In 1946, when I was born, Cobh was still called Queenstown. It was a jumbled collection of narrow houses and cobbled streets, leaning over the harbour like a pack of tipsy sailors. American ships often called there, eagerly awaited by the girls of Queenstown, who made a few bob on the side from the love starved sailors. Money was always in short supply, but the girls had to be careful – one sailor tipped his `date’ a penny wrapped in silver paper instead of the customary half a crown. She took her sad tale back to her father and brothers and they set out to find the miscreant and do justice, though not for dallying with the girl’s maidenhead – being cheated out of two shillings and fivepence was a serious business.

I was born in the area known as `The Holy Ground’. Once, centuries ago, it had been the site of a monastery, but the things that went on there in 1946 were hardly monastic. There was even a song about it, a bawdy old shanty my uncles sang to me when I got older.
I was born in a house on Chapel St. My mother refused to go to the local hospital because it was staffed with nuns and they had a bad reputation. She had heard all about the young girls beaten for their sins and made to scrub floors for penance – married or not, it seemed to make no difference to the nuns.

My mother took to her new life with as much grit as she could muster. Bridget was not happy to see the first of her precious sons married, and to one of the Settled People, at that.

The Kavanagh boys had a reputation as larrikins and scallywags, but they were seen as hard men, too, and messing with them was not in anyone’s best interests. They loved boats and once stole the sheets off of Bridget’s washing line to rig up sails on a rowing boat, which they sailed up the river to Cork.

Seeing the four handsome lads swaggering about Cork Harbour in their thick oily fishermen’s jumpers and sea boots, some local girls fluttered their eye lashes and asked them what ship they were on.

“Oh, the Black Hawk, down in the harbour,’’ my Uncle Gerry said grandly, indicating the masts of tall vessels massed at the dock.

After a grand time in town they set off for home in the `Black Hawk’, and the only storm they met was when the Kavanagh women saw the state of their sheets.

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.

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’.

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.

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

Yes, there really was such a place - the Wigan Casino. The band actually consisted of a pianist and a guitarist, besides the dummer. Yes, he looks bored. Asked once why he didn’t even change his deadpan expression when there was a stripper on stage, he uttered the immortal words: “When you’ve seen two, you’ve seen ‘em all.”

This little black Himalayan bear, whose cage was next next to our caravan in Guernsey, belonged to the circus owners. He was a very charming little fellow, just a baby really, and he enjoyed our scraps and left overs.

But he really wasn’t in the best place to grow up - at the prospect of moving him into a larger cage, the owners decided to sell him instead. he became a popular attraction at Gerald Durrell’s Jersey Zoo, which was just opened in 1959, the year we were in the Channel Isles.

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.

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).

When it became necessary for me to create my own circus act, I ran into a difficulty unusual among circus children. I was scared of heights. Added to this the fact that I was not very talented at the normal things, like tight rop walking and juggling, that left me with few choices as a performer.
But luckily, in Spain, I ran into a retired roller balancer who had taken up clowning after an accident. He taught me his old act, and gave me his original props, a roller and a balance board, and some hoops, which you can see in the picture above. Thanks to this kind man, I quickly learned an act that brought me a lot of work, een if I wasn’t the most daring or inspired roller balancer of all time.
I had to put in many hours of practice, in shady spots about the bullrings where the circus was camped.