‘Quickly, grab your clothes and put on something warm.’
I ran into Frankie’s room; she was pulling a pair of her leggings onto Jesus. ‘I’m gonna take him to see Big Ben,’ she said, and in a squeaky baby voice to Jesus, ‘Yes I is, baby, I’m taking you to see the Queen.’
I tore back to my room, nearly running head-on into the doorframe with excitement. I reached into my drawer and put on my favourite Darth Vader costume pyjamas and grabbed Skeletor from his house.
‘Hurry up then,’ shouted our mother, as Henry-Joe wriggled and wailed in her arms. We bounded down the
hall, clutching our treasured possessions. ‘And bring a quilt each to keep you warm.’
I ran back, grabbing my quilt and wrapping it around my shoulders like a mammoth ermine. Through the window I could hear my father revving the engine of the car.
The night was cold and crisp as Frankie and I jumped into the car, grinning at each other from across the back seats, shaking and kicking our legs with delight. A couple of miles from home Henry-Joe’s cries became whimpers and he went off to sleep. Frankie and I sat barefoot in the back, miming with our toys to my mother’s Barbra Streisand tape.
With Frankie as puppeteer, Jesus could do a mean Barbra impersonation, although I’m sure if he was alive he would have been utterly humiliated by the whole experience.
I loved being in the car at night; the quiet hum beneath my bare feet, and the strobes of the motorway lamps and catseyes reflecting from my window sent me into a deep, sombre trance.
Skeletor sat in my lap, contemplating his next overturn of the world as I rested my head against the window to feel its cold vibration. The sound of soothing saxophones buzzed from our mother’s UB40 tape mix. My father lit up his umpteenth cigarette, his gold rings clicking against the glass as he flicked away the excess ash. I pulled the duvet up around my face, holding in the warmth close to my chin.
London: the home of Mary Poppins, Oliver Twist and that witch out of
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
. I knew all the songs from the films, but wondered if it could really be the same as in the movies.
I drifted in and out of sleep, until I was given a heavy nudge by my sister. ‘Wake up quick. Look at them.’
She leaned over my lap, pointing at a huge column guarded by four great black lions. They managed to appear majestic, heroic and sinister all at once. Our faces pressed against the rear window as we left them behind. An old man sat between one of the monster’s front paws, like a cub in his protection, resting his weary head on its stone chest. It reminded me of me, held between my father’s legs.
A gut-wrenching sadness came over me. I looked over at my father, who was pulling a cigarette from his lips and spinning some story about how years ago, a witch had put the lions there and turned them to stone. ‘But late at night, they come back to life to hunt for little boys and girls,’ he finished, with a sinister laugh.
I looked back to check. It was late now, and yet the beasts were still frozen in a black death. I said nothing, knowing that, where my father was concerned, I could never be right.
I had caught him from time to time, watching me as I played, talked to Skeletor and dozed. His eyes were deep-set and black, with whites as yellow as poison. Like a Gorgon, the monster inside him would glare, freezing me to the spot and turning me to stone.
I sat with my nose against the window. The city outside was so enormous. If I ran from the car now I thought, they could never find me again. I would be free. I could join a gang like Fagin’s and spend my days picking pockets. I could come and sit with that lion too, as often as I wanted to. For a moment the prospect seemed so wonderful. But
I knew there was no way to escape. The only place I would be going was back to the bungalow and to my beating room.
One day, I told myself, this great city is where I am going to be. This is where I’ll come to.
Welcome to Warren Woods
We had been in the bungalow for just over a year when our father arrived home one day with the news that a new Gypsy camp was being built a few miles from where his family were living. He had bought a plot, a brand-new trailer and a new lorry to ship us all there. We were going back to our roots.
And so we packed up and moved to start a new life just a few miles from Tory Manor, in West Sussex.
The road leading up to our new home was long and straight, with trees so high at each side that they met over the roofs of passing cars, creating the impression, to a small boy, of a dark and monstrous forest, split by the road hewn out of its overgrown wilderness.
Frankie was glued to the window on the left and me to the right. I wondered if anyone had ever dared go into the forest to see who lived in there.
‘I don’t want you two going wandering in these woods,’ Mother said, picking a clot of heavy blue mascara from her eye in the rear-view mirror as she manoeuvred Henry-Joe around on her lap. ‘Do you hear me?’
‘Why?’ asked Frankie.
‘Because a witch lives there,’ snapped our mother.
‘I thought so.’
Every now and then we would pass a house buried deep
in the woods as if it had been swallowed up and was being slowly digested by the foliage.
‘Will we know anyone who lives here?’ asked Frankie, scratching at her frilly dress.
‘Yes,’ our father said. ‘And while your granny Ivy ain’t well we have to live here and put you two in school.
‘What’s wrong with her, Dad?’ I asked.
‘She just ain’t well, Mikey.’
Granny Ivy was always ill. I thought it must have been something to do with her being a midget. I was already taller than she was and she was always using a scary-looking gas mask to help her breathe.
‘School?’ shouted Frankie. ‘But that’s for Gorgia children.’
