Wonder Years
My parents were, in many ways, typical Gypsies. My mother, like all Romany Gypsy women, kept a proud, clean home and looked after the children. Gypsy women were not allowed to work outside the home, the only exceptions being the handful that occasionally sold trinkets and told fortunes.
Gypsies are very superstitious people; black cats are seen as a good sign, as are horseshoes, and even Dalmatian dogs, as long as you can spit on both hands and rub them together before you lose sight of one. They are also certain that if a bird flies into your home, someone is about to die. But contrary to popular belief, they don’t believe in magic, and the Gypsy ‘curse’ is no more than an age-old way of scaring non-Gypsies into buying something.
I have run into many people who have asked me to remove a curse placed on them by a Gypsy, because tradition says that it can only be removed by another Gypsy. Of course I oblige. I may not believe in curses, but the poor people who have suffered at the hands of some old Gypsy woman often do.
My father did a bit of this and a bit of that. Sometimes it was scrap metal – collecting it, weighing it, then selling it on. At other times he’d do casual work, such as laying tarmac. Then there were the ‘grunters’: old people whom
my father would visit, offering to do ‘essential’ jobs, like cleaning their gutters, fixing their roofs or resurfacing their drives. He would charge ridiculously large sums of money for small and often unnecessary jobs. Grunters were considered fair game, because they were Gorgias: non-Gypsies.
Most Gypsies despise all Gorgias. They believe they are only good for making money from. The old people were the best targets because they were easy to find, and to con. Some of the Gypsy men would go back time after time to the same old person until they’d stripped them of their last penny.
As a small boy I remember seeing old men and women crying to my father as they stood on their ‘new’ driveways, telling him that they just couldn’t afford to pay the amount he had asked. But my father showed no remorse, demanding his money and sometimes even driving them to the bank and waiting while they took out what little money they had left.
‘I have a family to support,’ was his line. ‘They’re on the way out, they don’t need their money.’
My father’s reputation as a great con man almost surpassed his family’s infamy as fighting men. His family, once well respected, had come to be feared. Wherever they went the Walsh men were always bristling for a fight, prowling the campsites and Gypsy nightspots, scouting for easy victims, and demanding that any man who looked at them the wrong way put up his fists. They had no real friends, just a handful of fans and endless amounts of troublemakers and fiends who trailed after them, fuelling their already over-bloated egos.
My mother, Bettie, was a friend of my father’s twin sister Prissy – the two of them had been friends and smoking buddies since they were ten years old. Prissy was born with illness in her bones, and in her later life she would need to use a wheelchair. But even with crippling arthritis, she was as fiery as the rest of the Walsh clan; a typical, dark-skinned Gypsy girl, with tar-black hair that fell about her hips, eyes as green as a ripe amphibian, and a cigarette permanently dangling from her lip.
The cigarette was the only thing the two girls had in common, because my mother couldn’t have looked more different. She somehow emerged from her dark-skinned mother with milk-white skin and flaming red hair. She was a curiosity and an embarrassment to her family who couldn’t understand where this unusual creature came from. Some people even muttered about a curse – Gypsies don’t believe they can curse others but a few believe they can be on the receiving end of one. In truth, though, she was just different, both in her looks and in her temperament. Unlike most Gypsy women she hated gossip, and was happy spending time alone.
She was the second oldest of six children, her older brother taking her father’s name, Alfie, and she her mother’s. Her mother, Bettie, was an old battleaxe with legs that were the same width all the way down. She was a chronic hypochondriac and had a permanently constipated look on her face. Mum’s father was a handsome old devil with a dark sense of humour. He had multiple sclerosis and a reputation for being an old loon that he played up to, just for laughs. He couldn’t stand fighting and he didn’t like horses either – another Gypsy passion – and he only
cared for a dog if it was under the wheel of his lorry. He was very keen, though, on inventing various stews; his favourite was a whole pig’s head, dropped in a barrel of gravy and potatoes.
Alfie and Bettie and their brood lived on their own plot of land: an over-grown field with two trailers and a huge double-decker bus, splashed with a rainbow of colours. The bus had been a Christmas present one year to the kids, who had woken to find one clapped-out bus and eight cans of paint.
Behind the field were the woods, and hidden in them, what Alfie described as his ‘plantation’. He grew drugs – strictly medicinal, he insisted – which after several ‘tests’ would be sold on to local hippies … and even local police officers.
The whole clan, apart from my mother, were dark-skinned, dark-haired and of Granny Bettie’s hefty build.
My mother always told us that she fell in love with our father when she first laid eyes on him at the age of ten. And he fell in love with her too despite, or perhaps because of, her unusual looks; he knew she was the woman he wanted. Unfortunately for her, the only way he knew how to talk was by punching someone in the teeth. When he wasn’t fighting he was tongue-tied with shyness. So much so that he was too frightened to come near her for three years. Instead, he would beat up every travelling man who so much as stood close to her. He punched a male cousin of hers in the mouth, smashing the poor man’s teeth out, just because he’d escorted her into a bar.
My father’s refusal to let another man come near her, while not actually speaking to her himself, left my mother
high and dry. Eventually she did the unthinkable, in Gypsy society, and approached him.
Her opening line left a lot to be desired, but it did the trick.
‘Are you going to ask me out or what? If not, will you just fuck off!’
My father, thus confronted, found his tongue and asked her out. And that was it. As the stories have it, he only cheated on her once, which led to my mother, her sister Minnie and his own sister Prissy, writing several unsavoury swear words all over his new car in lipstick: a nightmare to clean off, apparently.
