I WAS BORN with the cry of the banshee on me. My mother was ten years old, a little barefoot girl in Ireland, when she saw this strange apparition. She was with her two brothers late one midsummer evening and they were sneaking the horses into a farmer’s field for the night. Little Katy Wilson was skipping down this lane when she came across a broken stone wall overgrown with brambles and thorns. She looked through a dip in the wall and saw this small creature-woman sitting in the ruined gable end of a cottage. She had no clothes, just her long hair coming down over her body, and was using a piece of the thorny briar to comb it. ‘She was racking her hair and it was pulling on the plugs of her hair and she pulled it that hard that it caused her to cry out,’ my mother would later tell us. The sound, a shriek, caused the horses to bolt down the lane.
I would hear that story countless times at campfires late at night. Perhaps I’m crazy to believe it but I do. It is why I have had bad luck: the wail of the banshee is supposed to herald death, and I have seen more than my share of that.
My parents could have not have been more different in appearance. Kathryn ‘Katy’ Wilson was a gentle woman with auburn hair, fair skin and freckles. Samuel Gorman, the son of Bulldog Bartley, was a dark, upright man with hair as thick and shiny as black plastic. Though he was fierce-looking and came from a line of renowned knuckle men, he was not himself a fighter. He was a law-abiding man, a strict church-going Catholic and rigid disciplinarian. He only ever fell foul of the law once in his life, for not having a dog licence, and to hear him dwell on it you would think he had committed murder. He was always turned out in a suit, collar and tie and set high standards for his family.
Samuel was twenty-seven years old when he married Katy and she was thirty-three. She came from Newry in County Down and was one of the Wilson travelling clan, close friends of the Gormans: in fact my mother and father were first cousins. They had a big travellers’ wedding with an outdoor banquet laid out on long tables near Nottingham. Katy was married in black, still in mourning for her mother who had died six months before.
Neither of the newly-weds had been to school and neither could read or write. They lived with a posse of brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins in a farm field down Black Lane at Giltbrook on the outskirts of Nottingham – the land of Robin Hood. And that’s where I was born, on St David’s Day, March 1, 1944. It was a stormy night and the scene was like something from a romantic novel: as the women fussed around and my mother cried out in labour, my father jumped on a half-blind black stallion called One-Eyed Jack and rode him bareback through the gale for the midwife. The nurse climbed on the horse with my father, hanging on for her life, the wind howling around them, and they arrived at the camp in time for her to deliver me right there, in a gypsy trailer with little round windows in the back.
I was christened Bartholomew and was baptised at the Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel at Eastwood. Old Bulldog Bartley, the greatest-ever gypsy fighter, held me in his battered mitts.
‘Ah, pretty little boy,’ he said, ‘my jeal all over.’
I looked like a carbon copy of him, with flame-red hair and blue-green eyes and my mother’s fair skin. Perhaps my future path was mapped out for me there and then. I would be told many times that I was the image of my grandfather. It was a good job I ended up six feet one and fifteen stone and had a knockout punch in each hand. But my real strength as a fighter came from within: it’s spiritual.
On my birth certificate, my dad put his occupation as ‘scrap iron and rag dealer’. I don’t know why: he was a carpet salesman. Perhaps he was worried the taxman would come after him. He bought rolls of carpet and webs of oil cloth (lino) and hawked them door-to-door, wearing out his shoe leather tramping up driveway after driveway. He was never wealthy but made a living and put food on the table and clothes on our backs. Even in the post-war years of rationing, we never went without.
Eleven months after me, on February 5, 1945, my brother Samuel arrived, born in a barreltop wagon. He was dark like dad, with the same black hair. We became inseparable, as close as two brothers could be, watched over always by my mother. She never left us, day or night. We thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world – and the finest cook.
