by Mikey Walsh
The night we finished school I sobbed myself to sleep. There were so many things I still had to learn. And I didn’t want to leave Mrs Kerr.
In our final week, the class had gone to the Natural History Museum to see an exhibition about ancient Egypt. We Gypsy children were never allowed to go on school trips. Our parents didn’t trust the teachers, so any permission slip would be chucked straight in the bin. This time, realising how much I wanted to go, Mrs Kerr drove to Warren Woods to ask my mother. It was a brave thing to do.
‘I can’t tell you just how enthusiastic your wee ’un is about this topic, Mrs Walsh. I personally would very much like to have him with me,’ she said.
Mother smiled politely. ‘No.’
And that was that. Mrs Kerr reluctantly gave up and left. Mother stared after her.
‘Nosey old witch,’ she muttered.
In truth Mrs Kerr had blown any possibility of my mother’s trust or approval a couple of months earlier, when she had sent each of us home with a permission slip for us to view a sex-education video.
Mother had been sitting in the front of the car with Granny Bettie when I passed the sordid invitation to her. ‘What’s this for then?’ squawked old Bettie as my mother unfolded the sheet of paper.
‘Sex education,’ I announced enthusiastically.
In a split second and with the precision of a Ninja assassin, old Bettie gave me a karate chop to the side of the neck.
‘Don’t let me hear you ever say that word in front of me again, you little cunt.’
I was baffled, since I had no idea what sex was, and certainly didn’t associate it with what Uncle Joseph was doing to me every week.
It was in this moment of excruciating pain that I had my first lessons in the words that should never be spoken in front of a Gypsy woman. Any sexual term was banned, as was any reference to ‘women’s trouble’ and mention of these would earn me a chop to the neck. The exceptions were the words fuck and cunt which, despite their vulgarity, had slipped through the net of taboo words. Both men and women used them constantly. When Frankie and I asked our mother what dinner would be, she would almost always bark, ‘a pig’s cunt’, before lapsing into a silent fit of guilt. We would pester all the time, just to get her to say it for us.
It seems ironic that most sexual terms were banned, yet most Gypsies, both men and women, used an abundance of foul language in almost every sentence, but that was the rule.
Mrs Kerr’s attempt to give us sex education went down so badly that her name was mud for ever after and when it came to the Natural History Museum outing, her approach was doomed from the outset. Not only was she turned away, but I was beaten for having encouraged her to come to our home, even though I hadn’t known she was coming.
A few days later Mrs Kerr drew me to one side at lunch break. She dug through her handbag, and said that she had a surprise for me – she had brought me back a blue scarab beetle charm from the exhibition.
She placed it in my palm. It was the most wonderful gift I had ever received, but I found it almost too hard to cope with such kindness.
‘Thank you so much,’ I whispered, trying and failing to hold back my tears.
She put her arms around me and gave me a hug. ‘You are more than welcome, my pet.’
Days later, I left the school without being able to say goodbye to her. I never went to school again. I was almost eleven, and expected to go to work, like other Gypsy men.
I often wish I could see Mrs Kerr again, and thank her for what she did for me. I can never hear a Scottish accent without thinking of her.
While my parents dismantled the contents of the trailers, ready to leave, I slipped out to the stable. After Kevin’s death it had fallen into disrepair and become no more than a storage place, because everyone in the camp swore it was haunted by his ghost. But I didn’t mind the idea of that; I had liked Kevin and couldn’t imagine his spirit ever wanting to harm me.
In place of Kevin’s furniture there were bags of rubbish, my father’s tools and my mother’s tumble dryer. This place was both my sanctuary and my torture chamber. My father still used it as a place to beat me for wetting the bed.
Four years on it was still so bad that I hated to sleep. I would refuse to drink all evening and spend twenty minutes in the loo before going to bed. Once there I’d lie, eyes wide open, praying that it wouldn’t happen again. Eventually, despite my efforts, I would fall asleep, only to wake in a wet patch. That meant a beating in the stable, then a public stripping, followed by the fire hose. But despite its association with my father’s violence, I liked the stable; I knew that in there I could be alone.
