by Mikey Walsh
No matter what movie we watched, our father was always fast asleep within fifteen minutes, or at the point when he had eaten all that was left of the snacks, whichever came first. We got wise to it, hiding away half the sweets until he was out cold and snoring like a warthog, when we’d bring them out and munch away through the rest of the film.
Our mother had been waiting a long time for Big Jabba John to get her a copy of her favourite movie, promising us that we’d love it when we saw it. When he finally delivered, Frankie and I couldn’t wait. We were hoping for something along the lines of Jaws, but our mother assured us it was nothing of the sort. She giggled with delight as she put it in the video recorder, calling over her shoulder, ‘Mikey, go and get the box of Maltesers out of the cupboard.’
We pulled the blinds and spread ourselves out around the living room. Frankie, in a sulk because it wasn’t Jaws, stretched herself across the couch, so I took my place on the floor, sharing mother’s cushion and making sure I was within reach of the Malteser box.
Our mother had finally made a good choice; the film was The Wizard of Oz and it enchanted us. After that Frankie and I began a ritual of watching it daily, then going out into the garden to act out our favourite moments from it. Frankie was always the wicked witch, while I was her faithful, flying monkey. Together we would swing back and forth on an old rope that our father had tied to a tree branch, flying through the air before taking a great cackle-filled leap to the ground.
Our tree was divided into two halves, separated by a rickety wooden fence. Beyond it was the backyard of our Gorgia neighbours, who had three daughters, all around our age, with white-blond hair in plaits and matching red raincoats.
We were always conscious of them watching us through the gaps in the trees, but were warned not to ever speak to them. ‘Gorgia-breds,’ our mother would say. ‘Don’t you ever speak to them, even if they talk to you. They’ll have you taken away.’
The prejudice went both ways. ‘Come away from there,’ we’d hear their mother say as she shoved them back into the house. ‘They’re Gypsies, and they’ll put a curse on you.’
One day Frankie and I heard the girls whispering. ‘Gypsies, look it’s the Gypsies.’
Frankie, ignoring our mother’s advice, began swearing at them.
‘Yucky yucky Gypsies, yucky yucky Gypsies,’ the girls began to chant.
Our father had given us a whole directory of obscenities to work with so we were streets ahead in this particular contest.
‘Whores, go fuck yourself!’ Frankie shouted.
While the three huddled to debate whether Frankie’s strange words were a Gypsy curse, she put a cupped hand to my ear and told me what to say.
‘And eat some dog shit!’ I squeaked.
At this point the girls’ furious parents emerged from the bushes. Frankie and I ran into the trailer, slamming the door of our bedroom as we lay in wait for the parents to come over and complain. But they didn’t dare set foot in the camp, and we never saw the girls at the fence again.
We had no idea of the meaning of the words we used, but it was not uncommon for Gypsy children to be subjected to, and encouraged to use, swear words and we regarded them as just another part of our vocabulary.
A few weeks after our encounter with the girls over the fence, a fire broke out in our trailer. The old portable heater we used had been left on in the front room, and Frankie had left her teddy bear next to it.
Frankie and I were fast asleep when our mother ran into our room and shook us awake then ripped us from our beds and threw us at my father, who was outside the bedroom door. Peering over my father’s shoulder, terrified and fascinated, I saw flames and flying pieces of burning fabric everywhere. As he ran outside with us, black smoke billowed down the hall, the whole lounge was engulfed in flames and the trailer began to tilt.
As our home went up in smoke, we went over to my father’s cousin Dwayne’s trailer to wait for the fire brigade. By the time they arrived everything had gone, and all that was left was the chassis the trailer had rested on.
Our parents were philosophical – trailer fires weren’t unusual – and the next day my father set about getting us a new trailer. He wouldn’t have been insured, but his family all helped, and a new trailer was duly bought and installed in the same spot. Inside it was almost identical to the first, but there were few survivors from our toys. Jesus had somehow escaped with nothing worse than a hideous head burn, but the Cabbage Patch army had been reduced to black smudges on the concrete. Despite this, Frankie and I thought the fire was exciting, and we played fire engines for weeks afterwards.
