Despite that, I always looked forward to him coming back from work, unless our mother had said ‘wait till your father gets home’. She didn’t threaten us unless she was at the end of her tether, but when she did she always followed through, and we knew we were in trouble.
I loved my father, and I wanted with all my heart to please him and make him proud of me. But even in those
early days, when I was first walking and talking, somehow I already knew that I didn’t match up. I would spot him from the corner of my eye as I played, looking at me with an expression of irritation and dislike.
His glare made my heart feel as though he had crushed it with a rock. I wasn’t showing any sign of becoming the muscle-bound He-Man he so wanted me to be, and whatever special energy those gold gloves were meant to bestow, it seemed I was immune to it.
With my mother it was far simpler. I adored her. She never spoke down to us and she taught us to appreciate what we had. She never made me feel the way my father did, however; she was not a warm or affectionate person and there was an aspect to her that was distant and untouchable. Yet I loved spending time with my mother and saw her as magical. It seemed to me she inhabited another world to the rest of us. One I longed to be a part of.
Neither of my parents ever said they loved us. Words like those were seen as a sign of weakness. But I could tell by the look my mother sometimes gave me that she did indeed love me. Even if she had wanted to be more openly affectionate, a look was as much as she could have given me. Women were strictly forbidden from ‘mollycoddling’ boys in case they compromised the tough masculinity that was expected of Gypsy men.
The one time our mother did show us affection, of a sort, was when we were ill. Like most Gypsy women, she was not keen on the benefits of modern medicine; she had more faith in the practice of positive thought, mixed with a touch of denial, and the odd old-wives’ remedy. Her methods were slapdash, to say the least. When I caught
cold, I’d be made to lie on the couch, mint leaves up my nose and whatever sauce she had a lot of in the cupboard slapped all over my chest.
‘Let’s get that ball of snot out of you,’ she’d say as she rummaged through the kitchen drawer. Then, for one verse of ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ she would tap a wooden spoon across my chest to break up the phlegm.
By the time the cold had reached Frankie, the method would have changed. Frankie would be laid out on her front, with a different kind of sauce over her back, and the mint leaves would be threaded around her neck on a shoelace. The only thing that was always part of the process was the wooden spoon tap. She would lightly bounce the spoon off Frankie’s shoulder blades like a xylophone.
When Frankie came out in warts all over her hands our mother was convinced it was the revenge of a toad Frankie had crushed when she leaped from the trailer steps a few days earlier. She sent us out with a small bucket to collect some slugs, one slug for each wart. Once we had brought them home she squeezed the juice from the base of each slug, rubbing the slimy excess against each wart, while Frankie squealed and retched. Once basted in slug juice, Frankie’s hands were wrapped in old carrier bags, which were then taped in place.
The next day I leaped out of bed and dragged Frankie from the top bunk to see if our mother’s magic had worked as she had promised. To our dismay Frankie’s hands were exactly as they had been before. Our mother, baffled by the failure of her foolproof medicine, drove us down to the local phone box to call Granny Bettie to see if there was some part of the process she had missed. We waited
in the car as she waved her arms and shouted down the receiver. After slamming it down she stormed back into the car and headed for the local supermarket where she bought several packs of bacon, all of which were to be wrapped around Frankie’s hands overnight, and then buried in the garden the next morning. This was solemnly done, but after a week of eager anticipation the warts had not budged. If anything they’d got bigger. At which point, accepting that she was a terrible failure as a witch, our mother finally caved and took Frankie to the doctor.
Sisters Grim
Our social life, such as it was, revolved around weddings, funerals and family get-togethers. There will never be a race that can do a wedding or a funeral like the Gypsies. In the Romany world everyone really does know everyone else, and many are related, so they will turn out in their hundreds.
Invitations weren’t sent out. Word simply spread and guests turned up. On the whole, Gypsies aren’t religious (though many, like my father, stuck a ‘born again’ fish to their cars and lorries to improve their chances of appearing honest and getting work) but usually choose to marry in church because they can fit in more people than in a registry office and it makes a better backdrop for the wedding photographs.
