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Walsh - Gypsy boy : my life in the secret world of the Romany Gypsies

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Book:
Gypsy boy : my life in the secret world of the Romany Gypsies
Author:
Walsh / Mikey
Publisher:
Hachette UK;Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martins Press
Genre:
Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2012
City:
England, England
Rating:
5 / 5
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An Eye-Opening Memoir of Growing Up Gypsy

Mikey Walsh was born into a Romany Gypsy family. They live in a secluded community, and little is known about their way of life. After centuries of persecution, Gypsies are wary of outsiders, and if you choose to leave you can never come back.

This is something Mikey knows only too well.

Growing up, he didnt go to school, he seldom mixed with non-Gypsies, and the caravan became his world. It was a rich and unusual upbringing, but although Mikey inherited a vibrant and loyal culture his familys legacy was bittersweet, with a hidden history of violence and grief. Eventually Mikey was forced to make an agonizing decisionto stay and keep secrets, or escape and find somewhere to belong.

Gypsy Boy shows, for the first time, what life is really like among the Romany Gypsies. A surprise #1 bestseller in Great Britain, this is a one-of-a-kind memoir of a little-seen world, one both fascinating and heartbreaking.

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I would like to thank the following people for making this book possible:

To Caro Handley, for being so patient and always on my side. To Stephanie Thwaites, for your guidance and support. And Fenella Bates I often wonder how things would have gone if you had never opened my submission. Without your belief in my writing this piece would never have become possible. A mere thank you seems so little a compensation for the magnificence of who you are and what you have done for me. There are no words I can find that express what all this means. I wish you everything.

And then there are those that have been listening to my story for years:

To Mr C and your wonderful Green. To Mr Robert Caton 10 years. Will we still be quoting lines from He-Man cartoons when we are seventy? To my sister, for teaching me how to pull off a floral nightie and red stilettos. To My Little Big brother. Youre a hero in every sense of the word. May you never tell of this book. To my brilliant mother. May you never hear of this book. To my wonderful friends who put up with me so well you know who you are. To my new Aussie family. Thank you for being so marvellous. And thank you Nan, for the Legs of lamb and trivia.

Two years after my father learned the truth about Joseph, he turned up at Josephs door with Jimmy and let him know that he knew the truth. Joseph lashed out at my father, but Jimmy, by then in his mid teens and as large as a truck, punched him in the mouth, exploding four of his front teeth.

Four more boys came forward to say that Joseph had also abused them. Unwilling to pass him over to the police, the accusing boys fathers, their friends and relatives made his last years a living hell. He was hunted, tortured, and beaten up by men who once looked up to our family. He went to work for a scrap company in another town, and five years ago he died, alone in his home, from a heart attack.

My father no longer has anything to do with his remaining brother, Tory. After Old Noah died, Tory refused to speak to them again, and in the following years, he lost most of his money.

My father has throat cancer a legacy of his years of heavy smoking. He is near blind, and spends most of his time asleep in front of the TV. His last attempt at bullying the family ended when Henry-Joe stood up to him and hit him back, yelling You might be able to scare everyone else, old man, but I am not a little boy any more. Im a betterman than you will ever be, so dont ever raise your hand to me again.

My father did not. He knew that he had been beaten.

Jimmy, now barely twenty, turned out to be the wolf my father had hoped for. But my fathers violent training backfired. No one, not even my father, can stop Jimmys violence now. My father came to believe he was possessed, and took him to a church in the hope of an exorcism. It made no difference: Jimmy still spends his life looking for trouble. He has been charged several times with grievous bodily harm on one occasion, towards thirteen people at one time. It began as a spat in the local pub when a Gorgia man tried to chat up Frankie. She tried to get rid of him before Jimmy arrived back from the bar. She pushed him away and he punched her in the eye in front of Jimmy, sealing his doom. The night ended with several people with broken bones and the guy who started it all with his index finger bitten off by Jimmy and spat across the carpet.

The days of knocking on doors are history it is now against the law to call, the way Gypsies used to. The younger generation, while determined to carry on with their traditions for as long as possible, are having to find new ways of surviving.

I hope that they can. Left to themselves the Romanies live peacefully and quietly, away from the spotlight. But the Irish Travellers have damaged the image of travelling people everywhere parking trailers wherever they choose, and scattering litter. There is also a lot more violence, not just with fists, but with knives.

A couple of years ago my brothers were accosted by a gang of fifteen Irish Travellers, aware of the reputation ofour family as fighters. Henry-Joe and Jimmy were prepared to fight, but knives appeared, and today Henry-Joe has vicious scars across his back, and Jimmy, after surgery for wounds to his face, was left with paralysed muscles down one side.

As for our old friends, many of them have encountered hard times.

Kayla-Jaynes boyfriend Tyrone left her after she slept with him. Weeks later she realised she was pregnant. She kept it hidden until the eighth month, when her family found out. Tyrone was forced to marry her, but of course it didnt last, and, like Frankie, she and her child live with her parents.

Levoy turned to crack not long after my departure, and was sent to stay with a family in San Diego to dry out. I saw him a few years ago, and although he was free of drugs, they had affected him deeply, both physically and mentally. He now lives with his parents and works in a local store in Newark. Bitter about what our upbringing has made him, he doesnt see any of the people he used to know.

Adam came back to the Newark camp, and is now married, with three children.

Romaine didnt marry. Now in her mid-twenties, she is regarded as a spinster. Aunt Minnie still wears her fur coat.

Jamie-Leigh married a violent man, who, while high on Ecstasy, was hit by a train and killed. In the years after I left Newark, when both she and Frankie had lost their husbands and were excluded socially, they found one another again and became very close. Jamie-Leigh would come round every day, always joking with my brothers that she was waiting for me to return and marry her. When myfamily came to meet me at the airport she had sent with them a paper napkin, with a large heart drawn on it to give to me. Underneath she had written, with perfect spelling, I love you.

Soon after that, Jamie-Leigh got involved with the underworld and began smuggling drugs. She was caught with cocaine strapped to her thighs, and is now serving a long sentence in a South American prison. I dont know if we will ever meet again, but I will always feel she is a part of me.

My cousin Tory got married and lives with his wife and children in a house across the way from Granny Bettie. Noah is divorced and works as a bodyguard now.

Aunt Maudie had a stroke while she cleaned the kitchen, and Uncle Tory came home that night to find her dead on the kitchen floor. He was devastated.

It breaks my heart to know how many of our people are struggling, and turning to drugs or crime. A once proud race has been brought to its knees.

And what of the mythical King of the Gypsies?

The real truth is that there never has been a Romany king. Only the odd self-proclaimed fool, who ends up getting himself and his whole bloodline beaten to a pulp.

I wouldnt change my life. If I hadnt done all that I have done, I wouldnt be where I am today. I am proud of my race, and what I am.

You can take the boy away from the Gypsies, but you cant take the Gypsy out of the boy.

The Birth of a Pig Boy

They were travelling through Berkshire with the rest of their convoy when my granny Ivys water broke in the back of a van. Most Gypsy women in those post-war days would give birth at home with the help of other women but, being less than four feet tall and easily mistaken for a pygmy in a cardigan, Ivy, despite having the temperament of an ogre, was in no condition to have a home birth without the aid of a real nurse and a couple of doctors.

The nearest hospital was the Royal Berkshire, and Ivy had no choice but to go there for the birth of her child. She successfully popped out a strapping boy, Tory, and within a couple of years she was back there, this time producing twins: my father Frank and his sister Prissy. Ivys youngest and most precious, Joseph, arrived another two years after that.

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