One evening my father came home boasting about having just gatecrashed Diana Dors’ funeral. Apparently, he and his friend Matthew, driving further afield than usual in the search for work, had stopped for a few drinks and then stumbled upon the event, and had followed the line of black limousines as they entered the churchyard. I can picture the crowd of mourners, paying their final respects to Britain’s Blonde Bombshell, as a couple of drunken Gypsies watched, sprawled against a pick-up truck in their bright green overalls, clashing beer cans, hooting, jeering and pointing out the celebrities.
My father and his brothers loved to brag about rubbing shoulders with stars. Diana Dors’ funeral became a morbid tit-bit for my father to boast about. While my Uncle Tory bragged non-stop about the ‘stars’ he rubbed shoulders with through the boxing club he frequented, my father and Uncle Matthew sought out celebrities for odd jobs, sometimes successfully. One of my father’s favourite anecdotes was cutting down a tree for Cliff Richard, then scaring him half to death a year later by jumping out at him from behind a lorry, shouting ‘Oi, Cuntsmouth’.
Most of what my father got up to was illegal. And even the jobs he did legally were often botched, so it was inevitable that the law would catch up with him. One day, our mother leaped into the trailer, looking terrified.
‘Frankie, they’ve come for you. The wardrobe, quick.’
Half asleep after putting me through my rounds, my father dived from his armchair and tumbled to the floor, then sped towards the bedroom.
‘Shit! His arse print’s still in the chair,’ screamed Frankie, jumping up and down on the crater in his seat.
My mother grabbed her, and with one of us under each arm, charged through the hall and slung us into the bedroom behind him like a couple of trash bags.
Our father was stuffing himself inside the closet, throwing old clothes and toys over himself as a disguise. ‘Shut the wardrobe, Mikey.’
I charged over, pulling the door across, as he hissed, ‘Say one word, my boy, and I’ll kill you.’
Frankie leaped onto a stool and pressed her face against the window.
‘Get down from there you fool,’ cried my mother, slapping make-up across her face for a five-second ‘everything is fine officer’ makeover.
‘MUUUUM! I wanna see ’em!’ Frankie bawled.
As my mother dragged her off the stool, there were three loud bangs on the front door.
‘What do they want?’ I whispered
‘They’ve come to take your dad away, so, whatever you do, shut up.’
Mother answered the door while Frankie got back up on the stool by the window and I climbed under the bed. I didn’t want to look at the police for fear of giving my father’s presence away.
From my hiding place I stared at the wardrobe.
One little word might stop him ever hurting me again. Just one word. But I was too scared. If he wasn’t taken away, he would kill me.
He got away with it that time. But by the time I reached my fifth Christmas, my father was finally caught, and we were shifted into a bungalow, owned by our granddad Alfie, while he went to prison.
5
A Bungalow with Barbie Graveyard
We didn’t miss life in a caravan. In the bungalow we now had heat, doors with sturdy locks, bigger rooms and our own garden to play in.
Our mother loved being able to do up her new home. In
the trailers she’d lived in, most of the decor was already fitted and there wasn’t much scope for adding her own touches. She hated the traditional Gypsy women’s ‘home and garden’ look; all Crown Derby, with an abundance of brass Shire-horse ornaments and masses of garish china everywhere. Now, with a real house, a budget and no husband to tell her what to do, she was free to let rip with her own taste – which we discovered, after only a few days, was not too dissimilar to that of Elton John.
Every time Frankie and I came in from the garden there would be a new and even more elaborate piece of furnishing that she had just finished. Layer upon layer of pastel ruffles soon hung from each window frame, and after a couple of trips to the garden centre we found ourselves surrounded by a whole troop of creamy Roman statues bearing bunches of lilacs.
