Above the noise, I could hear the girls, screaming ‘Kill him, Mikey, kill him.’
As the only Gypsy boy in school, I knew I was sworn to fight for the girls, and for the honour of our culture, no matter what. Scott was much bigger than me. My heart was pounding and my mouth felt dry. But one thought, above all others, stood out in my mind: if I lose, my father will surely find out about it. And a bashing from this boy would be nothing to what I would get from him.
Suddenly I saw red. I imagined I was back in the ring with Paddy, the crowd shouting and cheering around us. At that moment Scott’s first two punches landed on me.
Winded, I doubled over. He stood back, taunting and jeering and running around the circle doing high fives. A tear slid down my cheek.
The crowd started to chant. ‘Gypos go home, Gypos go home!’
Scott turned back to finish me off. I looked round and saw Frankie, Olive and Twizzel being pinned down by some of the bigger boys, as several other boys held a raging Jamie-Leigh while Jenny Hardy threw punches at her face.
I turned back to Scott, who was laughing. He raised his fists, and so did I. We circled one another, before he kissed his fist and went in for a punch. The chorus swelled as he turned back to finish me off.
‘You stinking … Gypsy … bastards; coming here and ruining our school. You make me sick.’ He hit me square in the stomach. Bent towards me he gave me a perfect opportunity. I grabbed his mane of hair and locked my fists there.
The crowd started to groan, as Scott screamed and fell to his knees, shouting and trying to grab my arms. He dug his nails into my fingers, but I wasn’t letting go.
I saw my father’s yellow eyes and felt the sting of his bamboo cane falling on my skin. I thought of Joseph, groaning with pleasure, not caring about the pain and fear he inflicted on me.
With strength I didn’t know I had, I lifted him off the ground and began to swing him round by his hair, faster and faster, in a dizzying circle. He was screaming at the top of his voice and I could feel his scalp was bleeding, but nothing was going to stop me now. Fury surged through
me and I swung him until tufts of his hair came out in my hands and he flew backwards into the horrified crowd.
As they parted and then ran for cover, Jenny Hardy ran towards me, her face contorted with rage. I drew back my fist and launched it into her chest, sending her hurtling to the floor. As she landed, Jamie-Leigh, Frankie and the other two girls pounced, tearing wildly at her face, hair, clothes and body like a pack of furious she-wolves.
Scott was sitting on the ground, sobbing, a clump of his hair in his hand. ‘Look what you’ve done to me,’ he shouted.
I walked away. I was trembling with the effort of what I’d done. But I felt exhilarated. Then the dinner ladies pounced, and we were all sent to the headmaster’s office.
Judging by its compact size, Mr Wadsworth’s office had not catered for so many misbehaving children at once. Of course we Gypsies had been there before. In fact we knew his office as well as we knew our classrooms; we appeared there most days for some misdemeanour or other.
Sitting in the corner was Dotty Quinlan, a girl rumoured to have been struck by lightning, and always in trouble because of her fondness for painting with faeces. She was sitting in her usual seat, knees tightly together and dressed in a Dorothy pinafore, with enormous spectacles and a haircut like a thatched cottage. She never spoke to us; she just buried her head beneath the neck of her dress like an old tortoise.
Mr Wadsworth was in such a fury he had completely lost the ability to speak an audible sentence. As he stood behind his desk, shouting, the only part I could hear clearly was the ‘
Do you understand
?’ bit at the end.
At that point, Jamie-Leigh chose to release a colossal
fart into the room. She laughed out loud, showing off her new, pointy front teeth, as the impact ricocheted off the base of her chair. Laughter spread throughout the room and Mr Wadsworth cupped his head in his hands as we wiped tears from our hysterical faces.
It was clear that our headmaster had come to the end of his tether with the battle of Gorgias versus Gypsies. It was never going to be resolved. No matter how well we Gypsy children behaved, no matter how much we tried to stay out of trouble, there would always be someone wanting to have a go at us, and being proud of who we were, we could never let it go.
