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

The clouds burst and rain began to hammer against the windscreen as we hit the motorway.

Calebs 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. Well be long gone when they find youre missing. Ive got us a place to live, a long way from anyone who knows you. Well be together.

I tried to smile. Yeah, I know. Ive 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 fathers anger and my mothers sadness have caused this rip in the heavens? They would have found my letter by now. I felt the crack of my mothers 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 couldnt 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 didnt 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 wasnt 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.