Throughout the months that my father was in prison, our mother spun around the house, living out a series of Doris Day decorating moments. She was always painting something or redecorating something and she loved to explain what she was doing as she worked. Frankie and I were happy to be her audience. We would sit, Frankie holding Jesus, me with my new favourite, Skeletor, as she hammered, tore up and painted, while describing, just like someone on a TV makeover show, exactly what she was doing with a yard of cream curtain, some gold paint and a bag of fake flowers.
With our father gone there was peace and harmony in the home. Our mother was never violent towards us, we had fun with her, and with the fear of my father removed I was at my happiest.
When we tired of watching her decorate, Frankie and I spent most of our days out in the garden making recipes from mud, eggs, Play-Doh, canned meat and captured spiders. We made up for our lack of a pool by taking turns sitting in a tin bucket filled with water, and we constructed our own bird traps for the swarms of crows that regularly haunted the place, hoping to keep one of them and teaching it how to speak. Of course we never managed to get hold of one, but as a consolation prize, we did stumble across the occasional crow corpse, which we solemnly buried, complete with eulogy and coffin.
By the time we had been in the bungalow for a couple of months our graveyard had a population of four crows, one flattened toad, what we thought might have been a mouse and Frankie’s most vile and disposable Barbie Doll.
‘Old Red Legs … too ugly to live’ was her eulogy: abrupt, brief and straight to the point. She was lucky to have had one at all. Old Red Legs was born with a defect that sealed her fate; her wondrous pins, though beautiful in shape, were (through the fault of her maker) as red as pigs’ blood, which made her an embarrassment in mini-dresses, and according to my sister ‘a psycho’. So it was no surprise that she was eventually found dead by Barbie and Co., naked, shaven-headed and hideously deformed, having been ravaged by a stray dog.
The heavy influence of horror movies may have played a significant part in our behaviour. That, and the ridiculous number of funerals we were made to attend, most of them for relatives we had never heard of.
Gypsy funerals tend to bring out every person who even passed the time of day with the deceased, and there were never less than 500 people there. Cars and lorries would be stacked with wreaths, and mourners would gather around a huge coffin, filled with belongings and garish jewellery for the dead person to take with them to the after-life. Not many Gypsies actually believe in an after-life any more, but the traditions have outlasted the beliefs. Some of the coffins we saw as children were so stacked with ornaments, jewels and even cartons of cigarettes that the undertakers must have had to sit on the lid of the coffin just to get the thing closed.
Not only did we children have to go along, but we were also forced to kiss the corpse goodbye. A chair would be pulled over, so that I could lean reluctantly over the edge of the coffin of some crone who had already been dead for a couple of weeks, and with a solemn ‘goodbye’ to the deceased, plant a kiss on the ice-cold forehead. The only way I could bear it was to screw my eyes tight shut.
Aunt Cissy, Granddad Noah’s aunt, had lived to be a hundred because, it was rumoured, she had sold her soul to a strange creature that lived under a bridge. Aunt Cissy was the living image of the witch from Snow White; and ironically, she used to give us an apple for Christmases and birthdays, stuffed with a fifty-pence piece for good luck.
She was frightening enough to gaze upon when she was alive, but knowing that we would have to kiss her dead face at her funeral was terrifying. Frankie and I did our best to escape, but were dragged back and lifted onto the chair by her coffin together.
We stared, transfixed, at her painted orange face and purple lipstick, surrounded by sausage-shaped ringlets, put around her face to ‘pretty her up’. I went in first, squeezing my eyes tight shut and leaning in. When my lips touched her forehead, I was afraid they were going to stick – her skin felt like that of a frozen turkey. Frankie went next and she couldn’t have looked more horrified if she’d been asked to eat dog shit.
Our mother would regularly take us to visit her parents, Granny Bettie and Granddad Alfie. Our father never came with us because he and Granny Bettie hated the sight of one another. Granny Bettie was an expert at insults and put-downs and she saved her worst for our father. On the rare occasions when they met, they sparred like prizefighters and, to everyone’s surprise, it was generally our father who came off worst. Granny Bettie knew how to crush him with a few words. So whenever our mother announced she was going to visit her parents, our father claimed he had work to do and shot out of the door.
