like a lantern. Then, desperate to please him but with no idea of what I was doing, I slammed down on the accelerator. After eight feet I crashed the monster into a wall, bouncing off to mangle a neighbour’s fence, before flying through the air into a patch of Busy Lizzies.
I could hear my father’s groans as I pulled myself from the dirt patch, battered and bruised. I scraped the mud from my pyjamas and slunk back inside, leaving the ugly death machine and its gloves where they had crashed.
I was hot with shame, knowing I was not like other boys, who made their fathers proud. I was a failure, and I couldn’t look at my dad’s face.
By the time I got back indoors, my sister had already clawed her way through her first present: a baby doll nearly twice the size of her, bald as a coot, and wearing a tea-stained Babygro. She flicked the switch at the back of its head and it began to wail disturbingly, rolling its head around like the girl from The Exorcist.
‘I’m gonna call him Jesus,’ she chirped, ramming a dummy into the beast’s mouth.
She put Jesus down to rip open another present and I ran over to help her control the thing as it began vibrating its way across the floor.
‘You don’t like the bike then?’ groaned my father. ‘You ain’t getting nothing else, you know.’
‘It’s all right, I’ll play on it tomorrow,’ I said, looking down at my feet.
I was sure as hell never going to sit on that death trap again.
Two days later, it was gone. I was relieved, and Frankie was glad to share the parenting of Jesus with me.
The handlebar gloves, though, were not: they had been hung from the corner of my bed, a symbol of what was to come.
4
Taking a Punch
By the time I was four my grooming process had begun. My father was now working locally and, having found a regular grunter, was home a lot more often, so he had plenty of free time between watching the soap operas both he and my mother loved to dedicate to training his only son.
Before he began he beckoned me over to the battered easy chair which was his throne and lifted the golden gloves from around my neck. ‘You need to show me how worthy you are of wearing these, my boy, all right?’ he said, tugging the chain over his own head.
Although the eventual aim was bare-knuckle, the training was done with boxing gloves on, as the moves were basically the same. My father pulled his treasured, ancient brown leather gloves over his sandpaper hands, making a few mock punches, to gear himself up. ‘Right, you ready?’
My own small gloves had been taken from the end of my bed and tied on around my wrists. ‘Yep.’
He told me to stand with my arms in the air. Then he punched me in the ribs. A small punch, at first, just enough to startle me, and hurt a bit. Then another, and another, each one harder, so that by the third I was winded and by the fifth I was doubled over in agony.
This was my first lesson, he said, laughing. How to take a punch. The rules, which he explained as I clutched my aching ribs, were that I had to take at least ten levels of blow, without crying, bobbing, weaving or dodging. ‘In at the deep end’, was his approach. He had learned that from his father, Old Noah, who used to say ‘bring your boy up like a wolf, and a wolf you will get’.
But for my father it was more than just the harsh tuition he’d had himself. He seemed to need to test his own strength, in case he may have weakened since the days when he fought and won against all comers. He didn’t hold back, when he hit me.
That session, like all those that were to follow, ended with ‘real’ punches, tears and at least thirty minutes of my father raving about how ashamed of me he was, how I was a pathetic coward and he didn’t know how he’d ever make a man of me.
I tried. I tried really hard. But the blows hurt so much. Taking them without crying was more than I could manage. In every session, by the third or fourth blow, my small body shuddered with pain and I collapsed in tears. I knew what that meant, so I would be sure to collapse into the tightest ball that I possibly could.
‘You’re (punch) nothing! (punch-punch) Nothing but a cowardly (punch-kick) piece of (punch) shit!’
Soon I dreaded the ‘training’ so much that I began kicking up an almighty fuss when he announced it was time. But it didn’t matter whether I kicked, screamed, pleaded or begged, I had to do it. Every single day. Punches, followed by harder punches, fury and humiliation.
And every day I failed him.
As the training sessions went on, I found it impossible to sit in the lounge and watch telly with him there. I couldn’t stop staring at him, watching as he skipped from channel to channel. I felt an axe was dangling over my head. And once he put down that remote control I knew it was time.
‘Ready, Mikey?’
I was never ready, and I was never less than terrified.
I was not yet old enough to go to school, and I was expected to take hit after hit from a grown man, get off my backside when I fell, and come back fighting.
Almost all Gypsy men are violent, it’s ingrained in the culture and the life they lead and impossible to avoid. My father had no doubt suffered as a child, and because of Old Noah and his motto, he grew up to be more violent than most.
