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.