Our mother hated most social events, largely because whenever we all went to one, my father would end up causing a brawl. She often refused to go, so our father would go alone to represent all of us, and Frankie and I would breathe a sigh of relief because we didn’t enjoy them any more than she did.
But there was no getting out of the wedding of our Aunt Nancy and Uncle Matthew. Aunt Nancy was our mother’s youngest sister, the image of Granny Bettie, with exactly the same temperament. She would sometimes baby-sit for
us, and the minute our parents’ backs were turned she ordered us about like slaves, demanding that we make her a sandwich. With a bag of crisps. And a tea. And a glass of Coke. And then another bag of crisps. She would eat continuously, then throw me and Frankie out in the cold to play.
At her wedding Frankie and our cousins Olive and Twizzel were the bridesmaids and, when the pageboy from Uncle Matthew’s side of the family fell ill, I was thrust into the role at the last minute. The boy’s outfit was half my size, so my mum and Granny Bettie had to pull together to squeeze me into his little navy sailor suit, complete with Donald Duck hat. For the whole day, rather than slipping away for my usual bug hunt and catnap, I had to join the girls (who were dressed like the Lullaby League) in throwing petals on the ground wherever our fat aunt stomped. We got our revenge for being made to look like Munchkins by making evil faces and V signs in all the photos, before we were all found out and given a good public spanking.
While we didn’t care for Aunt Nancy at all, we loved our mother’s older sister Aunt Minnie: a chain-smoking kleptomaniac who came over twice a week to take our mother, Frankie and me out on a day trip to the nearest decent shopping centre.
Aunt Minnie would exit her Ford Capri in an avalanche of smoke, ash and tumbling, floor-length, hand-me-down mink coat, which would get caught up in the sharp points of her red heels as she clicked along the tarmac towards our trailer door.
She’d tug the mass of her coat through the front door as she climbed in.
‘Morning, my little robbers. Where’s your mum?’
Our mother would call out from the bedroom, ‘Red shoes no knickers Minnie, ain’t you ever heard that saying?’
‘Well who says I
am
wearing knickers,’ Minnie would laugh.
She’d spark up another cigarette and crash down on the couch next to me. Her voice was almost always indistinct because of the fag hanging from her lips.
‘Make your old aunt a cuppa coffee, my babe,’ she’d say to Frankie.
Frankie and I called her Aunt Cruella. At twenty-one (a near spinster in Gypsy terms), she had gone on two dates with Jaybus, an Elvis lookalike from Birmingham, and on the third she had married him. Having borrowed his father’s car and worn a good suit on each occasion, he had convinced Aunt Minnie that she had caught herself a millionaire and would be set for life. Unfortunately, Uncle Jaybus was in fact a socially inept rag-and-bone man with a voice like Goofy in the cartoons. Frankie and I loved him. And, despite the initial disappointment, so did Aunt Minnie.
Once she realised her husband was not going to be able to look after her in the manner she wished for, she set about finding her own means of support – choring or stealing. She would tell friends to let her know what they wanted and when she had got a big enough list together, off she would go on the prowl. Having only one child, Romaine, who was a couple of years younger than us, she appointed me and Frankie as her accomplices. On big jobs, she would sometimes stop by our uncle Alfie’s to pick up our cousins, Olive and Twizzel. The two of them were a year apart, like me and Frankie, but unlike us they couldn’t
stand the sight of one another. From the moment they got into Aunt Minnie’s car they would be slyly hitting one another and only the promise of McDonalds would shut them both up.
A trip with our aunt Minnie was always an adventure. While our mother was doing her weekly shop in the supermarket, Frankie and I would push Romaine’s buggy behind Aunt Minnie, who would sweep into a shop, swish her mink about, and, in an accent reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s, bellow for the nearest sales assistant.
As Aunt Minnie spoke to the assistant, she would ‘browse’ the shelves, picking up each item she wanted us to take, and giving it a shake before placing it back on the hanger. We would load the pram, and our pockets, while Aunt Minnie dragged a hefty pile off to the changing room, with the hapless assistant in tow.