Kevin
One day Tyrone Donoghue came home with a young homeless man he had spotted outside Harrods, the posh department store in London. Gypsies and Travellers often pick up their workmen – known as dossas – from the streets of big cities, most commonly London, and take them home to help with their general chores and any kind of dodgy deed they may be plotting. A homeless man can’t refuse if someone carrying Harrods bags offers him a place to stay and money in his pocket every week.
So Kevin was ushered into the back of Tyrone Donoghue’s van and brought back to Warren Woods.
The dread on his face was even clearer than the dirt on it when he stepped out of the vehicle and saw all of us staring back at him as if he was an alien. And that’s exactly what he was. A tall, gangly boy, his hair combed into a neat side-parting and wearing clothes that were too small for him, he wasn’t a Gypsy like us, which put him into a different world instantly. And he was soon made very aware of how inhumane the travellers of Mr Donoghue’s kind were to a mere Gorgia man. Dossas were considered beneath both Gypsies and Travellers, and were generally despised. But Mr Donoghue took their treatment to a new low with his cruelty towards Kevin.
In a matter of days, Kevin was sleeping in the back of
the van that had brought him and was being terrorised daily by Mr Donoghue, his wife and five children. Scared of saying no or of standing up to their cruel demands, Kevin spent twelve hours a day painting, washing cars, walking and feeding fierce dogs, shovelling bricks, cement, dirt and mortar, laying tarmac single handed and even towing the Donoghue children around on a cart like a Shire horse.
He never refused, but he was still beaten regularly. Mr Donoghue would punch him just because he’d had a bad day at work. The children pelted him with stones and Mrs Donoghue refused to have him eat off her own plates and gave him one of the dogs’ dishes.
My father, being a friend and regular pub-going accomplice of Mr Donoghue, regularly witnessed the terrible life Kevin led at the hands of the Donoghue clan.
One day, sick of his modest tool shed, and in need of a helping hand to put up a bigger one, my father asked Mr Donoghue if he could borrow Kevin for a morning.
‘Of course, Frank, and if he gives you any trouble, or don’t shift his weight for you, drag him back up here to me,’ Mr Donoghue said.
Once Kevin was out of sight of his owner, he broke down, pleading to my father to save him. ‘I’ll work for you for nothing, Frank. Please help me.’
‘I’ll try, my boy. I’ll try,’ whispered my father.
He gave him a pat on the back, threw me a stiff glance and they both went about their work.
I stared after them, astonished. It seemed that Kevin had somehow got through to my unmerciful and cruel father. Sure enough, that evening down at the pub, my father dosed Mr Donoghue with whisky and made him an offer of a
hundred pounds for Kevin to work for him instead. Mr Donoghue gave in and they shook on it.
They spent the hundred pounds in the next hour, and Frankie and I awoke the next morning to find Kevin cleaning our window. We both gave him a wave. He waved back, and despite his bruises and a thick lip, he had a beaming smile that lit up his face.
The new tool shed, known as the stable, became home for Kevin. My mother bought him a bed and a dresser as well as a fridge, a cooker and a lamp powered by a huge cable extension that ran from our electric box. He quickly became one of the family. My father even took him to buy a brand-new wardrobe and have a haircut, and he promised him a decent wage, so that he could save up and get a life outside work. And away from us.
My father had saved Kevin, and yet at the same time Kevin had saved my father. Kevin’s innocence and need for help awoke a side of my father that we had never seen before. For the first time in his life, there was someone who didn’t look on him as a monster. He was a hero. And he clearly enjoyed every living, breathing moment of being one.
Two joyous weeks went by. Then my father bought Kevin a TV and Kevin climbed onto the stable roof to set up the aerial.
That afternoon Frankie and I were running around the plot with Olive, Twizzel and Jamie-Leigh, playing a game called ‘He loves a Bitta Girl’, which was basically a kissing version of tag.
Right in the middle of a clinch, there was a sudden explosion of fireworks, followed by a hissing and crackling
and Kevin tumbled down from the stable roof and crashed at our feet. His body hit the concrete paving, heaving an out breath of clear smoke, and the smell of burning meat filled the air. We didn’t know it then, but Kevin had touched the electric cable that ran above the shed, with his aerial.
