Marie May 12, 2008

One day in 1944, Little Beaver, now officially considered `the worst disciplined soldier in the British Army’, announced to his Commanding Officer that he was getting married.
“God help the girl,” the CO said.
The girl’s mother was thinking much the same thing. Jessica Woodruff, of Clapton Park, London, had woken up one morning to find a tank transporter parked in the narrow suburban street outside her neat terraced house. Dad had been ordered to take the load from Edinburgh to Glasgow and had `detoured’ along the way to call on his sweetheart.

The transporter Jess Woodruffe found on her doorstep

Maree Woodruff was just 17 when she met Patrick Little Beaver Kavanagh. An adopted child herself, she knew neither birth mother nor father. She did not find out until 60 years later that her name was Bacon, and she was the daughter of William Bacon and Hilda Ferry. William and Hilda were not married at the time of Maree’s birth, and Hilda was forced to give up her child.
Maree grew up with Jessica and Edward Woodruff in the suburbs of London and Pitsea. The Woodruffs were a kindly, quiet couple. Unable to have children of her own, Jessica made a career of fostering children from all walks of life, and all cultures, but only managed to keep two of them for her own, Maree, and Maree’s younger sister Sylvia. She clung to Maree jealously, especially when her birth mother tried to get her back. The Woodruffs kept moving, although Maree didn’t know it at the time, to stay one step ahead of Hilda, who was now married to William and had a son. Although Hilda had no legal recourse to take back her child, she never gave up trying to find her.
Maree knew nothing of this – she was raised as Jessica Woodruff’s daughter and when this devoutly religious woman, who belonged to every known Christian organisation, including the Salvation Army, met my dad for the first time, she must have thought the devil himself had come to spirit her gentle girl away.
Edward Woodruff took to the scruffy young man at once, but Jessica remained forever wary and suspicious of him. Finding a huge semi articulated rig stretching from one end of the street to the other, with a tank sitting on it, outside her door, did nothing to win her over.
But for my mother, she was conquered, won and surrendered at first sight.
She hadn’t been out in the world for long. She had a job at Rossi’s, a favourite canteen with the Armed Forces when they were in London, serving behind the counter.
She must have caught many eyes besides my dad’s. A tall, slender girl with film star legs, she wore her dark curls in a flirty cut, and had a natural grace that anyone who grew up in show business would notice at once.
When Patrick Little Beaver Kavanagh walked into Rossi’s, she had never seen such a scruffy soldier. His beret was askew, his shirt unbuttoned, he had an air of not giving a damn what anyone thought of him.
But it was his face that caught her attention. He looked like a proud eagle and he strode across Rossi’s canteen floor like it was a prairie.
He ordered a cup of tea, and gave her a close, but discreet, scrutiny, just as she was giving him.
“Would you do something for me?” he asked. Then, seeing that she was startled, he pulled a crumpled envelope out of his pocket. “I’m shipping out tonight, could you post a letter for me?”
The letter was addressed to Cobh in Ireland, but he didn’t sound Irish. In fact, she didn’t know what he sounded like, but his voice had a pleasant timbre, rich and warm.
“All right,” she said.
“I’ll pay for it.” He pulled a ten shilling note out of his pocket, far too much for the postage. She protested but he shoved it across the counter at her.
“I’ll have your change for you when you come back,” she said.
Many young soldiers came and went at Rossi’s, and some were never seen again. It was sad, but it was war. Maree posted his letter, and put away the change in her coat pocket. She hoped he would return, but she didn’t really expect that he would.
But some time later, he walked into Rossi’s and up to the counter and asked for a cup of tea, and Maree positively beamed. She hurried to fetch her coat and gave him his change.
He stared at it in surprise.
“You kept it all this time?” he said.
“Yes, of course. It’s yours.”
That, as my father told it, was the moment he decided to marry her. It was all very well to be charmed by film star legs, wavy dark hair and fascinating blue-green eyes, but an honest woman is hard to find.
The romance proceeded as war time romances do, taking place in snatched moments between battles. Pretty young Maree Woodruff became bespoke, as they said in London, and carried his picture as she went about her daily life.
When he proposed, he didn’t make promises he would not be able to keep.
“If it’s a cottage in the country with roses over the door you’re looking for,” he said, “I’m not your man. I’m a traveller, and I will never settle down. But I want you with me, if you’ll have me.”
Of course, she said yes.