She would re-emerge several minutes later.
‘Did you find anything, Miss?’ the assistant would ask.
‘No,’ Aunt Minnie would declare, as she swished her coat. ‘It was all total rubbish.’ And she would walk out, her nose in the air and leave the shop empty handed, but double her original size. If she was discovered, she would scream ‘
Shav
!’ (run). Frankie would grab me by the arm, then, pushing Romaine’s buggy like a battering ram through the main doors, we would charge out into the crowds. If we were all separated, we all knew to meet back at Aunt Minnie’s car. Sometimes she overtook us, ramming people out of our path with her great fur-clad shoulders and screaming that the store detective on her tail was a maniac trying to kill her, in the hope that some gullible bystander might wrestle him to the ground.
Back at the car park, Aunt Minnie took off the fur and hurled it into the boot. With a cigarette hanging from her lips, she would squirm around in the driver’s seat, peeling off her layers, which usually included around six tops, three pairs of slacks and an evening gown.
Once we all got home, Aunt Minnie would stay around long enough for a couple of coffees before carting her goods back to camp to sell for the best price. Since it was 100 per cent profit, she was able to sell for knock-down prices, and there was always a queue for her wares.
We loved our outings with Minnie, which were often hilarious and always an adventure. Far less fun were the outings to our father’s loud and overbearing family. But our visits to them were inescapable. Twice a week we piled into the van and drove to the home of my father’s older brother Tory.
Tory Manor, as it was known by all, was the most palatial home within a twenty-mile radius. Granddad Noah and Uncle Tory had bought it with the plan that, with their wives and Noah and Ivy’s youngest son, Joseph, they could live there together. But after just three days Granddad, miserable in a home that didn’t have wheels, refused to live in it any longer.
He set up home with Granny Ivy, their fifteen-year-old Jack Russell, Sparky, and Uncle Joseph in a brand-new, thirty-five-foot, bright pink Winnebago-style caravan at the top of the paddock behind the main house. This was their dream home, and they spared nothing on the decor. A swarm of fake butterflies the size of cats were nailed along the walls, a giant dust ruffle built entirely out of curved bright red bricks surrounded the caravan’s base, and
each of its two entrances spewed steps that twirled like helter-skelters to the ground. The paddock was resurfaced, and given a separate entrance off the road that led up to the main house, so that Granddad Noah could keep his prized Rolls-Royce within a few feet of the living-room window.
Once they had settled in, Granddad Noah and Granny Ivy were delighted, as were Uncle Tory and his family, who got the main house to themselves.
The caravan was Granny Ivy’s pride and joy and she liked to keep it immaculate. But as she was so small she was unable to reach most of the table-tops in her new home, she had her sister Tiny over to help out with the daily chores. Our Aunt Tiny shared the same throaty cackle, penchant for gold teeth and love of fur-trimmed moccasins as her sister. But in all other respects they were utterly different. Tiny stood as tall and broad as a wardrobe and could have used Granny Ivy as a hand puppet. As well as the moccasins, she wore a pink floral pinny that she never took off. It had two large pockets that draped just below her huge and low-slung breasts; one for her yellow rubber gloves, and the other for her cigarettes and solid gold lighter in the shape of a horse’s head.
Aunt Tiny had given up on the ‘Gypsy woman of a certain age’ black hair-dye regime. Instead she bore a large white curly Afro, which made her look like a circus clown. Every day she would arrive at the caravan and whiz around, duster in her yellow-gloved hand, scrubbing everything from waist-height upward, while Granny Ivy did everything below.
Unfortunately for Granny Ivy, her end of the deal also
meant washing the dog. Sparky had been bought by Noah as an anniversary present for her, but sadly the two developed an instant mutual hatred. Sparky spent every day lying in the darkness underneath the couch, waiting for Ivy to pass by so that he could jump out and bite her on the backside. To add to his annoyance, for the past three years he had been unable to poo without the aid of Joseph and a rubber glove. With Joseph being the only family member willing to do such a chore, the old dog had warmed to him and would scarcely leave his side.