My mother was the only other person who would come in during the day.
‘And what are you up to?’ she would say with a smile as she brought in a basket of wet clothes. I would just hold up my He-Man figures.
‘Oh, are the goodies or the baddies winning today?’ she would ask.
‘The baddies.’
I would watch as she hummed a Patsy Cline tune while loading up the dryer.
‘Well make sure you don’t mess with these switches,’ she would say, and hurry past with her empty basket, still singing as she left the stable. Her songs were always sad ones, and she had a voice that could reach right inside you and grab your most hidden emotions.
The old tumble dryer was my comforter and I loved it. I would lean against it, wrapping my arms around its tin bulk, feeling its rumbling warmth. Now we were going, and my private hiding place would be gone. In the caravan there would be nowhere to escape, and no friendly dryer. I wanted to store it all in my mind, before my father dismantled it the following day.
I wondered where my father would beat me, once we were on the road. Would he find some kind of tent? One thing was for sure, I would be glad to see the back of the hosepipe. And Joseph. I wouldn’t have to go to that awful yard every week and be left alone with him.
I hated it, and hated him. Suddenly it dawned on me that going on the move might be the best thing ever to happen to me.
We didn’t leave alone. The first to sign up to the convoy were my mother’s two sisters, Nancy and Minnie, along with their families.
Aunt Minnie, queen of the shoplifting circuit, had recently given me my first ever glimpse of boob, having lobbed one of hers out and jiggled it around in front of me. She looked even more like Cruella De Vil than before, in a garish sweater that was supposed to be designer and had ‘Channel’ stitched in huge gold letters across the back of it, which rather gave the game away. She and her husband Jaybus now had three kids; two boys had come along after Romaine.
Aunt Nancy had been brainwashed by Granny Bettie into believing she was the ‘Bardot’ of the family, but she was in fact a carbon copy of her rather plain mother, only with a fatter backside and dyed blond hair cut into a crash-helmet-shaped mullet on top, with the rest so long she could sit on it. Her husband Uncle Matthew was the only Gypsy man ever to wash dishes and together they had four small children.
Uncle Matthew also brought along his most trusted dossa, Kenny, a sorrowful-looking man with a face as flat as a witch’s tit and an arch in his brow that could put Jack Nicholson to shame.
The rest of the convoy was composed of the cling-ons: two newlywed couples, with a baby each, plus the infamous Finneys – Julie-Anne, Sam and their kids. They were like the Addams Family in a trailer.
Julie-Anne was a well-known fighting woman the size of a small tractor. She’d gained the nickname Big Bad Binney for publicly beating not one, but four men who thought it wise to pick on her husband Sam at a wedding reception. Sam was around the size of one of Julie-Anne’s arms, with a face like a Victorian serial killer and a mouth full of pointy black teeth. Challengers rarely bothered Sam, although we would often come home from work to find out that Binney had gained yet another notch in her belt while she’d waited for the washing to dry. Together, she and Sam had eight children: five girls, all exactly the same as Julie-Anne, and three boys all the same as Sam.
Tagging along at the last minute came my mother’s youngest brother Jimmy. He had just got married to a woman almost twice his age. At thirty-five Rayleen would have been condemned to be a spinster for ever if it weren’t for twenty-one-year-old Jimmy stepping in.
The day before we left, we went to Tory Manor to say goodbye to my father’s family. From the moment we got there Joseph hung around me, but I made sure to stay as close as possible to the crowd, never giving him a chance to pull me away for a last goodbye fumble. Not that he didn’t try. As the family chattered away he came up behind me and nudged me, rolling his eyes, winking and nodding to signal a quick getaway.
‘Let’s go,’ he whispered.
I stared at him, then turned to Aunt Maudie. ‘Those are amazing shoes, Auntie.’
‘Awww, thank you!’ she shrieked, lifting her foot and shaking it around. She was wearing stilettos with clear straps and thick plastic soles filled with water, rainbow glitter and with a tiny gold scale model of the Eiffel Tower welded inside each heel.