The ‘great’ name we were burdened with was a guarantee that violence would seek us out. My father knew that there would always be a new challenger. Leagues of men held grudges for his victories, and the sons of those he had beaten were waiting in the wings. Waiting to fight me and claim their place amongst the ranks of the victors.
My father wanted me to be ready, and if beating the life out of me was the only way to toughen and prepare me for that day, then so be it.
My mother watched our daily fight, tight-lipped. She had known my fate before I was even born. She knew about the family she had married into, and what the men were like. But what she hadn’t known was how it would feel to see her child being attacked unmercifully, time after time, and forced to play a ‘game’ which he could never win, leaving him a bruised
, battered, weeping heap on the floor.
On one occasion Frankie was roped in to count the punches.
‘Punch number three, you ready?’ I swallowed and nodded squeezing my eyes shut. ‘You keeping count, my gal?’
‘Yep,’ clucked Frankie, her back to the action, squirming to keep Jesus from leaping out of her grip.
I closed my eyes, tensing my whole body, awaiting the next blow. I dived into my unconscious, searching frantically for a place to hide myself from what was coming.
WHAM!
Like a wrecking ball, his fist crashed into my guts and sent me hurtling across the floor.
I tripped backward over my mother, who was lying on the floor, engrossed in a re-run of Starsky and Hutch. I crash-landed into the television set, pushing it off the stand. My mother got up and peeled me from the telly. ‘That’s enough now, Frank.’ Her voice was tight and low.
My father chuckled, rearranged his boxing gloves, and ignored her. ‘Get up then, boy,’ he ordered.
But my mother, nerves frayed by having to listen to my gasps and sobs, wasn’t giving up. ‘Haven’t you had enough tonight?’ she asked him.
Whimpering, I climbed to my feet, rubbing my throbbing ribs with the boxing gloves, which, by that time, had cut off my circulation.
‘Ready?’
He leaned forward from his easy chair, hissing and sparring with himself, waiting for me to come back for the next punch.
My mother grew more agitated.
‘Oi, pig’s head! I’ve said that’s enough! Now sit back in your fucking throne before you break it.’
‘Shut your fucking mouth, and watch your murder mystery,’ he hissed. ‘Come on then, Mikey.’
I hesitated.
‘I’m gonna count to three … one …’
‘Dad, please.’
‘Two …’
I turned to run, getting one step before being lifted from the floor with an almighty kick. As I fell, he ripped off a glove and dragged me in towards him.
Suddenly, in a graceful leap from the carpet, my mother snatched me from his clutches, punching him square on the nose.
My father rose from his throne, grabbing her by the hair.
Leaping onto him, she pushed her fingers into his eyes and nudged me out of the firing line with her foot.
‘Run, Mikey, run.’
Frankie threw Jesus to the floor, and rushed to my aid, pulling me up. Without looking back we stumbled down the hallway and into the bedroom.
‘Come back here, boy, I haven’t finished with you yet!’
Frankie slammed the door shut, fumbling frantically with the bolt as our mother rushed to stand in front of it.
We held onto each other, screaming, as our mother was chased and ripped from the doorframe.
‘Don’t open that door,’ my mother screeched.
Backing into the corner we listened to him dragging her from the door, and then wails followed by thuds, thuds followed by wails and the vibrations of bodies slamming against walls, appliances and cupboards.
Then silence.
A moment later we heard footsteps coming toward the door. Our father’s.
‘Unlock this door. Now.’
We didn’t dare disobey.
Our mother, sprawled on the kitchen floor, unconscious, was deaf to my cries as I was dragged back into the lounge, with Frankie hanging onto my feet.
Now launched on a violent rampage, his wrath unsuppressed, my father was going to finish the job and reaffirm his position as master of the house.
I was thoroughly beaten and we were sent back to our room. We stopped beside our mother, and Frankie tried to lift her face from a pile of broken china.
‘Don’t touch her!’
We backed away from her prostrate body and ran back down the hall and into the bedroom. We heard the telly come back on and knew he was watching it.
We sat on the floor, both of us terrified and whimpering. Was our mother dead? We didn’t know. We wanted to go to her, but we didn’t dare.
It must have been half an hour later that we heard the chink of the broken crockery being cleared away. We looked at one another, both thinking the same thing. Did that mean she was all right?
Slowly, without making a sound, Frankie opened the door, just a crack. Enough to see that our mother was on her feet, in the kitchen.
‘She’s OK,’ Frankie whispered.
Relief flooded through me. If she had died, I knew it would have been my fault.
The pattern was set that day: my daily training, in between the soaps, with our mother intervening when she thought I’d had enough and Frankie and I running off to the bedroom until the storm was over.