My first conscious memory is of standing by a water trough watching a horse drink. I was a waist deep in long grass, with bees buzzing and the sun shining and the horse flicking its tail to keep away the flies. My head was wet where my godmother, Aunt Nudi, had dipped it in water to make my hair curly. Our site was typical of many small gypsy encampments of that time. Relatives surrounded us in eight or nine caravans – or trailers, as we call them – some with tents nearby. Ours was one of the first aluminium trailers, known as a ‘tank’. We had an eight-by-eight tent with a wooden floor and a three-ply stable door. The tent had a wooden frame that folded like a concertina and red wooden knobs in each corner to peg it out. Fixed to the ceiling was a paraffin tilly lamp. We had a queen stove, painted aluminium because it doesn’t burn, with old enamel advertising signs for Woodbines and Ovaltine fixed at the back of the stove to keep the heat in. On the wooden floor was a lovely carpet, nice chairs, a dining table and curtains all the way round so you couldn’t see the frame. The tank had a chrome chimney with a cowl on top of it, and little fancy mudguards, and the four of us lived in it. Some lived in cottage wagons made of wood. There were also some flash cars: before World War Two, my grandfather Jack Wilson had a Chrysler Richmond with silver bugle horns on each side, while my dad had a Chrysler Q, a smaller version. During the war they couldn’t get petrol, so they sold them.
The women ran the domestic side of the camp, constantly washing and cleaning and cooking – always cooking. At Christmas, my mother and the other women would take their turkeys to the local bakery in big meat dishes to be roasted. Each one would have a string tag to identify it. Gypsy women are very particular about food hygiene; you rarely get food poisoning among travellers. Meat was always washed in salt water. The Christmas pudding would be like a football laced with Guinness, rum and currants and raisins soaked in brandy, with old silver and brass thru’penny bits washed and sterilised and put in it, and would be boiled in a cast-iron pot. They sometimes cut a big slice off the pud and fried it up in a pan.
We lived an outdoor life, ate fresh food, stayed up late and never went to school. We had no playpens so sometimes toddlers would be tied with a length of rope to the towbar of a trailer to stop them wandering off. It sounds idyllic but the travelling way can be harsh. My father was brutal, and I mean brutal. He had a thick leather belt with two big metal rings in it and he would hit me for the slightest reason, wrapping the belt around his hand to get a proper grip and flogging me without mercy, even when I was a toddler. He hit me everywhere with it: head, ears, eyes. I carried weals and bruises all the time. That is how it was in those days. I admit I was a reprobate, always up to mischief, and I would eat dirt before I would give in, even when he was lashing me. I also think he beat me because it was the way he had been brought up himself; he had been thrashed and, with my bright red hair, I reminded him of his father. It was a kind of revenge. He never hit our Sam the same way. Sometimes it would get so bad that Uncle Bartley, my dad’s brother, a very fair man and a mean fighter, would intervene. ‘Sam, if you touch that boy I will break every bone in your body because he is only a baby,’ he once said when my dad took the belt to me.
Gypsy children also see and hear things that town and city children don’t. Death touched me from an early age and has never been far away since. When I was four, I was outside the tent and saw a big bird coming towards me. The nearer it came, the bigger – and lower – it got: it was an aeroplane and it was coming down. I was sure it was going to hit me. It passed no more than twenty feet above me, the whoosh of air nearly sending me off my feet as I gazed up open-mouthed, and hit the ground with a terrible crash in the next field. The pilot was killed. It was a military plane and soldiers came and sealed off the area. My father later took me to the pilot’s funeral. I didn’t really understand what had happened except that this brave man must have fought the controls to keep the aircraft from hitting me.
On another occasion, I saw eight cows and two horses struck dead by lightning under a tree near Rugby in Warwickshire. I remember the stench of the charred animal hide, the blackened legs and the skulls where crows had pecked out the eyes. Those sights make an impression on a young child.
