Practising the Act September 16, 2008

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

Traveller Diplomacy September 16, 2008

Ireland was a divided country, with clearly marked differences between north and south. In the north, tension simmered, but it was still English territory. The south gained its freedom in the year of my birth, and was fiercely proud of that. There is a strong competitive spirit inn the Irish, and Dad found that that one way to arouse interest in our travelling show was to provide a shooting gallery.

Shooting contests with air rifles were always popular, and every year dad would buy some small silver cups from a shop in Dublin, to present to the local who got the highest score over the week.
At one small village, this simple little shooting contest became a source of fierce rivalry between two brothers, sworn enemies, who every night tried to outshoot each other. There promised to be mayhem, which ever of them won the cup.

So Dad took himself off to Dublin one morning and bought another cup, the same as the one he was offering. He diplomatically declared the contest a tie, and presented a cup to each brother. They were well pleased, and war was averted for that year, at least.

War, on another scale entirely, was on everyone’s mind, and not the recent unpleasantness of World War II. That had nothing to do with the Irish (unless they were foolish enough to have become involved in it, like my dad). The only war that mattered in Ireland had been going on for centuries. “The bhoys’’, as they called the IRA, sometimes turned up at the shooting gallery, eager to pay the small fee for target practice, and in strongly anti-English areas, mum had to pretend to be dumb, rather than take the risk of opening her mouth and creating havoc with her Cockney accent.

Her own mother was a fervid royalist and, after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, sent my mother a souvenir parcel. She sent it care of Dublin Post Office, where we collected our mail, and in the middle of the street, my mother eagerly opened the parcel to see what was inside.

“It’s a dress!’’ she cried with delight, and lifted it out of the brown paper to see it better.

A dress, certainly, but one patterned all over with the red, white and blue of the Union Jack.

We left town in a hurry.

Where it begins May 12, 2008

ALL storytelling must start somewhere. Mine starts in Dalkey, a seaside town on the west coast of Ireland. I am around three years old, so it must be 1949 – I am standing beside a pram, watching fascinated as a glossy wet sweet pops out of the chest of a small baby.
“He has a hole in his chest, see?” the baby’s older brother, a child of about my own age, plucks off the sweet morsel glistening on the sticky front of the baby’s grubby woollen jumper. “He can’t swallow nothin’. It just comes out his chest.”
“Do it again,” I said.
The boy pops the sweet back in the baby’s mouth, and a moment later, there it is again, glistening with saliva.
The boy and his brother were Settled People, or Stone People, as I called them. They lived in houses of stone, every detail of their lives etched in stone, ending up in graves with headstones marking where they lay.
I was a traveller. Our days passed unrecorded, and sometimes our deaths too. It was the storytelling that was our calendar, our book of days.
“Wasn’t that the year the tent blew down at Fermanagh?” someone would say and everyone else would remember, or someone else would say, “no, it was the time young Jimmy caught the big salmon in his good clothes,” and the storytelling would begin.
The Travelling People died and were buried at various places, they married and had their children and that was also somewhere along the way. It might have been Ireland, England or Scotland. But we were not Irish, or English, or Scottish. We were Travellers. We belonged everywhere and nowhere.
These people, the boy and his baby brother, belonged here in Dalkey. They would grow up here, marry, probably die and be buried in Dalkey. They might never even see Dublin, or Cork, or any place outside of Dalkey. That made them endlessly fascinating to me.
And this boy told a good tale, but I didn’t believe a word of it. He was an amateur magician, a clever boy with some sleight of hand, but not good enough to fool me. My dad was a stage magician too, a real one.
The sweet popping out of the baby’s chest is the earliest conscious memory that I have. It was also the beginning of my fascination with the Stone People, I think.
The house, where the boy and his baby brother lived, had a deep yard behind it, where travellers camped in Dalkey. It was a rough tober, but one we used frequently.
Tober was the word we used for campground. It’s a Gaelic word that means a well, a waterhole. Water was the most important thing to a traveller, so I suppose this the reason for using that word. There were other words for a campground, like the one the gipsies used, hatchintan. We travellers spoke a mixture of traveller languages, a sort of secret code amongst ourselves. Any attempt for an outsider – a josser, a diddikai, a flattie, a giorgio – to learn the Traveller language was doomed to fail, as we changed it all the time, switching between tongues to keep it secret from the Settled People.
But I could not stay away from them. They had histories, roots, constancy – I had stories, vague memories of people who came and went through my young life like ghosts, some of them.
My father laughed when I told him about the baby.
“You know it’s a trick,” he said. “Like the tricks I do in the show.”
Yes, I knew it was a trick – but I had almost hoped it might be true, and that it would tell me something about the Settled People, who must be magic to be able to stay in one place so long.

