Gypsy boy on the run : my escape from a life among the Romany gypsies

195 Pages·2013·0.81 MB·English

by  Walsh

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For my Dad … I love you very much
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Escape
2 Awakening
3 The Plan
4 Free
5 The Call
6 In the Boot
7 A Witch and a Holy Place
8 Alone
9 Caleb’s Call
10 Trailer Heaven
11 Under Arrest
12 Heartbreak
13 Moving On
14 A New Nose
15 Dreaming of a Fresh Start
16 Manchester
17 Eddie
18 An Education
19 Reunion
20 London
21 Drama School
22 Home
23 It Comes Out
24 Death of My Grandfather
25 Normality?
26 An End and a Beginning
27 Today
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following people for making this book possible:
Caro Handley; once again you have been here, right by my side, guiding me
through and making sure I get this all down right. Bless you. To Stephanie
Thwaites; thank you so much for your guidance, support and helping me through
these final stages with coffee & chocolate eggs. Fenella Bates … It’s been a joy
and a pleasure to know you, and to have us work together once again on this
final part of the story. You’re incredible. To Catherine Saunders and Ciara Foley
for being there on standby, ready to listen to my moans and groans. Emma
Knight, thank you so much for being there to hold my hand.
To my wonderful group of friends, old and new, for your love, your support,
for picking up the phone at ridiculous times, for being there with a friendly ear,
for taking me for coffees, cocktails, or whatever it was I needed to drag me out
of the dark. I cannot thank you enough. To Dee, for the wine, fags, and such
incredible belief in me … how long have you been listening to this story now?
Jesus Christ! Xx. To Alan, Kerry and Joan for your love, your friendship and
being such a wonderful part of my life. I love you very much. To the
extraordinary Harty’s – Olive, Hamish, Annabelle and Stephen. Bless you! To
the lovely Joanie, and her wonderful Jenny.
To my Ball and Chain. I wish you so much love. No matter where you go,
you’ll always be my family. To my amazing family; my Aunts, Uncles,
Grandparents, Cousins and friends from back home that have been so
wonderfully supportive of me, not only from my book but also throughout my
whole life. I love all very much. I miss you all dreadfully. To my sister; you are
the most incredible, strong, supportive and beautiful person I could ever have
wished for in my life. My best friend and my partner in crime. I love you always.
To the boys; we may be all grown up now, but we’ll still be quoting ‘Robin
Hood Daffy’ to each other when we’re 60! I love you very much.
YOINKS … and AWAY!
Mum … for your strength, wisdom, support and love. I see myself in you,
more and more every day. Dad … I just love you … so very much. For all that
you have done for me these last years … you are incredible.
To all the wonderful readers of Gypsy Boy that have shown such incredible
support in my journey to where I am today. Your letters, quotes, comments and
‘Tweets’ mean the absolute world to me. Bless you. To my extraordinary and
wonderful culture. I am so very proud to call myself a Gypsy man. To Leigh,
how I wish so much that you could be here with me. I miss you. I love you very
much. For Kate Bush, for Skeletor, for Michael Jackson, for Sloth and Chunk,
for Dorothy Gale …
And last of all, for you, the reader of this book … I wrote this just for you.
1
Escape
The clouds burst and rain began to hammer against the windscreen as we hit the
motorway.
Caleb’s face was a mask of concentration as he gripped the steering wheel,
pushing his little orange car to slice through the curtains of water at speeds it had
never reached before.
Panic gripped me as I looked over my shoulder for the hundredth time.
The road was clear. But for how long?
Caleb reached for my hand. ‘We’ll be long gone when they find you’re
missing. I’ve got us a place to live, a long way from anyone who knows you.
We’ll be together.’
I tried to smile. ‘Yeah, I know. I’ve been dreaming of this day for so long.’
And I had. I was going to be free, and I would be with Caleb. It was
everything I wanted. So why was my heart so heavy with loss?
A tidal wave was falling from the sky. Could the combination of my father’s
anger and my mother’s sadness have caused this rip in the heavens? They would
have found my letter by now. I felt the crack of my mother’s heart as I pictured
her reading it. I ached for her, and for what I was leaving behind. My family, my
home. But they would be better off without me. All I had ever brought them was
shame.
I looked over at Caleb. I couldn’t let him know what I was feeling. I was
scared that he might try to convince me to change my mind and turn back. And I
didn’t want to do that.
I glanced behind us again and watched, heart thudding, as a truck in the
distance came closer. For a terrible moment I thought …
It wasn’t his. I almost fainted with relief. But I knew it was just a matter of
time. He would come looking for me. And when he did, I had to be somewhere
he could never, ever find me.
I was fifteen years old and I was running away from everything I had ever
known. I had grown up in the closed and secretive world of Romany gypsies,
part of a culture and a way of life that had existed for centuries, alongside but
never part of the rest of the world. We Romanies were proud, fierce, independent
people and we held to our ways and customs despite the increasing
encroachment of ‘normal’ society and the hostility of non-Romanies towards us.
My family lived a travelling life, moving from town to town, settling for
weeks or months, as long as my father could find work locally, before moving
on. Friends and family moved with us in a great convoy of trucks and trailers
that wound its way from one place to the next. It was getting harder to find
places to stop, free from prejudice and attack, out of the way enough to preserve
our privacy and give us space to be together and live the way we had always
lived. When we found a good site we would stay for as long as we could, but
there always came a time when we had to move on – either because we were
hounded out, or when our restless spirit drove us back to the open road.
I was my parents’ first son. My father Frank and mother Bettie already had a
daughter, my sister Frankie, born almost two years earlier. Soon after she
arrived, my mother was diagnosed with a heart murmur and told that if she had
another child it could be fatal. My father, thwarted in his hope of a son to take
his name, gave it to my sister and tried to accept the hand that fate had dealt him.
But my mother knew how much he longed for a son and put aside fears for her
health to give her husband the one thing that would make him happier than
anything else.
I was born, like so many Romany babies, in the Royal Berkshire hospital.
My granny Ivy, a four-foot midget of a woman who, despite her tiny stature, had
a temper that cowed grown men, had given birth to her four children there. She
and my grandfather, Old Noah, were Gypsy elders whose status was akin to
royalty, and as word spread of the excellent treatment she had received, Gypsy
women from one end of the land to the other had flocked there to have their
babies.
When I arrived, with the whole family present as was the custom, I was
apparently so enormous that there was a collective gasp of disbelief. How my
mother not only survived but went on to have three more children, I have no
idea. It was Granny Ivy, cackling through her mouthful of gold teeth, who
declared me to be ‘a little pig boy’. After that the story became part of our
family folklore, and as a child I endured endless hours listening to Gypsy women
laugh and exclaim over the day Bettie Walsh gave birth to a pig.
As for my father, he was delighted with his bruiser of a son and as he placed
a chain with a tiny pair of gold boxing gloves on it around my infant neck, my
size only served to fuel his hope that I would be a fine specimen of Gypsy
manhood and a prizefighter to make him proud.
My heritage was a noble one. My parents were both born into well-known