Like our parents, neither Sam nor I could read or write. Instead of going to school, we would accompany my mam and dad on the road. Dad would pull into a street and hawk every house while we had to sit for hours in the van. Dad took sugar, milk and tea in an enamel billy can and I had to go and ask for hot water. We also had our chores on the site. We had to wash up and clean all of the chrome on the trailers. I used to do it listening to my favourite, Jet Morgan and the Red Planet, on the radio, imagining I was a space hero. It was so real you didn’t have to see it.
There were always comings and goings: tears and crying when friends left the site, backslapping and drinking when newcomers arrived. When I was seven, we moved to North Wales, to Bala Lake. We stopped with eight trailers on the Dead Pig Common, so-called because an old pig had been thrown out there years before. Gypsy stopping places often have such names: you might say, ‘We’re stopping at the iron gate,’ because there was an iron gate there years ago, or ‘the grassy corner’. Tin Kettle Lane was another one, so named because there was a lot of scrap iron thrown down there.
I had a dog, Rustler, a cross between an Alsatian and a greyhound, and was forever on the move, exploring the woods and fields and streams. Sam and I filled our days with adventure. We coursed for hares, learning that the best lurcher dogs often had catgut stitching in their bellies and legs – it meant they had been brave enough to run through barbed wire fences to chase their prey – and training them to a pitch. Competition was fierce to have the best dog.
As I say, strange things happen to travellers. I was walking along a river with Rustler and spotted a snake six feet long tangled around a tree. It had escaped from a circus a few weeks before. I killed it, took it back and hung it from the ‘flying lady’ silver mascot on my father’s Bedford van. It reached down to the ground. A snake is a detested thing among gypsies, a symbol of evil since the Garden of Eden, for God said to the serpent, ‘From henceforth man will strike out at your head and you will strike at his heel. From henceforth you shall crawl on your belly and eat the dust of the earth to the end of time.’
My main sport was fishing; not with a rod but by hand, wading into the water and tickling the fish and then gently getting them by the gills. I loved it more than anything and could get two trout in one hand. Of course, often it was poaching but who cared unless you got caught?
One day I must have spent too long in the water and when I got back to the trailer I was shivering uncontrollably. Within an hour, I was seriously ill. Someone was sent to fetch an old doctor down from the mountains.
‘He wants to be left in a room on his own,’ the doctor instructed my father. ‘Put him in the caravan, pull the blinds to and leave him quiet.’
Dad did as the man said, but within a short time I was almost comatose. ‘I’m not leaving my lad here like this,’ said my father. ‘He’s dying.’
He carried me into one of the tanks, laid me on the bed, coupled the trailer up to his van and said to my grandfather, ‘I’m taking him to the hospital at Wrexham.’
Grandad sat on the bed with me in the back as we drove the forty miles to Wrexham. I was barely conscious as the old tank bounced up and down on the road. I will never forget that journey with my poor grandfather holding my hand, old Bulldog Bartley, with his broken hands and his putty nose, his old coat with the leather buttons and knotted handkerchief and his bit of beard going grey, trying to comfort me, softly singing songs. He did his best.
When they got me to Wrexham I was rushed straight into the hospital with double pneumonia. Relations arrived in old Buicks, my grandfather Wilson and aunts and uncles, but I was so weak I couldn’t even wave to them. For several days I lingered at death’s door.
Gradually I began to recover. I knew I was getting better when they took me out in a wheelchair onto the green outside the hospital and gave me a bit of ice cream. My legs had turned into sticks. When I finally managed to crawl out of bed and on top of the blankets, the other children were shouting, ‘Look, Bartley Gorman’s out of bed.’ I used to complain to my mum, laying it on thick: ‘You never bring me anything nice to eat, you never bring me a spotted dick.’ It was my favourite. The next time she came, she shouted from the end of the ward, ‘Bartley, look what I’ve got for you.’ She held up this big pudding she had cooked specially, covered in muslin. I hid myself under the blankets and wouldn’t show my face, I was so embarrassed at everyone staring.