The Doll’s Pram May 12, 2008

A campground in Ireland !940s

Day after day I hungered for it. My footsteps slowed as we passed the shop window, my arm stretching as I dragged my mother to a halt.

It stood right in the middle of the shop window, gleaming blue and silver, shaped like a small boat, with a silky hood and lining.

“She really wants that doll’s pram,” I heard my mother whisper after she had put me to bed.

“We’ll see,” my father replied, and that was as good as a promise.

As my birthday approached, my excitement grew. The pram had disappeared from the shop window, and I was certain it was already mine.

While my mother hung out the washing next to the caravan, she watched me working on my house. I had been building it for days, laying out discarded bricks for the walls, and making little rooms for my dolls and teddy bears. I already had the kitchen and one bedroom finished. I got the bricks from a shed that had been demolished on the campgound, and the house was furnished with things I had scrounged, old chairs, a rickety table, a rug my mother had been planning to throw out. I intended to cover the house with branches, like a bower or a thatched cottage.

My mother worried about me. She would have preferred me to enjoy more sedate and ladylike pastimes than mucking about with bricks and home made mud mortar. But from the day I could walk I have been a nest builder.

My birthday dawned, and I scrambled out of bed, eager to unwrap my presents. My mother had made a knitted suit for my favorite bear, and of course, there were books. My parents were great believers in books for children.

After breakfast, my father took me outside and there was the pram, gleaming in the sunshine. I wheeled it up and down, reveling in the smooth gliding motion. It was so light and easy to push.
My mother produced a pram quilt and pillow she had made and set one of my dolls in the pram with them. She was beaming, plainly happy that at last I was behaving like a proper little girl.

She was sitting on the back step shelling peas when I next sailed past with the pram. She glanced up and smiled at me, then went back to her work.

Ten minutes later, I passed her again, and she was shaking the pea shells into a bucket for the compost.

Ten minutes later, when I again went past with the pram, she said, “My, your dolly is getting a lot of exercise.”

As evening fell, my father came home and stopped to see how my house was progressing.

“Where did all these bricks come from?” he said. “You must have been working hard today.”

My mother came out and shook her head at me. “Look at you, covered in mud again. I hope your new pram is still clean.”

Then they both looked at my new pram, standing proudly outside my house.

And they both saw that it was full of bricks

The Swingboats April 20, 2008

The traveller’s creed is a simple one – if you can’t afford to buy something, do without, or make it yourself. The latter course was the one most often taken.

These swingboats were built by my father when he came back from WWII and took his new bride to Ireland for the first time. They proved, in his words, a `handy earner’ when circus work was hard to get. I was about six months old in this picture, which was originally black and white, but which I colorised to give more of an impression of the work that went into those swinging boats. Each pole in the support, and each boat, was hand carved and painted. This was what the public expected back then, not something mass produced in a factory, but showing all the traveller’s skill and art.

Travellers Three April 20, 2008

Taken in 1949, this picture shows Little Beaver and Marie, my parents, and me at a fairground near Dublin. I am riding my new prize possession, a three wheeler bike. In the background you can see the wooden swinging boats my dad built, and his prize possession, a Packard tourer painted red and yelow (circus colours).

How We Made Potato Ice Cream April 19, 2008

have an idea how we can make a bit o’cash,” my grandmother said.
Kavanagh ears pricked up like alert puppies. It had been a tough season. The Kavanagh Touring Theatre and Musical Comedy Show had barely been making enough to pay for the trip to the next town.