Our mother was always a very ‘dust yourself off and move on’ kind of woman.
She constantly made excuses for our father, to avoid any gossip. The dark staining of her front teeth, she claimed, was caused by me hitting her with a spoon when I was a baby. But everyone knew that it was not a spoon, but our father ramming her face into the side of a sink bowl, also breaking her cheek bone. This was yet another night after training, the same night my nose was broken by a punch from my father, for crying.
I still have images of the awful things he would do to my mother as punishment for stepping in to try to protect me. She was regularly thrown to the floor, stamped on, held down and punched, while her hair was torn out in clumps from her head. But she would take it all, never making a sound, never crying in front of him, and never giving in.
She didn’t seem to hold it against him, either. Despite these horrors, our parents were still affectionate with one another. My father would kiss my mother and give her a bear hug whenever he came home. She, in turn, would often come up from the floor where she was lying in front of the TV to sit on his lap. He would call Frankie to join her and then proudly brag of his girls as he lifted them up and down like trophies.
The other Gypsies who lived around us were aware of my father’s violence; no one could have missed the thuds and crashes that echoed from our trailer daily. But they were all far too frightened of him to do anything about it. Even if they had, my mother would not have accepted it. She knew him better than anyone. She fought her own battles and got him back, by never letting him win. He might knock her out, but that didn’t mean she had surrendered.
She fought him hard, and courageously. But in time, the beatings took effect, and she gradually got the confidence and spirit she once had knocked right out of her, so that by the time I was almost five, it was she who had fallen into silence.
Many women outside the situation she was in would have walked away, never to come back. But she was a Gypsy wife, and to leave would have meant becoming an outcast. So she covered up and excused her husband for the cruel way he treated her, and she found refuge in us, and in music.
Sometimes work would take our father away for weeks on end; at others he would spend whole days sitting in front of the telly, putting me through the training routine two or three times a day. Luckily for me he had a fairly active social life when he was home and would often disappear to the local betting office or the pub.
When he was away, everything changed, and the three of us had fun. We would record ourselves on Mum’s old stack music system, singing karaoke at the top of our lungs. Our party piece was from her favourite Barbara Streisand album, and at five I learned the Donna Summer part to ‘Enough is Enough’ which my mother and I would belt out together, while Frankie did a manic kind of rain dance around the trailer.
Mum introduced us to Michael Jackson, who would be blasted throughout the camp from our speakers as we sang along to ‘Thriller’, Frankie doing Michael and me roaring the monster sounds and miming the Vincent Price bit. We practically wore out the tape of the music video, which our mother had bought for us, joyously watching over and over again, practising the dance moves and debating which zombie was the coolest and prettiest.
We weren’t bothered by the zombies at all, since we watched our father’s grizzly collectio
n of horror movies on a regular basis and had by now seen much worse. He would get hold of bootleg copies of banned films, and make us watch them, as one of his more minor forms of punishment, so aged four I sat in front of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Evil Dead and Child’s Play. They scared us dreadfully; I often had nightmares and Jesus would be locked firmly away at nights in case he came to life and searched in the cupboards for kitchen knives to wield against us.
We loved TV, and were avid fans of The Muppet Show. As a sixth birthday surprise for Frankie, our mother’s brother Alfie, a 400-pound giant, dressed up as what he thought was Miss Piggy. He woke us up in the middle of the night, squealing at the top of his voice. Our shrieks of horror were louder, though. We thought this horrific apparition in the doorway was the Texas Chainsaw murderer Leatherface, coming to kill us.
The films we loved to watch arrived courtesy of Big Jabba John, the only Gypsy man in the south of England who could get a video tape of any movie you asked for within days of request. He spent most of his time either ripping off rentals in his trailer, or sitting in the front row of a cinema with an almost steady video camera. Every Monday night, he would arrive in our camp in his rumbling beast of a pick-up, the back full to the brim with cassette tapes and video boxes. As soon as we heard the roar of its exhaust as it hit the gateway ramp, every man, woman and child came running from their caravans, screaming and waving their hands in the air. By the time he left, Frankie and I would be starting a Disney movie marathon, over fish and chips, sticky buns, Angel Delight and toffee popcorn.
While our father bagged yet another horror film, our mother preferred epic love stories, which sent me and Frankie into comas on the carpet in front of the TV. Frankie would eventually drag me out and we would flee from the trailer into the garden. It was while escaping a weepy Liz Taylor movie that Frankie leaped from the trailer door, right onto the jagged edge of a broken milk bottle. Our father rushed her off to hospital, where she was given thirteen stitches in the bottom of her foot.