I was in hospital for three months until I was well enough to go home but was a sickly kid after that. I had a succession of earaches, toothaches, coughs and viruses. I seemed to spend half my life in bed and, being gypsies, my family were not always able to get me the best treatment. Not long after leaving hospital, I came down with a chest infection and my father went to the chemist. Dad spoke in a funny way, deep and gruff, and he wasn’t always easy to understand.
‘My son has bronchitis,’ he said.
The chemist thought he said, My son has a brown carthorse.
‘What’s up with him?’ he asked.
‘He’s hoarse,’ said my dad.
Again, the man thought he said, He has a horse.
It sounds ever so ridiculous. Anyway, the chemist gave my dad some horse liniment. My father came back, thinking it was medicine, and gave me a tablespoon of this yellow liquid which you were supposed to rub on horses. God almighty! I leapt in the air, hit the tilly lamp and almost brought the tent down. My eyes came out like balls. I went into a fit and ran to the tap, gargling water. Dad took a dose himself and it nearly killed him. He went back up to the chemist and had murders with him. But somehow it cured me.
No sooner was I back on my feet than I was in the wars again. I tried to jump a galvanised fence and missed my footing; the edge of the corrugated iron went straight up my leg and opened it like a zip. I needed eight stitches. The doctors never even gave me an anaesthetic. They were trying to tell me stories to take my mind off it, tales about giant spiders in South America, but you could hear me yelling all over the hospital.
Even with my scrapes and illnesses, I was a bold little bastard and dad would still punish me just as harshly. He had very strict rules. He wouldn’t let me wear a belt because he said it weakens your back; we had to wear braces. That is why the gypsies used to take their handkerchiefs off and tie them around their waist to fight – because they didn’t wear belts. Although the family were close and self-supportive, it was still a tough old world, where disputes were settled the simple, direct way. Even my dad had to raise his fists when the occasion demanded.
He and Black Bob Evans, a close friend, were watching over some horses while their wives were out hawking. My dad looked over at Evans and said, ‘Who do you reckon would win out of you and me?’ The next thing, they were fighting in the street. Bob’s son ran to get his mum while I stood and watched. The women came running and broke it up. Black Bob was the best man in North Wales. He had a saying: ‘I’ll fight with a lion that roars in my face but not with a snake that crawls at my feet.’
Grandad could still fight like the devil. Just before my dad came out of Wales, he was sleeping under the four-wheel dray one night, with a sheet over the top, when my grandad returned from the public house.
‘Get up and make me some tea,’ he ordered.
Dad ignored him, so Bulldog Bartley drew off and punched him as he lay there, breaking his nose in three places.
I was too young to ever see my grandfather fight, but years later I spoke to a old man who had. Davy Stevens lived in a little cottage near Wrexham. He was nobody’s fool, an old potter who knew how to bang plates together so they wouldn’t break. ‘Can you remember my grandfather, Uncle Dave?’ I asked him.
‘When your grandfather was sixty-three years old, I was with him in a pub in Chester,’ he said. ‘He could still lilt and step-dance and sing old Irish songs. There was this travelling man and he had about six sons in the pub. I tell you Bartley, one was the biggest lad I ever did see. This man was a Romany gypsy and he caused an argument with your grandfather because he had his sons with him. Your grandfather said something back to him, so his biggest son stepped in and said, “Listen, I’m the man for you.” ’
My grandfather may have been sixty-three but he still had the name Bartley Gorman, undefeated, and had never been known to refuse a fight. ‘Let’s go outside,’ he said.
They retired to a cobbled courtyard. ‘Oh Bartley, I was only a young lad,’ said Davy, ‘and this man, black curly hair, he was about twenty-seven, he bloody didn’t half give it your grandfather. Bloody hell. He knocked him up this old entry outside the pub, he was fetching the blood from down his nose, he was punching the hell out of him. Your grandfather was drunk as well.
‘Then your grandfather said, “Hang on, hang on.” He walked over to a horse trough and he ripped his shirt and waistcoat off and dipped his head in. He swilled water all over him. My God, Bartley, when he came back he was bouncing three yards. He hit the big lad on the point of the jaw, knocked him clean out. I never seen anything like him in my life.’