‘You two got to go to the school. People will come and take you away if you don’t,’ our mother said, looking up from her vanity case, Henry-Joe now tucked under her arm. ‘Anyway, you’ll be there with the other children from the site. You won’t be the only ones. And I’m putting you in as twins again, so you’ll be together.’
We knew we were nearly there, because mother had applied a thick layer of coral lipstick and was putting on yet more of her blue mascara.
‘When do we start?’ Frankie asked.
‘Monday morning. Me and your aunt Nancy are gonna take turns taking you all there and back.’
‘Are Olive and Twizzel moving here too?’
‘For fuck’s sake, yes!’ bellowed our father. ‘Now get your fucking coats on.’
Frankie gave an exited wince, wriggling and kicking her feet. We hadn’t seen our cousins since Frankie loaded their
knickers with lime jelly while they slept when they’d visited us at the bungalow.
The indicator was clicking on my side, but it wasn’t for a while that we saw the entrance to our new home. Frankie climbed over my lap for a better look.
They had somehow managed to bulldoze deep into the wood and make a huge open space. It was bigger than anything I had ever seen before. So huge I could not see how far back it went. It looked as if a giant meteor had fallen from the sky and crashed here, clearing the space. After the darkness of the forest, the light above the clearing shone through so brightly that our eyes had to adjust.
Our car was greeted by the owner, a man with a face like a sack of potatoes, who leaned through the window to greet us. As he spoke to our parents, Frankie and I stared in wonder. The clearing was like a huge swamp. Not a blade of grass, not a tree in sight, but endless mud and water and several towering pillars, with iron steps at the sides and thick electric cables balancing from the top. I wondered if it was one this size that had hurt our mother.
We got out of the car and I stood against the wall, which was at least three times my size. On it hung a huge white sign with big red letters stuck onto it with melted rubber: Welcome Travellers to Warren Woods Caravan Park.
While our father parked the lorry, our mother lifted Henry-Joe close to her chest and ushered us towards the empty space we were to call home. Our father staggered back towards us through a sea of mud.
‘This is it, you herbs,’ said our mother. I liked it when she called us her herbs, because it meant she was in a good mood. We stared at our piece of land. There was a thread
of red string all around the outside of it, to mark where our walls would be. The ground within it had been levelled off. It was as big as a field, and with one of the electric totem poles sticking out of it, it looked as if a great pirate ship had just sunk in the middle.
Frankie pulled herself free from Mother’s grasp, screaming for joy, and managed three steps before falling face down in a foot of mud. There was a cartoon farting noise and I fell about laughing, almost wetting myself.
Due to its size, our new trailer was delivered to us in two halves, but was still only a fraction of the space we’d had in the bungalow. Frankie and I were back to sharing a bedroom, so narrow our father could barely fit through the door. We had bunk beds once again, and being the most accident-prone, I was banished to the bottom.
Despite being brand new, the trailer was very like the last one inside; all brown with a splat of orange and fake wood walls. And once they had put it together and laid the carpet, Frankie and I were stuck inside for several days, like a couple of prisoners. It rained non-stop, so there was no way our mother was going to let us go outside and then tread mud all over her new bright pink carpet.
We had an electric box, connected to a cable that ran straight from the pole, so we were able to keep warm and watch videos. Which we did, all day. We wouldn’t hear from our parents until they came in after dark with either a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, or fish and chips. We peered out of the window from the couch and watched the lorries dumping piles of rocks all over the place while my father and the other men spread them across the mud. Hovering a few feet from our father was our mother, with
Henry-Joe strapped onto her front and carrying a large funeral umbrella to ward off the rain.
Other trailers arrived and disappeared into the furthest reaches of the crater, and other men appeared to help with the stone-shifting. Slowly the camp was taking shape.
Meanwhile I had two things to dread. School, on Monday, and – far worse – my first night at the boxing club, down the road from Uncle Tory’s house, three days later. Every time my father came into the trailer he reminded me about it.
One afternoon he burst in and flicked the switch to the kettle.
I was in mid-wail, wearing a pillowslip as a bonnet, being an orphan baby that Olive, Twizzel and Frankie had found in the woods. He stood over me; his glare tearing me apart, making me feel worthless and humiliated. I’d have preferred it if he’d beaten me to a pulp.
‘Ready to fight?’
The mention of it made my insides collapse. ‘Yep,’ I replied, trying to sound enthusiastic and failing miserably.
I pulled the bonnet from my head, and ran from the room. Knowing he was likely to land a good kick on me, I ran past him with one hand on each buttock cheek, furious with myself for being caught out once again.
I wished I could be more like Uncle Tory’s sons, Tory and Noah. Tough, fighting boys who made their dad proud. I was nothing like them – and my father knew it. I was a hopeless boxer and he knew that too. Frankie still won the trophy every Sunday. I thought maybe he should take her.
Two days later we started at St Luke’s Primary School, a couple of miles up the road, along with a handful of
other children from our camp. The local education officers here were, apparently, more scrupulous than those in our last home had been, and would regularly turn up in the local Gypsy camps, demanding that the children be sent to school.
