Moving On
I was eleven when my father sold our plot at Warren Woods. It was the end of an era and a good time to go.
By that time many of the other residents had decided to move on, selling their plots for very generous prices to the Irish Travellers who had arrived in a tidal wave, fulfilling Mr Donoghue’s oft-repeated prophecy that they would take over. They lived not just one family to a plot, but as many as they could fit, and within a few weeks of the arrival of the first families, our site had begun to show the scars of their invading culture: piles of rubbish, old car parts, the fences kicked down.
Our plot was sold almost immediately, giving my father the money he needed to prepare us for the road. He bought two caravans, one for him and my mother, Henry-Joe and Jimmy, and the other for Frankie and me. They came from a company that catered specifically for the needs of Gypsy people. Roma was the brand name, and they had done their research. Their trailers were monstrosities, created to mimic miniature palaces. Garish, flamboyant and overtly camp, we couldn’t move for polished steel, mirrored cabinets and chrome. Every surface was carved from white, polished timber with a mirrored effect, and not one cupboard was without a glass window, so that the woman of the house could display her Crown Derby.
Gypsies are seldom poor, and since they rarely stay put, they have fewer ways to spend their cash, so they stack up on flashy jewellery and designer trailers, trade their cars in for new models every year and splash out on designer gear. The women, with little else to do but clean, often do so in full make-up, Gucci mini-dresses and Jimmy Choos. Though the regulation rubber gloves, hair in a bun and a fag hanging on the lip tarnishes the image somewhat.
My father was excited about going on the open road. My mother had no choice, the decision was his, but she seemed happy enough. The plan was that we would move from place to place, right across the country, before finding somewhere to settle for winter.
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.