The `Wild Man’s’ Son May 12, 2008

Little Beaver in the 60s

My father was tall and lean and fierce. People said he looked like an eagle with his hawk nose and hooded eyes. He had a slow, twanging voice with an accent that was hard to place. It wasn’t Irish, or English – no one could guess where he came from. He had a tattoo on his chest, a deep blue eagle with wings spread, and a ribbon scroll underneath with some strange words in a language few people knew. The words meant King of the Tober. A gipsy had tattooed him many years before, and it was a kind of badge, that gained him entry and respect at any Romany campground. It worked as far afield as Spain and Australia, something any Romany knew by sight.
But he was not a Rom, although he was a Rom Brother, beloved by them and accepted into their private society.
“Never judge a man by what he says, or what he looks like,” he told me. “A ragged man can be a king, a good man doesn’t waste his time with fine words. Watch what he does.”
His hair was long, down past his shoulders, a fashion unknown in Ireland at the time. Usually he piled it on top of his head and hid it under his old British Army beret. It was the same one he had worn through five years and six months of World War II. He also wore a flying jacket he had acquired in trade with a Canadian airman. This jacket had actually saved his life some months before when he was working on a truck motor.
Dad had been fixing on a fan belt, when the man helping him started the motor too soon. The fan blades swept into action, and one of them sliced through the leather jacket into his arm.
“Maire, Maire,” one of the men called urgently. “Beaver’s had a bad accident.”
My mother’s name was Maree, but they called her Maire, in the Irish manner. She was cooking stew in the caravan, fighting with the little kerosene stove that she used for cooking. She gathered me up and ran outside, imagining all sorts of horrors. Dad was holding the pieces of severed flesh together with his free hand and there was enough blood to sicken a vampire.
The doctor at the hospital stitched up the arm, and told my father that if he hadn’t been wearing the sheepskin lined flying jacket, his arm would surely have been cut off.
He didn’t let the arm bother him. When he got home he finished fixing the fan belt and had the swing boats and the tent packed for our next move.
Except for his five and a half years in the British Army, my dad had known no other life but that of a traveller. He was born in London in 1916, the result of a short lived union between my grandmother Bridget Mitchell and an allied soldier. We knew hardly anything about my grandfather and my father remembered very little about the man who had disappeared when he was two years old.
This man, whom the Kavanagh and Mitchell families called `the wild one’, disappeared in 1918, never returning from the killing fields of Europe. Whether he died, or simply went home without bothering to call in on his young wife and son, no one knew. It was said he was an American Indian, and didn’t hold with convention.
Bridget herself was the only child of the British bare knuckle boxing champion title holder and world champion contender Charles Mitchell.

Boxer Charlie Mitchell

My dad had not inherited much of Mitchell’s looks, but he was a lithe scrapper like his grandfather and had the same ability to end a fight with one crushing punch. Bridget was a tiny feisty woman, who ruled over her family. She had married again, to traveller Patrick Kavanagh, and it is from him that we get our name. My dad had three half brothers, Hugh, Henry and Gerald, and a half sister, Margaret, known to everyone as Peggy.
Patrick Kavanagh was a member of the Kavanagh and McCourt Players. This outfit put on melodramas and variety shows in a tent all across Ireland and the UK before the wars. They were travellers who made their living as strolling players, buskers and hawkers, and all the young Kavanaghs were performers.
If his father truly was an American Indian, and if he had been born on the Plains instead of London, my dad’s life would not have been very different. The travellers lived off the land, camped under the stars, and turned their horses loose at night to graze. My father slept out with the horses and rose early to round them up before the farmers found out the horses had been grazing in their fields.
His life was unremittingly hard. He lived with the `prads’ and `grys’, as the travellers called horses, and at an age when other children were learning to read and write, he was performing in the tent show, playing the guitar and banjo, and working as hard as any man.
He never forgot that he was different, that his father came from some other place. He grew his hair long, and made himself a bow and arrows, which he learned to shoot. His targets were mostly rabbits. His grandmother had imparted some more family lore on the `wild man’, and showed him a photograph of a man on a paint horse, surrounded by cattle.
“That’s your father,” she said. “He was a wild Indian, one of them Apaches.”
Apparently the Wild Man had named his small son Little Beaver, because he was always busy building things. Dad kept this name as he grew up, kept it jealously for his own, even though he had been adopted by Patrick Kavanagh and renamed after him. He was originally christened Charles, after his grandfather.
He wanted to live as an Indian. Fortunately for him, there is a great deal of similarity between the American Indian and traveller cultures. He rode bareback, used his bow and arrow, learned to master a rifle, and soon earned himself the name of `the Wild One’.

Little Beaver Kavanagh, 1916-81 April 19, 2008

My father used to tell me tales of life when he was a “chavvie”, traveller lingo for child.
Those were the days of horse drawn wagons, and travelling tent shows that combined comedy, drama and circus acts.

His first job of the day was to round up the horses. They were never tethered at night, but let loose to graze. Travellers couldn’t afford hay.

A lean, foreign looking boy, he would wander over the nearbuy fields until he tracked them all down, pushing them in the direction of the campsite.

They knew where to go, he said. No matter how far they had wandered in the night, they knew the way back to camp.

By the time he got back, the campfire was lit and breakfast was cooking.

He never made it sound romantic. The life was hard, and the family often went hungry. He grew up learning to live off the land, catching rabbits, gathering dandelion leaves for greens and jumping into icy cold streams when the salmon ran, to catch dinner with his bare arms.

But the freedom of that life is unimaginable to us today. He was free to travel anywhere, free to learn from nature’s ways.

All his life he cherished this freedom he had known as a chavvie. As the world became ever smaller, he travelled further, going to places his elders had only imagined.

But he found that while the ability to travel where you pleased became more efficient, the freedom to travel where you pleased became more restricted.

He often found the modern world a difficult place. Raised in freedom, he had to learn to live within society’s strict boundaries.

My father, Little Beaver Kavanagh, half wild traveller, half Apache Indian, died in Australia in July 1981.

Twenty years ago he gathered his last strength for a great journey. I hope he found his freedom again.