After a year of courting, my mother accepted my father’s bumbling proposal and, at eighteen, they got married. She wore a white wedding dress that was, typically, nontraditional. We would always refer to it as her ‘Mary Poppins at the fair’ outfit. And it was – complete with a hat with a candy-coloured ribbon and parasol. My father, on the other hand, showed up in the same clothes he had worn the night before: beige corduroys, an ill-fitting grey checked cardigan, the usual clump of garish gold on each finger, and a rose shoved in his breast pocket. There isn’t a photo of the wedding in which my mother doesn’t look furious.
Despite that the two of them loved one another very much. He loved her for being so different: her small, svelte frame and calm voice. She saw his sensitive side and understood the troubled boy within him and his need to prove himself to his family.
Within months she was pregnant. Both families were convinced that an heir was on the way, but my mother gave
birth to a girl, and shortly after was told she had a heart murmur and that it could be fatal if she were to attempt to have another child.
Crushed, my father tried to accept his ill-fate, relishing the birth of his baby girl, and even giving her his own name, Frank, which he had been saving for his first boy. But a longing for a boy festered within him and he began to beg my mother to try again. Less than a year later she consented, favouring my father’s happiness over the risk to her own life.
She fell pregnant once again and I arrived with, thankfully, no sign of trouble from her heart. We spent a lot of time with our mother because our father was often away for days at a time, up to goodness knows what ‘business’ with the other men. Most of it was dodgy, but he made good money – we certainly weren’t poor. Contrary to popular belief, not many Gypsies are. Our clothes were clean and well made and we had all that we needed and plenty to eat. We lived mostly on take-out food and we all preferred it. Mostly because our mother’s cooking was never her strong point. She did her best though; beans on toast, just toast, or a bowl of canned soup. Apart from the occasional attempt at a Sunday roast, the only time she cooked a big meal was when she made the pig’s head stew she had learned from her father, which she always followed with jam roly-poly and custard to take away the bad taste in our mouths.
She filled the kitchen cupboards with easy-to-prepare food: Rice Krispies and Frosties, pot noodles, crisps and the thick slabs of bread and butter we ate with every meal. We also had copious amounts of salt; whatever was served
up, our father would usually have more salt than food on his plate, often using several spoons of it on a single meal.
Both our parents had an incredibly sweet tooth and our mother would often live on a Mars Bar a day and nothing else. She always had a tin of sweets around the trailer and she would help Frankie and me make Angel Delight, a ‘just add water’ dessert we all had a big thing for.
Although we had a table in the kitchen, most of the time we only used it to mix up our sticky concoctions. We ate our meals off our laps in front of the TV, unless it was a takeaway, in which case Frankie and I ate in the back of the cab of our father’s lorry, while listening to our parents bantering in the front.
My father was very dark, with a stout, barrel-shaped body and short, stubby legs. Our mother always had to take his jeans and trousers up; he liked them taken up too much so that you could see his socks. In his eyes, it made him look taller. He was solid, with hands as huge as spades, dried out and rough as sandpaper. His palms were full of open cracks, like severely parched land. He had dark brown eyes, with yellow whites and they had dark rings sunk deep around them, making them protrude and giving him a frightening glare. On the top of his arm, spreading across his shoulder, he had a tattoo of a large rose, with two swallows carrying scrolls that bore our names – Mum’s, Frankie’s and mine. His hair was black and shiny with grease, combed back, with greying sideburns, which reminded me of Grandpa in the Munsters.
In our camp, as in most other permanent camps, each plot had its own outside tap, toilet block and electric box with pay meter. Each morning, Frankie and I would roll
two big, shiny churns over to the tap and fill them, before dragging them both back to the door. We would have to work as a team, because as each of the churns was as tall as me, once it had been filled, it was near impossible to move. Once we got them back, they would be put out by the step and as the day progressed, the water would be poured out into jugs and pans to be boiled for baths, cooking, hot drinks and laundry.
My father rarely used our indoor bathroom, having no patience to wait for the water pot to boil. At the crack of dawn, even in winter, he would make his way over to the tap with a towel round his bare shoulders. He would bend over and let the icy water run over his head as he wet the end of his razor before scraping the freezing blade across his face. I watched through the window every morning as he wallowed like a bear beneath the cold tap. One Saturday morning, I would have been about six years old, I decided that I too would have a shave. After my father had put his razor back I borrowed it, and in two short strokes I took off both my eyebrows – the only facial hair I had available – before coming proudly out of the bathroom to show off the results of my efforts. Frankie screamed and my mother made me spend the next week wearing two coloured plasters where my eyebrows should have been until eventually they began to grow back.
When our father was at home he went shirtless, though he always wore braces, even over his bare shoulders. When he went out he was always smart, in short-sleeved shirts, dark jumpers, and a Del Boy sheepskin coat. When he came home, if he’d made good money, he would be in a cheerful mood and would sit me on his lap in his armchair;
a big dark brown one with a stand-up ashtray next to it that reached the armrest. He would draw me pictures of dinosaurs with blood on their teeth and curly gecko-like tails.
Sometimes, when he came home late, he would stand in the doorway of the room Frankie and I shared and he would wake us up for a chat. We’d stumble sleepily through to the living room, as he made us hot tea and jammy toast. We’d sit, dunking our toast in our teacups, as he asked us all that we’d been doing while he was away.
He liked to play games and tricks on us. One Halloween, he stalked the outside of the trailer in his old overalls, a butcher-style apron and a cone hat made out of Sellotape and old Christmas paper covered in little Santas. He banged on our windows, scaring the living daylights out of us, roaring with laughter as we screamed our heads off.
But his good moods were sporadic and unpredictable and it took very little to make him lose his temper. In those early days it was mostly our mother who was the butt of his anger, though I was given a hiding when I misbehaved. He seldom dared to hit Frankie, though. If ever he did raise his hand to her, she would scream the place down, and he’d back away. She was far more like him than I was, and knew just how to play him.