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Poetic personal essay about growing up in Ireland, one of the first memoir-type pieces I ever wrote. Enjoy.
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Gypsy
Gypsies are romantic to kids. I think kids identify with gypsies.
There is a ballad, hundreds of years old. A rich lady leaves her
husband and fine house to roam the moors with her 'raggle-taggle
gypsy-o', to lie in his arms on dark nights.
My stepfather explains the name. "They were called 'Egyptians' by
the English. Then the word changed over time. They come from a
different culture. They have their own language."
Which an outsider can't understand.
I am nine, reading a book about a gypsy girl. It is called The
Diddakoi, by Rumer Godden. I've forgotten what the title means. The
outcast, the orphan, something like that. The book was made into a
BBC TV series. On the cover, Kizi, the girl, stands before a brightly
painted caravan. Her face is troubled. Her hair is dark, like mine, but
short. Her eyes are brown, and sad.
The book is about her struggles to fit into the 'real' world of an
adopted home and school in lower middle-class England. The children
taunt her. She goes to the bathroom and doesn't know how to lock
the door or even that she needs to shut it. So girls peer in and laugh
at her. She doesn't know how to do things quite like they do. And
they hate her for that.
There are no gypsies in Ireland. There are tinkers. Again my
stepfather tells me. Tinkers would go around from door to door in the
old days, mending pots and pans for people. In Enid Blyton's Noddy
books there is a tinker-like character called, I think, Tin Can. He is
aged, cheerful; he has a donkey on which he loads all his wares. But
he is stone deaf from the clattering of all his pots and pans.
Now tinkers aren't like that. They are the most hated group in
Irish society. In Dublin you're accosted by tinkers all the time,
especially on O'Connell Bridge. The kids beg. They're pale, thin, dirty,
with a driven look in their eyes. Mothers beg too, slumped on the
pavement holding their babies. The men stay out somewhere and
wait for the women and the kids to return at night and bring them
money. They camp on waste ground in the North side of the city.
Their settled neighbors loathe them, accuse them of stealing and all
sorts of crime. They aren't allowed into pubs, or if the men are, the
women aren't. You see no old tinkers, because they die in their forties
or fifties. Their kids die too.
Irish people have their necessary myths about them. "Did you see
the gold rings on that one? Ah, they're all rich, really. They don't
need the money. Robbing bastards."
They aren't ashamed to beg, which is what people hate, I think.
They lounge around, looking directly in your eyes, obsequious but
hard. Tough. God bless you, love? they chant questioningly as people
walk by with stony faces. Give us a little money for the baby?
Whenever they step foot in suburban neighborhoods, it's war. The
local ladies are up in arms immediately. It doesn't take much to get
them out either. Nobody wants them and nobody wants to think
about them. They're greedy, thieving, drunken, subhuman. They're
very, very threatening.
It's fear that I note in the eyes of staid housewives, as they hurry
through the streets, avoiding the accusing eyes of tinker children, who
act as if they're entitled to the few silver coins that they so
monotonously ask for. But it's money that these women do not want
to give them. What will it go towards? Drink for their fathers? Or
something else, something even worse?
My teacher at school tells the story of being accosted by a tinker
boy. "It's so sad," she says vaguely. "I told him I wouldn't give him
any money. I bought him a sandwich. I thought that was the best
thing to do."
It is the time of "Feed the World" and Live Aid, and Bob Geldof
weeping as he watches a BBC news program about Ethiopia in London.
And Irish people give very generously; the famine in Ethiopia captures
their imagination. It is the pictures of the starving children that make
it impossible for them not to give. Those staring, passive eyes,
resigned to death. It's heartbreaking, everybody says. Heartbreaking.
My mother is as actively anti-tinker as anyone. One morning
tinker horses wander into our little row of red-brick houses. Big,
rough-haired creatures, eager for grass, they clomp into the front
garden of our next door neighbor, Mr. Houlihan. It is a lovely, fresh
morning. I sit on our garden wall and laugh at them. My mother
comes out, sighs in irritation, and climbs into the next door garden. It
takes a while to shoo the horses out. They leave piles of steaming
dung behind.
I am particularly amused because we do not like Mr. Houlihan very
much.
We walk in town, my mother and I. I am older, fourteen, fifteen. A
tinker woman sits on the pavement clutching a plastic bowl. She turns
upraised eyes on the people who pass. We note her silently. I glance
at my mother, who looks disdainful. A man in his thirties passes us
and bends down to give her some coins. She mumbles something,
shoving the bowl up into his face. "You want more?" we hear him ask
incredulously. My mother and I continue walking. Then the man
catches up with us. With a grin at my mother, he announces: "I took
it off her!"
And on he goes.
My mother laughs, delighted. Delighted, I suppose, that someone
has stood up to one of these tinkers, told them where to get off.
It's funny that the kids can be especially menacing. With their
pinched faces, eyes bright with sugar dependency, running wild on the
streets, they still know their job: to get money. And they run in packs,
pestering adults. "Please," they chorus, in strong Dublin accents.
"Please, Missus." And the 'missus' is not used to this kind of attack
and deeply resents it. Whether she gives them anything or not.
Even later, my mother (now well-dressed, carrying a large golf
umbrella, a good leather handbag hanging at her hip) tells a story of
being surrounded by a crowd of tinker kids who won't let her go. She
is carrying a gas balloon for my little brother, one of those silver
helium-filled balloons with a cartoon character in front, new in Ireland
at the time. The kids demand the balloon. She keeps on saying no.
They keep on pleading. Finally, exasperated, she begins to clear a
path through them using her umbrella. That works.