So “the bhoys”, as my grandmother affectionately called her four strapping sons, who were the mainstay performers of the show, were eager to hear any suggestions.

“We need to sell somethin’ in the interval, like them moving pictures do,” grandmother said. “We could sell ice cream.”

The expectant looks turned blank. If moving pictures were a new thing to rural Ireland in the postwar days, so was ice cream. I climbed down off my father’s knee (he was the oldest of the four brothers) and wriggled closer to my grandmother. In all my few years of life, I had never tasted ice cream, but I had seen other, richer kids eating it and it looked delicious. “How are we going to make ice cream?” one of my uncles objected. “You need a great factory for that.”

“Leave it to me,” my grandmother said. “You go to Dublin and get me some of those ice cream cornet things.”

So my uncle took the small amount of money my grandmother gave and set off up the road to Dublin. It wasn’t very far. (In Ireland, nowhere was very far unless you went “across the water”).

Now in the backblocks of Glockamorra in the post-WWII years, there were shortages of just about everything…except potatoes.

My grandmother’s fertile mind had already figured out a way to make ice cream. Mashed potatoes were fluffy, white and if you left them long enough, cold.

Long into the night, grandmother had the family scrubbing, peeling, boiling, straining and mashing potatoes. “It’s like being back in the army,” my father grumbled.

But she soon had mounds of fluffy white spud, to which she added a few drops of vanilla and some sugar. It really did look like ice cream. I clamoured for a taste, but grandmother shook her head.

“If we make enough money out of this, I’ll buy you a real ice cream,” she said.

My uncle got back from Dublin with a dusty carton of ice cream cornets.

“I searched the whole town and this is all I could find,” he said. “Your man said they were a bit stale but he let me have them cheap.”

“Never mind,” grandmother said, unpacking the cone-shaped biscuits. “They’ll do.”

“ice cream” was piled into metal buckets and taken to a nearby stream. With the fresh spring water chilling the buckets, the ice cream would be nicely chilled by showtime. The are where the tent was pitched was outside the town, and had been quiet most of the day. But by showtime a sizeable crowd had gathered, mostly farmers with their wives and children.
My parents, and my uncles, changed into their stage costumes and the show started. I sat in my usual spot in the audience. My job was to be a “gee” for the audience participation segment of the show, running up on stage to encourage others if the local children were too shy to move. But this was a good crowd and didn’t need any encouragement to enjoy themselves.

I watched my grandmother instead. She had set up a table near the stage, and was busy pinning a sign to it that said “Ice Cream Cornets Twoppence”.

In the interval she stood proubly at her stall dishing out the scoops of “ice cream”, which sold like hot cakes. By the time the interval was over, the buckets, and the carton of cornets, was empty. My grandmother was beaming, because her apron was full of pennies.

There was not even enough left in the buckets for me to have a lick. I wandered sadly out of the tent and hoped grandmother would not forget her promise now she had all those pennies to spend.

Next morning, one of my uncles came knocking on the caravan door.

“Come and look at this,” he said to my father. We followed him out to the tent.

Under every seat was a small, neat mound of potato ice cream. ”Will ye look at that,” my uncle said, grinning. “That stuff tasted so bad they preferred to eat the stale cornet by itself. We’d better pack up and leave, man, before they come looking for their pennies!”

I couldn’t resist…I had to dip my small finger into a mound of the discarded “ice cream” to taste it.”

It tasted just like cold mashed potato with vanilla and sugar.

April 19, 2008

IWhen was very young, the radio was the major source of home entertainment. It provided music, comedy, drama, current affairs and childrens’ programming – the way cable and the Net does today.

The container all this magic came in was a small brown box made of a plastic called Bakelite. It had an on/off switch, a volume control and a station finder. That was all. But I couldn’t have imagined life without it.

When we were travelling, the radio was my link to another world. Sitting on its shelf in the wagon (caravan) it opened a door for me into the lives of the “settled people”, the people who did not travel with shows, fairs and circuses, but lived in the houses in the towns we visited.