After a couple of seconds of utter shock, we ran and told my mother and then Jamie-Leigh and I ran for the neighbours, banging on doors and shouting for help.
It took an ambulance forty-five minutes to come to Kevin’s aid.
He hadn’t a hope.
We children were left deeply shocked. Kevin had been carried into the air and slammed to the ground by a force we’d had no idea existed. Watching our friend die in front of us was something we could never understand or forget. Whenever Olive, Twizzel, Jamie-Leigh, Frankie and I were together, we talked about it for many years afterwards.
The day after the accident, my mother, Henry-Joe, Frankie and I were cleaning out Kevin’s room, when my mother came across a letter. As she read it she started to cry. She sat on his bed and laid Henry-Joe beside her. It was a birthday card, addressed to Kevin’s mother.
A guilt-ridden Mr Donoghue and my father paid for a lovely funeral for Kevin. The mourners were us, the Donoghue family and, to our surprise, Kevin’s mum.
I can still hear her voice, and her words of unconditional love for her only son and the one word she kept repeating: sorry. For what, we’ll never know.
The Monster in the Woods
My eighth birthday fell on a Saturday, which meant no school, and no father till evening, as he was off working. We didn’t have birthday parties, but we didn’t need them, there were always friends to play with and for me just being free for the day was enough. I didn’t expect presents, girls got presents and a cake, boys just got a bit of money.
Frankie and I were playing in her battered Wendy house with the other girls when Sadie popped up over the wall from the plot next door. Sadie was a boy and, like me, was born into a family of fighters. His father, impressed by the Johnny Cash song ‘A Boy Named Sue’, about a boy who grew up to be a fighter because of his stupid name, thought he would try the same ploy with his own son.
Unfortunately it backfired totally, because Sadie turned out to be the most camp Gypsy boy ever to set foot in a caravan. When his father realised that not only would he never make a fighter, but that he was not going to match the description of a Gypsy man in any respect whatsoever, he was horrified. He banned Sadie from setting foot outside their caravan, so that no one would set eyes on him.
By the time he was in his mid-teens Sadie had the voice, hairstyle, mannerisms, wardrobe, and even the figure, of a voluptuous silver-screen siren. When his father was out,
he would venture out of the caravan and as far as the wall dividing our plot from his, where he would climb on the electric box next to the wall and poke his head over, in the hope of finding someone to talk to. His hair always arrived before he did. He had the most amazing bouffant hair-do we had ever seen, and he flaunted it with obvious delight. It would appear over the wall, followed by Sadie’s heavily made-up face.
He would lie in wait for my mother, who went out daily to sweep her beloved crazy paving, which by this time covered the whole of our plot. She didn’t mind Sadie, but after a while she got fed up with the constant interruptions and started to wait until his father was at home before going out to sweep, knowing that Sadie wouldn’t be allowed to come out.
Undaunted, Sadie turned to us children for company. He would watch from the window until we went out to play, and then appear over the wall and chat to us as we played. He must have been very lonely, though we didn’t think about it then.
When he appeared on my birthday we hadn’t seen him for a week or two.
‘Hiya guys! Have you missed me?’ he drawled in a fake American accent.
‘It’s Mikey’s birthday today, Sadie.’
‘Ooohh, is it? How old are you?’
Frankie, crawling around the front gate with her bottom in the air, responded for me. ‘He’s eight.’
‘It was mine the other week – I was seventeen,’ beamed Sadie. ‘What are you doing for it?’
‘I’m going spider hunting,’ I told him.
‘What did you do for yours?’ asked Jamie-Leigh, pulling the last legs from her prey.
‘Me mum paid for me to go to America with me aunt Julie – you wanna see some pictures?’
‘Yeah, go on then.’
Sadie’s face glowed. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Before we could escape he was back and he hoisted himself over the wall. He was wearing a pair of beige, skin-tight flares and holding a large, red and pink fabric covered book with SADIE glued on the front in blue sequins.
While we stood around trying to look interested, he flicked through pages, each one beautifully decorated and filled with photos of his holiday, most of them close-ups of him, framed against the Disneyland castle. He told the story of every picture until we’d had enough of being polite and ran off to play.