Joseph, sulking, slunk back into his trailer.
I was sad to leave our little gang of friends behind but we were sure we would soon see them all again. Their families promised to travel up and join our convoy from time to time, and we thought we’d go back and visit them.
But we never saw most of them again.
Just over a year later, our cousins Olive and Twizzel were killed in a car crash. Olive, still only thirteen, was, like so many Gypsy children that age, already driving. She was at the wheel, with Twizzel beside her, when their car was hit by a cargo lorry, killing both girls instantly. I missed them terribly.
We never saw the Donoghue girls again either, or Horace. His father died soon after we left, and he had to take over as the man of the family. Then his mother ran off with Uncle Horace’s dossa. Horace was left behind to look after his elderly grandmother. The only one I was to see again was Jamie-Leigh, the Gypsy princess with her gorgeous face and gutter mouth. I loved Jamie-Leigh for her courage and confidence and I missed her humour and energy so much. I never dreamed it would be more than three years before I would see her again.
By the time we set off there were seven vans, five cars, eleven caravans, all silver plated, and two huge tipper lorries; both were sprayed in orange, yellow and black stripes and stacked to the brim with washing machines, toilet tents, awnings, dog kennels, dogs, Tarmac tools and spinning wash lines. My father was driving his lorry, towing the bigger caravan, while my mother was driving the car, towing the little one. I made sure I rode with her.
We were a convoy of dirt-eating, rough-arsed, stereotypical, Gypsy folk and we got many a horrified look from drivers on the motorway as we headed north. The plan was to move from camp to camp every few weeks, eventually making our way back down south when the winter came.
Word was the Gypsies from the north were a lot more peaceful than those in the south. I was relieved. We would be miles from the boxing club and those who revered the Walsh name. There would, I prayed, be no need to fight.
Gypsy encampments are everywhere. Most are secluded, hidden away down inconspicuous back roads. A few are slap bang in the middle of a community, but most of these don’t last long, because they attract a lot of public complaints. We hoped to find camps of the more discreet kind, but by the time we went on the road the problems were mounting.
Irish Travellers hadn’t just taken over Warren Woods, they seemed to be everywhere. We called them Hedgemumpers, a Gypsy term for people who were not fussy about their living conditions. Hedgemumpers would set up camp anywhere: on the side of a motorway, or even in the centre of a local car park. This type of traveller had given us the worst public image, creating litter and chaos and taking everything that wasn’t nailed to the ground. There were very few Romany Gypsies who lived this way.
We travelled north assuming we would be welcomed into established Romany camps. But we were wrong. Fearful that we were among the ever-increasing band of Irish Travellers, camp owners refused to unlock their gates. My father and the other men tried to reassure them that we were Romanies, but as soon as they heard we had come from the south, they distrusted us. By that time there were five Irish Travellers to every Romany in southern England, and they were convinced that we must have Travellers in our convoy.
Even camps we had booked in advance backed out once we arrived. On our first day, after travelling for hours, we were turned away from four different places. The people in the last camp we tried refused to even let us speak, yelling ‘fuck off’ as soon as they saw us.
We had no choice but to join the Hedgemumpers. We set up camp that night in an empty truck stop, just outside a large northern town. Each of the families found their spot and within a few minutes the legs were wound down on the trailers and the dogs set free from the backs of the lorries. As the women all scattered into the trees to find a decent place to relieve themselves, the men walked off to a nearby garage, taking several buckets to collect water.
I leaped onto the back of our lorry to search for our doorstep. The sky was darkening, and the clouds were bruised with pinks and blues, curling and intertwining like lava around the setting sun. There was no electric light apart from the street lamps and no one in sight. In the distance I could see the river of twinkling lights that was the motorway and I inhaled the stench of pollution and petrol fumes.
With no one around I unzipped myself and peed onto the tarmac below the lorry.
Then Uncle Matthew’s dossa appeared from nowhere, and I jumped backward in shock.