We have relations who befriend tinkers, work with them. My
mother and stepfather despise them for that. They have lots of kids
themselves, these relatives, and are always looking for old clothes,
not for the tinkers, but for their own children. We give them, of
course.
Old clothes. Hand-me-downs. One never forgets having to wear
them; it marks you out. New, flashy clothes are so important to my
friends at school, and to everyone on the street, down to the poorest
shopgirl. Even the tinkers dress in cheap, bright-colored clothes. The
kids, that is. Their parents are shabby, dressed in big shapeless coats,
but then it's so cold. How can they survive, day after day, pounding
the wet pavements, pleading with people who have houses and cars
but who consider themselves heavily taxed and barely able to clothe
their own kids?
I don't know how they survive. A lot of them don't.
My mother never realized that she didn't fit in. She was foreign,
an American, a 'poor' American woman, but only poor in terms of not
having money; in reality she was educated and middle-class, only
temporarily poor. But it took a long time. It took a lot of determined
upwardly mobile struggling to get us to the point where we could have
our house decorated so that I would no longer be ashamed to bring
friends back to it.
And then, having made this damp little red-brick house
respectable, they left it for a big white house in the country, with land.
And that I think is what they always dreamed of: to own a big house,
surrounded by their own land. To finally be free of grimy, middle-class
Dublin, to join the 'landed gentry', people who owned horses and
fancy cars.
Finally, they had money. And they had something to live up to.
My stepfather bought a cream-colored Mercedes station wagon with
brown leather seats. In my late teens, it was embarrassing to think of
myself sitting in the passenger seat, dressed as I would be, looking
like I did.
I had always been downwardly mobile, in every way, I think. As a
child they let me out into the streets wearing hand-me-downs, things
my stepfather's mother had picked up at jumble sales, brown jumpers
with holes in the elbows (which she would darn), jeans with holes at
the knees, dirty running shoes. What a picture I must have presented.
Instead of the positive image most Irish kids took care to create for
themselves, I showed a very negative side to the world. And I didn't
know why. I said to myself that I didn't like dressing up. Clothes
shopping bored me. Just thinking about it bored me. Clothes were
only to wear. It was stupid to think about them. If I really wanted
them, I could have them. My mother too let her hair stay long and
scraggly. She wore jeans and shirts that she had owned for years.
She had no social life. She worked. Perhaps I thought it was loyal of
me to accept what I was given, and not ask for more. I wore a school
uniform, I always had, and I dreaded fifth and sixth year, because then
we would have to wear our own clothes. Other people couldn't wait.
I hated glamor. I was suspicious of it.
My shame was always there. I was ashamed of playing this role,
this terrible, thankless role, yet I played it well. As I walked down the
street, eyes on the ground, not daring to meet people's eyes, I wonder
now what I was thinking. To whom was I being loyal? To myself, I
thought. This is who I am. Let them laugh at me.
Meanwhile, my stepfather rose up the ladder at work. Soon he
would be a partner in his law firm. My mother worked hard making
cheesecakes and ice cream for a local delicatessen. She had her own
business, she was a caterer, but I did not think of it like that. Neither,
I suspect, did she. My friends' mothers did not work.
I know it was not sadism on their part to send me to a school
where everyone would be better off than we were. It was certainly
masochism on mine to be so ashamed of my background. Yet I did
not do the usual thing - pretend, agonize over my appearance, try to
fit in. No, I tried to stand out; I put my energy into not conforming. It
made them all so uncomfortable. They did not really want to
persecute me. I was quiet, shy, passive, and I worked hard. I should
have got by, and I was happy to be ignored, but my behavior was still
just a little too strange to let pass. A little unpredictable. And I liked
being different. Ultimately, I wanted always to mark my own territory.
Other people were frustrated too. And they, the rebels, were
expelled or asked to leave. I could not be one of them either. I did
not possess that aggressiveness, that hard, driven energy which
stemmed from anger. I conformed joylessly to the rules of the school,
pulling my socks up, buttoning the top button of my blouse. When I
saw two girls in my class smoking on the hockey pitch one games
period, I reeled in shock. How did they dare? They could be kicked
out for that!
I did not understand that kind of recklessness.
With another kind of recklessness I roamed around on weekends.
The library and the second-hand bookshop were the only temples that
I worshipped at. We did not, of course, go to church. My mother and
stepfather were both embittered products of strict religious
upbringings. The idea of any kind of community did not appeal to
them.
I soon learned that other people would label me. At school the
people whom I considered dull and conformist labeled me dull and
conformist. From the way I dressed and the way I acted people
misread me constantly, and rejected me.
My mother felt differently. She felt that Irish society had embraced
her, that people welcomed her. I don't think she knew what was
happening to me.
With time, she slimmed down, began to spend money on clothes,
got her hair cut, and became a different person.
She didn't encourage me to follow. Or perhaps she did, in subtle
ways. As I reached my late teens, they finally began to worry about
me, or to think about me for the first time. They turned their attention
on me, like headlights on a frightened animal. I froze. Life was
bearing down on me and I could not move.
I am ten or eleven. I am walking a street near my home, on an
errand for my mother. I stop at a traffic light. A boy, seven or eight,
with blond hair, sits on his bike, waiting for the light to change. I meet
his eye reluctantly. He gazes at me.
"Are you a gypsy?" he asks.
I see now that many people thought I was a tinker. When I spoke,
though, my accent marked me as 'middle-class'. Even my appearance
was middle-class in its very shabbiness. Poorer kids dressed more
sharply and fashionably than I; they looked different. But that was
my insight. Perhaps other people didn't see it that way. They did
sense I was violating their rule: always look decent. Put the best face
you can upon the world.
Gypsy and tinker were interchangeable terms. But there were no
gypsies in Ireland.