Dad was a born performer. He loved to sing, and he could pick up almost any instrument and learn it quickly – hence the guitar and the banjo. But his dream was to have the best `speciality’ act in the world. A speciality act was something unique. Anyone can pick up a guitar, or learn a few magic tricks. It was not enough for Dad to do what other men found easy. He wanted to be unique – or, as he later billed himself, “the world’s foremost sharpshooter.’’
As a boy he had learned to use a bow and arrow, and a whip – the army had refined his sharpshooting skills. He was always creating, inventing, designing – he had a pile of sketchbooks in which he drew his designs and diagrams, executing them with the precision of a draftsman. Right now his sketchbook was full of Native American designs, warbonnets, costumes and `props’ – a totem pole, a large drum, a six-foot high wooden target board with chevrons painted around the edge. These things would not have meant anything to anyone who didn’t know that he was planning his unique speciality act.
During this period he learned to make Sioux war bonnets and beadwork on a loom. I’m not sure how he learned to make the war bonnets. I think he studied pictures of them in detail, or perhaps he found a book somewhere with instructions. He was very insistent that I learn to read, even though he was not bothered if I ever went to school. Once you learn to read, he said, you can find out anything you want to know. Someone, somewhere, will have written a book about it. He taught himself to read as a boy, with some help from literate people he met along the way. Anything he could not learn just by doing it or watching someone else, like fishing, or fixing motors, he taught himself out of books.
Yet he had no time for reading in a general way. My mother loved reading for its own sake, and devoured at least one novel a day. Dad found a world of education in books, but never entertainment.
He made everything himself. He made our first home, buying a second hand ambulance with darkened windows and fitting it out as a motor home. He liked the darkened windows because the Irish were not shy about peering in to see how traveller folk lived.
The interior had an area partitioned off for their bed, cupboards and seating. I slept on the seating at night with the dog, Moffy. She was a lean black greyhound acquired by Dad after he came home from the war. She was acknowledged to be one of the best rabbit dogs in Ireland, catching them herself without any supervision, and bringing home the clean kill to be skinned and cooked.
He built in a small desk into the ambulance, mainly for his sketchbooks, and so he would have a place to work at his beadwork and war bonnet making. He bought bag loads of feathers and beads, and leather thronging, and sat up late at night making costumes for the act. I pretended to be asleep, but really I was watching him bent over his work by the light of the Aladdin lamp, deep in concentration.
Was his father an American or Canadian Indian as my grandmother claimed? I never doubted it as a child, for his brooding face with its hatchet nose seemed to come out of an old illustration or sepia photograph of an Indian chief.
And from where else came this utter fascination with the culture, this astonishing ability to learn the crafts just by studying pictures of them? He bunched the feathers together, large turkey feather, smaller chicken feather, two fluffy marabou feathers (the kind elegant ladies wore on their hats) and bound them neatly with leather thongs. Then when he had a pile of them made, he strung them with leather thongs to a cap of leather and held them in place next to each other with the fine thread he used for beadwork, so that when he had finished, the feathers stood up from the cap like a crown.
It was like one of his magic tricks – I knew how it was done, yet still there was a kind of wonder in it when the feathers stood up.
The act was the reason we moved from Ireland to England. Dad’s dream was to work in theatres and variety shows and there was