Although the great house was just yards away, the whole family would always gather in the pink caravan every Friday evening, when Granddad and Uncle Tory would host a cock-fighting tournament out in the vast gardens. Each week several cockerels would fight to the death … or until Granddad Noah put the loser out of its misery by decapitating it with the end of a shovel.
Uncle Tory’s wife, Aunt Maudie, who lived in pink-velour tracksuits, see-through high heels and had enormous fake breasts, would sooner have dropped dead than have the ‘riff-raff’ that came along to these fights set foot inside her home, so she made us kids – Frankie and me, Tory and Noah and their twin sisters Patti and Violet – gather twigs and set up a camp fire that would keep the men warm and well away from her house until the party was over. Our reward was the marshmallows she would give us to cook over the fire.
Although Patti and Violet were a year younger than me, they were both twice my size. The Walsh clan commented constantly that Frankie and the girls looked like triplets, and they did, but in truth, this owed less to
genetics than to the fact that, much to our mother’s annoyance, Aunt Maudie was a serial copycat, and her two girls were given exactly the same hairstyles and clothes as Frankie.
There was always a rowdy crowd, most of whom were fellow trainers from the boxing club up the road where Uncle Tory spent a lot of his time. Some of the visitors would bring their own cockerels, but the majority just came along to watch. All of the men would make bets, which would all be handled by Uncle Tory, who also charged a joining fee to make a bit of extra profit.
Most of the fighting birds were caged in home-made hutches, strapped down into the rear of the lorries. My uncle Duffy (like most of our ‘uncles’, not an uncle at all) kept his in a boarded-up dog kennel on the back of his Ford pick-up. One week he arrived with a new cockerel named Red. It was as big as a chair, with a sharpened beak, which Uncle Duffy had filed down himself, and not one feather on his body. When Uncle Duffy opened that passenger door, we kids ran for our lives, for fear his pterodactyl of a cockerel would peck our eyes out.
After several weeks as reigning champion, we watched old Red get torn apart by a sneaky, fully feathered newcomer. Frankie, the twins and I huddled on top of the old well watching, as the two birds clucked, hissed, pecked and sprayed blood all over the lawn.
I could never erase the guilt I felt for not jumping in and trying to save the losing chicken. Often, unable to stand the suffering any more, we kids would go into the house to watch
Loony Tunes
on TV. But as old Red fought his last, none of us could move. The twins covered their eyes
as Frankie stared, transfixed but still chomping away, her hand dipping in and out of her bag of marshmallows.
It wasn’t long before the younger bird finally pecked through old Red’s neck and he had to face the final relief of Granddad Noah’s shovel. There was a loud cheer and the passing of money among the men as Old Noah gathered up Red on the spoon of the shovel and tossed him into the fire.
Frankie put down her marshmallows and walked over to the flames. She wanted to see the bird close up for the first and last time without running away in terror. But as she stepped up to the fire, the great chicken’s flaming corpse leaped from it with a wild scream. We children shouted in terror and the crowd ran in all directions as the bird, its head hanging by a thread, darted across the garden in a crazy dance of death. Only the men – my father, Uncle Tory, Old Noah and a few of the others – laughed their heads off, as the rest of us scattered.
In a bid to escape the madness of the cock fights and the pink trailer, I would often wander off alone into the extensive grounds of Tory Manor. Scattered among them were giant flowers, curved willows, ivory-barked trees and a set of curious stone dancers, each frozen in a wonderful gesture. Over time, many of them had been swallowed up in the heavy foliage, and others had been disfigured or decapitated by one of young Tory or Noah’s hunting weapons. As well as their Samurai swords, catapults and pellet guns, the boys had a harpoon gun, which they fired into trees, statues, and even unsuspecting pigeons. I’d had a go once, but misfired, getting the teeth of the harpoon
trapped three inches below the surface of a tree root just inches from my toes.