I had no idea how they lived in real life, because we rarely stopped anywhere long enough for me to make friends with them. But radio comedies and dramas told me that they were a lot like us in many ways – except that they never hitched up their homes and moved them on from place to place.

My favourite show was a morning children’s program called Listen With Mother. It was a half hour show comprising songs, stories and games, an introduced by a woman with a sickeningly sweet voice who always said – “Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin…”

Some of the stories featured two teddy bears called Tingha and Towser, and while I can’t recall much about the stories, the names stick because I called my first teddy bear Tingha.

I got him for Chrismas, on a freezing morning when my dad was digging snow away from the caravan wheels and my mother was heating up the stove to cook Christmas dinner. We had recently acquired a portagas stove (it was called Calor Gas in those days) and she was determined to give it a workout with the traditional turkey and pudding. My father had bought a new tank of gas the day before – he didn’t want it running out halfway through cooking!

I unwrapped my presents on my bunk bed and the first one I opened contained a small teddy bear with shiny blond fur. He looked exactly as the stories had described Tingha so that became his name. He sat by my side through Christmas dinner, which had turned out well.

Tingha went everywhere with me in a small carrycot, wrapped in a blanket against the cold weather, or sitting up to watch the world go by in fine weather. But like me, he was an Only…until couple of Christmases later when I was given another bear, a larger brown bear with a grumpy expression.

This, of course, was Towser. Both bears are very old now. Their eyes have been replaced several times and they are covered with bald patches. In spite of constant repairs, their stuffing leaks out and they look as if they have lived full lives. Well, they have.

These bears were my constant companions. Everywhere we traveled, the bears were the first things to be paced. They came with me to Spain, Scandinavia and South Africa; they traveled to Australia twice and went around the world twice. They have been stuffed into trunks, shopping bags and tea chests. They have traveled on trains and boats, they have covered enormous distances.

In recent years, they have rested at the home of my mother, who gave up traveling when my father died. But now they are home with me again, and have moved house at least twice since. I like to think they enjoy the change of scenery as much as I do. Maybe the old traveling days have gone, but that doesn’t mean we have to stand still!

Working for Your Bread and Butter April 19, 2008

In a tent that would hardly be regarded as a backyard marquee today, the Kavanagh and McCourtney Company would put on a show that included magic acts, musical numbers and a full length drama production.
They toured Ireland between the wars, putting up the tent in small towns and villages and playing to packed houses in the days before TV.

Even movies couldn’t put the tent shows out of business. They bought second hand equipment and took silent movies to the provinces as part of cine-variety shows.

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in one of these tents, watching fascinated as moths fluttered around the sputtering oil lamps hanging from the rigging.

Only now, in retrospect, do I marvel at the dangerous combination of canvas and the naked flame, the marvellous thing being that there was never a fire.

Then I marvelled at the flickering patterns the hissing lamps made on the stretched canvas overhead, while a rapt audience wallowed in the harrowing adventures of the characters in “Little Grey Home in the West’ and “The Red Barn”. “The Red Barn” was an especial favourite with Irish audiences. It told the tragic tale of an unwed teenage mother, murdered in the red barn of the title.

My grandmother’s personal favourite was “Little Grey Home in the West”, where she got to play the dear old mother who sits at home and spins while she waits for her prodigal son’s return.

I got to make my stage debut in one of these plays, the title long forgotten – but the plot involved a warring marital couple who eventually make peace. In my scene, I played their little girl, who ties their hands together with a ribbon to seal their reunion.There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

The audiences knew the lines as well as the actors, even better on some occassions. If an actor dried up, there would be a furtive prompt from the audience.

The patrons were often poor farmers or village people with no money to offer for admittance. But show people were happy to accept eggs, butter or bread in lieu of cash.

A dozen beautiful warm eggs straight out from under the hen could ensure a whole family the best seats in the house, and the hungry show people a supper that night.

And at least, that way, they couldn’t throw the eggs if they didn’t like the show.