Sadie came out to speak to us most days. And even when he was locked away and couldn’t come out, he would open his window, blasting tracks from his latest albums, miming the words and striking various poses at the window.
The camp’s behaviour toward Sadie was, unsurprisingly, never kind. He was a victim of relentless verbal abuse and name-calling. He was mocked and jeered, especially by the men, and his father made no secret of his shame. For years Sadie’s name was used by many as a term of insult toward anyone with his kind of ‘ways’. Yet despite it all, Sadie refused to change for an easier life. He was who he was, and that was that. And though I never would have dared to say it, I admired Sadie, who in his own way was just as brave as any other man on the site.
Two months after my birthday my mother was taken into hospital and she arrived home a week later with a baby with silky skin and eyes just like my father’s: wide, black, shiny stones full of nothing. I peered into his cot one morning and watched him as he cried. I reached for the bottle of milk and placed it by his mouth. He suckled quietly, clenching his fists, as I stared down at him. I knew this was the one. This was who I should have been: the boy who would be a fighter and make my father proud.
When my parents came in and saw me with him they went berserk. I was unworthy even to stand near to him. My father lifted me by the hair and threw me from the bedroom and slammed the door in my face.
Jimmy. A Walsh through and through.
All my father’s hopes now rested on his new son. He had given up on making a true fighter of me, and Henry-Joe was my mother’s son, protected and mollycoddled, but Jimmy would be a champion. None of us doubted it.
Despite this, I was still dragged weekly to the boxing club, forced to go through my paces, and made to suffer whatever humiliations my father could put my way.
Every week I would be weighed, and then put through a hardcore exercise routine of sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups – on an old doorframe – skipping, hitting the punch bag and then sparring with Uncle Tory, who would hold up pads with a little red spot on each, and make me hit them as fast and as many times as I could.
Despite my loathing of the whole business, I did grow physically fit. Not to the standards of Tory and Noah, but I could see it in the difference between me and the majority of other boys at the boxing club. They may have been put
through their paces, but they weren’t doing half the work there that I was being asked to do. I hated to admit it and I never did to them, but when I was on those punch bags, I could vent the anger inside of me. It only helped more to have Uncle Joseph constantly looking over my shoulder, or Uncle Tory’s face in between those punching mitts. Every strike to that bag was another blow to them.
My stomach grew solid and my legs, like a football player’s. But in the opinion of the Walsh men, being physically fit didn’t mean that I was able to fight. After the calamity of my first fight, my father, uncle and grandfather had decided I would not fight again until I reached the age of twelve – the age of manhood to Gypsies – and for this at least I was grateful. When the boxing matches started, the three of them would join the other men around the ring. Uncle Tory told me I couldn’t afford the time to be in the audience, so I was sent outside to spar with my cousin, young Noah.
By this time Noah had decided he wasn’t too keen on boxing. He was fourteen and more interested in where he was going with his friends afterwards. They would all go into the local town to look for Gorgia women to score with. So when the coast was clear Noah and I would put down our gloves and stand together outside, sharing our hatred of boxing.
In between school, chores, the boxing club and the scrapyard, there wasn’t a lot of free time. But when there was, I loved to take off on a bike. No child on the camp had ever been bought a bike to fit. Most of us rattled round on one that was several sizes too big. We managed to ride them all right, but stopping was a bit of a problem.
Slamming the brakes on guaranteed a swift flight over the handlebars.
Frankie, Olive and Jamie-Leigh had perfected the knack of jumping off, letting the bike carry on to a natural stop against the nearest wall.
Twizzel and I, however, being younger, had not yet managed to master the knack of jumping off. But we’d discovered that crashing into a fence usually did just as well.
My father’s friend Mike had set up his own business, stealing bikes by the truckload from the local sports centre and selling them at random Sunday markets. The kids of the camp were his guinea pigs; he gave us the task of test-riding each bike and giving our opinion on each one’s condition and saleability. Not only did we get to ride the bikes, but he paid us a fiver a week, which we split. We couldn’t believe our luck.
The tarmac road into the camp was over a mile long, so for a good while we used that. But after a while we decided to explore what lay beyond our camp.