Granny Bettie and Granddad Alfie still lived on the land where my mother had grown up, but all the things that had made it so special – the old bus, Granddad Alfie’s forest and the plantation – had become mere ghosts of their former selves. My mother spoke fondly of the way it used to be when she was a child, but now it had fallen into decline, and so had our granddad, who was bedridden and paralysed from the neck down by multiple sclerosis.
Granny Bettie had let loose her horses and goats in the hope that they could eat through the overgrown grass and weeds that she could no longer clear, but they seemed more interested in eating what was left of the fences.
My mother and Granny Bettie would go out to chase a horse for Frankie to ride on, while I would stay indoors with Granddad Alfie. He would be propped up on his bed and I would perch beside him, holding onto his pipe and listening to his stories. He had taught me how to stuff his pipe with tobacco, light up, and then keep it within an inch of his mouth in between puffs. I’d have a pint of lemon squash at hand, since I choked while trying to keep it alight. Granddad Alfie would teach me his favourite swear words, and how to blow a smoke ring the size of a doughnut. Then he would tell me and Frankie ghost stories, each one of them more terrifying than the last and, according to him, all true.
Granny Bettie would scoff. ‘Stop telling them ghost stories, you old fool, filling the children’s heads with rubbish. Listen to me you two, when you’re dead, you’re dead, there’s no such a thing as a ghost.’
‘God strike me blind, Bettie,’ Granddad Alfie cackled. ‘When I do drop dead, I’m gonna come back here and kick you right square up the arse!’
‘Drop dead then!’
Just after my sixth birthday, he did.
Custom dictated that we had to stay at Granny Bettie’s home until the funeral was over. Granddad Alfie was laid out as a centrepiece in the spare room, and in shifts my mother and her family grieved at his side, twenty-four hours a day, until the day of the funeral.
It was a time of sleepless nights, endless pots of coffee and plates of biscuits. During those weeks, friends and family from miles around travelled to pay their last respects, share their stories and say goodbye to Alfie. The old field hadn’t seen so many people in years.
I loved listening to them laughing over their memories of him. One told of the bonfire night – which was also his birthday – when Alfie had brought home a swan and cooked it for the guests, much to Granny Bettie’s disgust.
My mother was devastated. Her father was the only p
erson who had really understood her and been on her side, and now he was gone. With our father still in prison, she mentally vanished, lying awake each night, never speaking a word and staring blankly into the TV till morning. We would get up to find her lying on the couch, where we had left her when we said goodnight.
Though I loved my father, and wanted to see him, as his release date approached my fear of his violence grew greater every day. When he walked in two months after Granddad Alfie had died he seemed almost a stranger after so long away, and I felt suddenly shy, watching him take my mother in his arms and kiss her, before ruffling my hair and throwing Frankie in the air.
The prison gruel seemed to have agreed with him because he was even more barrel-bodied than before. His sideburns had turned into badger grey horns. He was the image of the ‘Pop-up Pirate’ Frankie and I played with.
Our mother prepared a slap-up roast to celebrate his return, even managing to root out a couple of old Christmas crackers she had stashed away. They were a ploy to distract us from her ‘experimental’ cooking; the only thing not scorched as black as a witch’s heart were the sprouts, which gave off a festive, yet nuclear green glow. We sat around Mum’s American-style Diner table, Frankie and I holding our noses as we forced them down.
That afternoon Frankie and I were outside playing when my father called us both into the house. ‘I’ve got a present for you two, come quick,’ he said. We wiped our muddy hands on our clothes and rushed back indoors.
Mother was standing in the kitchen, her back turned and hair messed up on one side of her head. She was quietly cursing to herself, while wrapping her arm in a wet tea towel. Frankie rushed past her and into the lounge. ‘What is it? Give it to me,’ she yelled.
Something was dreadfully wrong; I could sense it. I needed to see my mother’s face, but she kept turning away. I was scared. Reluctantly I followed Frankie, who was sitting on our father’s lap, holding a huge, bronze trophy, with two gold-plated boxers welded onto the top.