St Luke’s had known we would be coming, and the Gorgia parents there had demanded that we be kept separate from their children. A compromise had been agreed: we were taught separately during the morning, and joined the regular classes in the afternoons.
For the morning shift, we were put into our own special classroom, which was so small that it may well have formerly been the broom closet, and supplied with our own special teacher: Mrs McAndrew, a vision in autumnal shades, with arms like sacks of oranges and hair like a bird’s nest.
As well as Frankie and me, there were Olive and Twizzel, Jamie-Leigh Bowers and three of the five Donoghue children.
The Donoghues were Irish Travellers who had recently moved to the far end of our camp and claimed to be the new breed of Gypsy. We were a dark-skinned race, apart from our mother. They had skin like lard, strawberry-blond hair and were smothered in freckles.
Most non-travellers put all travelling people in the same category. But the Romanies and the Irish Travellers are worlds apart. Both races have very proud origins. But the Romanies were around for centuries before the Irish Travellers existed. For many years the Irish Travellers were workers for the Romany people. Then, as time passed, they went their own way, while mimicking the values and way of life of the Romanies. Since then the Irish Travellers have
prospered, while nursing a deep dislike of the Romany people who were once their masters. Today the Romanies are wary wherever they go, in case there are Irish Travellers around to attack them. The two races have nothing but contempt for one another, and the war between them has gone a long way towards destroying the Gypsy culture.
When they first met, Tyrone Donoghue shook my father’s hand and said, ‘We Irish are gonna take over this country, Frank.’
People didn’t take him seriously, because he looked so ridiculous. He was a little ferret-faced man, strutting about. But despite the general hostility between our two peoples, my father took to him right away and they often went to the pub together in the evenings.
The Donoghue children spoke with such a thick Irish accent that we couldn’t understand them, even after two weeks. And the teacher had the same problem. She spoke to all of us as if we were retarded.
‘The cat (long pause) sat (even longer pause) on the mat. See, children?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Jamie-Leigh was never short of words.
‘Language, Miss Bowers!’ But Mrs McAndrew’s soft voice was no match for Jamie-Leigh.
She was the single prettiest girl I had ever seen. She looked like a Gypsy princess. Her pitch-black hair fell about her waist like an oil spill and her eyes were such a pure green that she looked like an angel. Then she would open her mouth and out would come the vocabulary of a fifty-year-old hooker.
Even in the mixed classes where we spent the afternoons
she wouldn’t think twice about hollering out questions, using the c-word in every sentence, and farting violently. She was vile, but I thought she was amazing. I envied her so much it made me gag. Here was me, near mute, chin tucked into the neck of my jumper, hair brushed forward over my eyes, trying my very best to disappear, while she walked tall and didn’t give a damn what people thought of her. She knew she was great, and these people were not going to convince her otherwise.
Jamie-Leigh, Frankie and I were all in the same class. Frankie and I had got in as twins again, despite the difference in our size. And Jamie-Leigh, who was younger than me, had somehow been wangled in by her mother, Audrey, so that she could be near us.
On our first day Mrs Kerr, the afternoon teacher, announced the term’s topic.
She was Scottish and her Rs rolled and curled from her tongue. ‘The topic for all of us this term is Ancient Egypt.’
‘What, like the pyramids and that?’ said Frankie.
‘Yes. And that and a whole lot more, Miss Walsh. Pharaohs, mummies, curses, the Nile – all of it. And you are going to pick your favourite part to research.’
Jamie-Leigh leaned towards my ear. ‘She sounds like that cunt Lorraine Kelly.’
That was the final straw for Mrs Kerr.
‘Miss Bowers, you will do your work in the afternoons at my desk. I rarely use it, and I know you’ll love the peace and quiet, as will I. Grab your stuff, pet.’
A tut and a kiss of the teeth as Jamie-Leigh dragged herself over. As soon as she sat down at the teacher’s desk,
she saw the benefits of her new, high-status seat; it was ideal for grabbing the attention of the entire class. Mrs Kerr was clearly going to live to regret moving her most disruptive pupil.
While Jamie-Leigh loved the limelight, the burglary side of primary education was more Frankie’s thing. Tugging Jamie-Leigh along with her, she would wait for break time to go through everyone’s drawers searching for the goodies every kid was after: iron-on Batman stickers.
While Frankie and Jamie-Leigh were hard at work, Mrs Kerr would make her way outdoors and stand at the playground gates for a cigarette, before putting on her roller-skates and racing around the tarmac with the older children. She must have been over forty. I couldn’t imagine my Mother ever doing anything like that, and she was only twenty-six.
The majority of our time at school was spent either fighting with the Gorgia children, or teaching Mrs McAndrew our language. She was far more interested in learning from us than in teaching us anything. Romany, an ancient language, is still used by Gypsies, but only in combination with English. Romany makes up about 60 per cent of Gypsy dialect, because many words have been forgotten over time. So a Gypsy’s English vocabulary is often at the same level as a five-year-old child’s.