To the east and the west were forbidden zones. On the east side stood a rotting piece of land, empty apart from a lone trailer which had been half swallowed up by the base of a huge old oak that looked like a clawed hand.
A woman whom we were convinced was a witch lived within its decomposing walls with ten black hellhounds. She had lived there quite peacefully until we Gypsies arrived. An outcast herself, she held nothing but contempt for us, setting her dogs onto anyone who dared come near her home. And those beasts aimed to hurt.
So we turned to the west, where, beyond the sewer river,
there was another secluded society: a home for people with severe mental illnesses. The patients were allowed to roam free, but only within the electrified walls that surrounded it. It was called Oak Place, and it lay deeply buried within the west woods, hidden away from the rest of the world. We all agreed that it had to be investigated and one evening, after wolfing down our dinner, we leaped upon our stolen bikes and headed out to meet the others at the one deserted plot in our camp. When we got there the troops were already assembled and Dolly and Colleen, the Donoghue sisters, were passing around a cigarette from a pack they had stolen from their mother.
Jamie-Leigh sucked back the smoke like a pro and blew it out through her nostrils. Frankie jumped from her bike, leaving it to collide with a pile of rubble, and headed towards Jamie-Leigh with her arm extended. I crashed onto the rubble pile and clambered off to head over to the group.
Frankie was taking a long drag on the cigarette, her eyes blissfully closed, as if it were the fruit of life. ‘Don’t tell me Dad,’ she warned me. As if I would. Going on eleven, she was now a seasoned smoker, along with her fellow ten-year-olds. The four girls passed the cigarette around, reverently, while Olive and Twizzel appeared, running down the lane holding hands, looking identical in blood-red dress coats.
‘Save me a bit of that,’ Olive yelled.
Tagging behind them was the new recruit and only other boy of the group, Horace. Lucky enough to have completely escaped the notice of the school board, he spent most days indoors stuffing himself with sweets and watching action movies.
Horace’s face was a mask of freckles and his hair was a bright red mass of straw. His parents, Aunt June and Uncle Horace, were both black-haired and olive-skinned.
Shunned by everyone but her devoted husband, Aunt June spent most days adding more hot pink to the decor of her trailer or soaping down the car in a strapless bikini and high heels.
Her strange tastes were also reflected in young Horace’s wardrobe. She filled it with nothing but shell suits and Jockey boots; today’s was lime green, with a hot pink stripe through the chest.
‘Right,’ sucked Colleen as she inhaled smoke. She crammed a double drag from the last of the filter before stubbing it out. ‘Let’s go.’
Dolly, being the tallest went over the wall first, to help the rest of us break our fall. From our side it was an easy climb, but the drop on the other appeared considerably longer. Dolly clambered over, rolling like a log onto the verge below before getting down onto all fours beside the wall. ‘Break my back and you’re dead,’ she called up.
The rest of us, apart from Jamie-Leigh who jumped clear over, landing in a frog squat on the other side, climbed over and slowly lowered ourselves down, using Dolly’s broad back as a stepping-stone.
Once we were all over, we made our way through the wood, ducking and diving through cobwebs and stray branches that whipped us in the face.
‘Has anybody ever seen
Predator
?’ asked Horace.
‘Oh for goodness sake shut up, I’m scared enough as it is,’ said Dolly, who was leading the way.
Twizzel, Horace and I were trailing along at the back.
‘What’s it about?’ asked Twizzel.
‘Well, it’s this alien, right, and he lives in the woods or something, and he’s killing all these men and pulling their heads off and stuff …’
We sang, cursed, fought and giggled our way deeper into the darkening forest, until the narrow path suddenly opened up into a clearing.
The girls dug out Colleen’s cigarettes and lit up.
‘Where are we?’ Twizzel hissed.
We appeared to have stumbled upon an old campsite. In the centre was a dead campfire, with an empty barrel lying across it. Around it were three large logs, arranged as a seating area.
Jamie-Leigh grabbed Frankie’s hand and edged closer to see what was inside the barrel. She peered inside, then leaped backwards. ‘Oh my God,’ she cried. ‘There’s a dead man’s arm in there.’