After several years in Wales, my parents decided that they wanted Sam and I to have some schooling. We upped sticks and moved to Bedworth, a tough coal-mining town north of Coventry. Our new home was Warner’s Yard, a plot of land on a main road next to a pub. There were a few other travellers there, like old Tom Flanagan, who would go around the markets picking up discarded fruit to wash and sell. We had not been there long when I saw at firsthand the misery that violence can bring.
*
BOXING DAY, 1953, and a big celebration. My aunt Teresa had married Arthur Till that day and my jeal gathered for the reception at the Three Horseshoes hotel in Exhall, Coventry. By early evening the party was in full swing. There was drinking and laughter and singing and dancing. Christmas decorations hung down from the ceiling and a big fir tree stood in one corner, festooned with tinsel. I ran around with our Sam and the other children, like little wild things. Some of the younger men and women were looking forward to going on later to a dance at Bedworth.
At around 9pm, a hard-looking stranger came into the bar. His name was Sid Roper. He was a travelling fairground operator and a notorious brawler, one of the hardest showmen in the country; he once tried to hit a man at a fair, missed and splintered the jamb of a wooden swing. Showmen and gypsies generally don’t mix but this was Roper’s home turf and I suppose he thought he could go wherever he wanted. He was drunk and dangerous.
He sat down near my cousin Kathleen and put his bottle of Guinness on the floor. Kathleen pulled her chair away because she didn’t like the look of him and the bottle spilled. Whether this was the cause of what happened next, I will never know. Roper got up and walked towards my uncle Jimmy Wilson, who was dancing with his arms around my mother while the band played The Tennessee Waltz. Jimmy was a lovely man who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but without warning Roper punched him full in the face. Uncle Jimmy spun like a top across the floor. He put out his hands out to break his fall but missed and his head hit a table. Glass broke. Some women screamed and one knocked me over as she ran from the room.
Some men lifted Uncle Jimmy into a chair and put a handkerchief on his bleeding forehead. ‘What did you do that for, Sid?’ one shouted.
There was confusion. Roper grabbed hold of the groom’s tie and was almost throttling him. One of my cousins shouted, ‘Do something, Caley.’
Caley Botton was courting my cousin Kathleen. He was only twenty-one years old but built like a barn door – six foot and sixteen stone. A few months earlier he had challenged out Coventry Pot Fair but no-one would take him on. I watched, nine years old, as Caley and Roper started fighting. They struggled on the small stage and sent the drum kits flying. Caley got his right arm free, drew back and hit Roper with a ferocious punch. The showman’s head banged against the wall and he crumpled in a heap, blood spattering over the turquoise dress of one of the bridesmaids. Caley went to stick a few more blows on him but was pulled back.
They dragged Roper out by the scruff of his neck. Meanwhile my uncle was still unconscious. The police and an ambulance arrived and took Roper to the cells and my uncle to hospital. The party broke up, because no-one had the stomach for it after that. But even worse was to come: later that night, the news came back that Uncle Jimmy was dead. He had never regained consciousness. Jimmy was one of seven brothers and there was a terrible scene, with awful wailing and crying from the women.
Two days later, Roper appeared in court. One of his eyes was closed and the other was puffy with bruises where Caley had hit him. A detective superintendent told the magistrate that he should be remanded in custody for his own safety. ‘But for the arrival of the police, and his arrest, Roper would possibly have been more seriously injured,’ he said. ‘There is a great deal of feeling between the parties.’
My breed wanted to tear him apart. He was kept in custody and the case was heard at Warwick Assizes. Roper initially pleaded not guilty but after hearing some of the evidence, admitted manslaughter. A Home Office pathologist said my uncle died from ‘cerebral compression and cerebral laceration consistent with having come in contact with the ground.’ He also said Jimmy’s skull was thinner than normal.