Red-faced I turned to pick up the doorstep from the lorry floor.
‘You need a hand taking that off?’
‘Its all right, I’ve got it.’
As I tilted the doorstep off the side of the lorry, he reached up, taking it from me and lowering it to the floor.
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you OK getting down?’
He reached up and lifted me, although I could have managed alone. ‘You’re definitely Frank’s boy. You look just like him,’ he said, smiling. ‘You must be little Frankie?’
‘No, that’s my sister. I’m Mikey.’
He wiped his hand on his sweater and held it out to me.
‘Well, I’m Kenny. I work for your uncle Matthew.’
I took his hand and he shook mine. It was the first time I had ever been greeted with a shaking of hands.
‘Well, I’ll see you later, Mikey. I gotta get the legs down on this trailer.’
He walked away and I stared after him.
He and I were probably the most despised two people in the camp. Yet he had treated me politely and kindly. And in doing so he had touched the lonely, lost place inside me. Perhaps I had a friend.
Minutes later the men and women returned. The men built a campfire and the women cooked. We all sat round the fire and there were stories, songs, jokes, debates and beer after beer after beer.
After a final group toilet visit, the women retired to their trailers and it wasn’t long before the men’s discussion turned to the enemy: the Irish Travellers. I sat and listened as one man after another shared his fears and spoke of attacks by the Travellers on the Gypsies. The light from the fire lit their faces as they told of fighting champions who had been stabbed, shot and crippled by Travellers, attacking in huge groups.
The worst story of all came from Uncle Matthew: one of the elders had been ambushed at his daughter’s wedding, tied between two vehicles and pulled apart.
After this the only sound was the crack and snap of the fire. The men’s faces looked empty. The catalogue of horrific stories made them realise how serious things had become. The threat of the Irish Travellers loomed over us all.
Eventually Kenny changed the mood by pulling several lumps of coal from the fire and juggling with them. Roars of laughter erupted from the group, as one by one, they all had a turn. I covered my face and chuckled at my father’s attempt. He squealed like a pig, trying to juggle a single coal, and hurled the fiery chun
k into his face in a panic. It was an uplifting end to the night.
As the party began to clear Kenny took a seat next to me.
‘How are you, Walsh boy?’ he slurred. I could smell the alcohol on his breath.
‘You’re drunk.’
He nodded, taking a long drag of his cigarette. ‘I wanna show you something.’ He pointed up towards a cluster of stars. ‘Look up there … Kenny’s pot.’
‘What?’
‘That group of stars up there. You see it?’
It was the Big Dipper. But how was I to know back then? From that moment on I would always know it as ‘Kenny’s Pot’.
Sitting there by the dying embers of the fire Kenny told me about his wife and little girl. ‘Do you wanna see a picture?’
He reached into his shirt pocket, pulling out an old wallet, and from it three passport-sized photos. He passed them over. At first I couldn’t make them out. The glow from the fire was highlighting an overlay of greasy fingerprints. Eventually I made out a mugshot of someone who looked like the serial killer, Rose West.
‘That’s the wife … isn’t she beautiful?’
What could I say?
‘She’s stunning.’
The other two were of a happier, less distressed-looking Kenny, holding on his lap a little girl. The resemblance between father and daughter was astonishing.
‘Where are they now?’
He heaved a sigh, lighting up another cigarette
‘I don’t know. She left me over a year ago and took my baby with her.’
He raised the cigarette to his mouth and paused. Then, he let out a silent wail. I followed my instinct and did a most uncommon thing. I put my arms around him. And he wept until my neck was drenched with tears.
Later I lay in my bunk, staring at the ceiling.
There was a rumble of thunder. A storm was coming. Lightning lit the sky, and rain began to fall; huge drops like rocks, crashing faster and faster on the tin roof in an up-tempo samba.
From behind the sliding door I could hear Frankie, muttering and swearing in her sleep. I thought about Kenny, my new friend. He didn’t really know, or understand, what I was going through. I knew that.