Then came the sentencing. ‘In some ways this was an accident,’ said Mr Justice Finnemore. ‘It probably never entered your head that when you struck this man, you were going to injure him seriously.’ He fined Roper £30.
There was uproar. All of my aunts and uncles were shouting at once.
‘Thirty pounds for a man’s life?’
‘It’s like Judas betraying the Lord for thirty pieces of silver.’
‘He murdered him.’
‘We’ll get you, Roper.’
Even Roper didn’t feel justice had been done: he later said he wished he had got three months in prison. The police had to help clear the court and the protests continued in the street outside.
A tragedy like that in a close-knit family is devastating. Three months after Jimmy’s death, one of his brothers, Johnny, was taken into hospital and stayed there for months before dying of a broken heart, though they said it was septicaemia. Uncle Henry became very ill, had to go for psychiatric treatment and eventually had a lobotomy.
Roper himself did not long avoid true justice. In October 1954, having served his sentence, he was leaving a show at Nottingham Goose Fair when he had a seizure in the cab of his truck. They took him to hospital and found he had an inoperable brain tumour. It was a pity for Roper: he never meant to kill my uncle.
We have always believed that it was Caley’s punch that damaged Roper’s brain and caused his death. He was some man, Caley Botton, one of the best fighters of his generation, and became part of the family when he married my cousin. He had a fighting pedigree: one of his forebears was Caleb Wenman, the man who lost his arm fighting Bartley Gorman I, while his grandfather, Old Freddie Botton, could kill you with a walking stick. Caley made his name when he fought Willy Biddle, from Leamington Spa, who claimed to be the best man among travellers in the Fifties. They fought on the fairground at Coventry and were arrested. They were put in the same jail cell and began arguing again. ‘I beat you once, Willie, and I will beat you again,’ said Caley, but Biddle declined, even paying Caley’s £5 fine for him, and they forgot about it.
After that, Caley got up at Bedworth Fair and announced, ‘I’ll fight any traveller in the country.’ No one accepted, so instead they arranged for him to fight Frankie Raven, a leading boxer known as the ‘Coventry Wonder’, in a ring at the booth over six three-minute rounds. Caley was out of shape for the ring and in the first round Raven broke his nose. Blood went everywhere. In the fourth, Raven knocked him out of the ring; my dad pushed him back in. But Caley stuck it out for the full eighteen minutes. He was tough. ‘I couldn’t hit him. He was too clever for me,’ said Caley afterwards. It was a lesson for me: fighting is not just about strength and power.
*
I WAS NINE when I first went to school. My father and mother couldn’t read but decided Sam and I needed to learn. We were sent to Saint Francis of Assisi School, a redbrick, slate-roof primary with a small tarmac playground in Bedworth. They put me just one class up from the youngest ones, so I was older than everyone else in my form. Even so, my knees were knocking under the table. I was an alien, like someone from the wild suddenly introduced to civilisation.
At playtime I would stay in the shadows of the stone porches that faced the schoolyard, watching the other children, too shy to step out. Eventually a little kid said, ‘Come on, Barty,’ and I ventured out. My father had bought me marbles so I could play with the other kids and make friends. He was kindhearted, even though he beat me so. We had a hole in the dirt that we played around and you had to get the glass marbles near the hole. I won the game when this lad called Joe Friel kicked all the marbles away and said he had won. He pulled me by the hair. I started fighting and thrashed him, even though he was one of the bullies of the school. From that day on, I was fighting every day.
I often fought boys bigger than me. I once tussled for a mile all the way back from school with a tall lad called Peter Hayward. I would tell these lads I could beat them before we had a fight, and I really believed it – I had been raised to believe I was an invincible Gorman. I was also a teacher’s pet, however. A teacher called Miss Mornian had a lovely redheaded son who tragically died in a road accident. I was the only other redhead in the school, and every time I sat in the class I knew she was looking at me. I’m sure she gave me special affection because I reminded her of her son.
That school was the only place I ever learned anything. I had a good brain and soon picked up the basics of reading; you teach yourself afterwards. But my attendance record was dreadful and I am still a poor speller. The first book I ever read was the Bible. My mother brought a little blue one for six shillings and sixpence from a Catholic church. It was all ‘thous’ and ‘thees’ but I read that Bible every night, often to my parents. It was the only book I had but also the only one I was interested in. I wanted to know where man came from. I didn’t believe in God because my parents told me to; I wanted to find out for myself. Like other kids of the time, I also used to devour the Eagle, Beano and Dandy comics.
Later I would read The Ring Record Book for hours, with the records of all the old boxers. Sam and I had boxing gloves from when we were small and had been brought up around fighters. My dad took me to the gym at Bedworth Labour Club. I was only nine, and shy at first, but eventually I was banging away at the bags and shadow-boxing. Even though I still had not fully recovered from my illness of two years earlier, I started competing as a schoolboy amateur and probably had around twenty fights. Sometimes we were trained by Les Allen, a top-ranked pro middleweight who beat several champions. My father knew Allen and also Randolph Turpin, the world middleweight champion from nearby Leamington Spa. I can remember seeing Turpin when I was a lad, out doing his roadwork.
My father never mellowed. He was the most serious of men, and very moral. ‘You can always tell a trollop because she throws her hair back,’ he used to say. ‘And you can tell a whoremaster because he cleans his shoes on the back of his trousers.’ He used to make me spar with the big lads to toughen me up when I was ten and they were fifteen. I would cry because they were hurting me so much – crying as I was fighting – but I would never give in. I had been brought up with this thing that I could not be beaten.
Dad still hit me nearly every day. I was the boldest bastard in skin and hair and used to say, ‘Give me more.’ One day when I was eleven, and he had beaten me, I sat on the bed and began to cry. My spirit was broken. Dad came and hugged me. Nobody has loved their father more, because he was also the kindest man in the world; he spoilt me and beat me at the same time. But those childhood scars never leave you.
I boxed for my secondary school, Nicholas Chamberlaine, but never learned a thing there. There was the usual name-calling from some of the older boys – ‘gyppo’ and all that – but I soon earned a reputation as a boy who could look after himself. Our Sam got in a fight one day with this lad Gerald Barker and was losing so I climbed onto the dustbins, dived on top of Barker and knocked him out. They took him away and I was ever so worried. I got the cane quite a few times and I was also hit with a plimsoll once by the games master for failing to bring in some football boots; we couldn’t afford them.
When I was twelve, another brother arrived. Our John was born at the hospital in Nuneaton and I carried him out, wrapped in a shawl, in my arms. My mum was forty-five and some of her family actually turned against her for having a child so late in life; they thought it was a bad thing. Outside school we spent hours playing on the bombsites all round Coventry. I also set up a little stall outside Warner’s Yard selling newts and lizards we had caught. With the money, I bought my first gamecock for five shillings. They were happy times. The old photograph men used to come round and take our pictures and I was always pulling faces and poking out my tongue. My dad would look at the pictures, costing twenty-five shillings, and say, ‘Look at him, Katy. Look at the money I’ve wasted on this.’ And he’d rip up the pictures.
My school report from 1957, when I was thirteen, recorded that I was late ‘almost every day’. The headmaster’s comment said I had ‘a dreadful record for punctuality’ and my form master noted, ‘Has at least tried hard this term but has had little or no success.’ I did get an ‘A’ for art – and I wasn’t the worst in the class!
If I had started school earlier and applied myself, who knows how my life would have turned out? I love to read now and to watch documentaries on television. I have a good knowledge of current affairs and can hold my own in any conversation. But there is no doubt that my education was lacking and you do miss out on a lot. Perhaps I would have caught up with the other children at school and become an artist or even a preacher. Perhaps I would have become a professional boxer, even a champion. But I left school at thirteen and never went back. Gypsies grow up quickly. From now on I was a man and would act as such. My path was set.