People in Ireland, I learned, could often be just as prejudiced as the English. We met so few other children from outside the traveller families – mainly the farmers’ children who came to see us when we moved onto a site – so we kept very much to ourselves. Not long after moving back from England my father bought a new caravan – well, new to us anyway – and it had a battery in it that could power a little 12-volt black and white television. Sitting in the trailer watching TV by the side of the road was a great thing.
I was happy going back out on the road. Lots of the sites were familiar to me and I knew where to find little hiding places and where to make dens for myself. I never thought life would change; the most my family ever wanted was a nicer car, a nicer caravan. We’d put up somewhere for the winter and be joined by other families who, like us, would travel the roads during the warmer months but rest up for the colder ones. I liked to see new faces, as much as I loved my family I could also get a little sick of the same old thing every day. Even though I had three brothers and three sisters and we all got on like a house on fire, it was still great when someone new to us was nearby. I loved to see someone different pull in beside us, strangers who might be part of the clan but still people we hadn’t seen for months. For me the great thing was that our games could be more involved because there were more youngsters joining in.
Come the spring the three or four families would each go their separate ways, and we’d move about, never sure who we’d find ourselves alongside for the night. In those days there was never any trouble between the clans; we were always careful, but the times were easier. It was only when travellers started to give up the travelling life that everything started to get more difficult. That began to happen at the end of the 1970s, when the recession hit and there was little or no work, and the only money my family had coming in was the social security. The lack of work hit everyone, not just travellers.
In 1979 I went to the horse fair at Ballinasloe, over in County Galway, with my father; it was a great experience for me but he didn’t enjoy it. My father was the kind of a man who never liked trouble, but there was always trouble at the fairs, so he avoided them if he could. As soon as we saw some fellows picking on each other, trying to provoke a fight, he said, ‘Right, Jimmy, we’re off,’ and that was it. I’ve never been to a horse fair since.
One thing that never really featured highly in my childhood was school. Like most traveller children, what I needed to learn I learned from my father out in the fields and hedgerows. The only point of going to school, as far as travellers were concerned, was to prepare a child for their Holy Communion and Confirmation by learning about religion.
My first school was the primary school in Mullingar run by the Christian Brothers. Travellers weren’t well looked after in school and I discovered it was no different at the one I attended. In the last few years the Christian Brothers’ schools have come in for criticism and I’m right behind what has been said about them. Our teacher, Brother Reagan, was a priest, and what he used to do to the small children in his class was not at all nice. He had a thick black strap, what we called the black taffy, and if he felt you needed it, he’d make you stick out your hand and would whack you hard with it. He would do this to kids as young as 6 years old. We never learned anything from him; we just feared and hated him. Traveller children weren’t expected to learn; we were simply a nuisance as far as Brother Reagan was concerned and he just wanted us to keep quiet and not bother him. We were never sure of what rules he had, so often we’d get the taffy across our hands for what seemed like nothing at all.
I was taken out of the Christian Brothers’ school and sent to the convent school next door. My class was taught by a nun called Sister Mary. She was a saint by comparison with Brother Reagan, but she was as well the loveliest nun I’ve ever met. All the bad feelings I’d started to have about religious people changed completely when I was in her class. Where Brother Reagan was fierce and angry, Sister Mary was very pleasant, and I felt protected by her. Yet I still didn’t learn much with her, always looking forward to being out of the classroom playing.
The school playground was full with my cousins as well as my younger brothers and sisters. One of our cousins, Theresa, was in the class below mine. I didn’t see her again until ten years later on, at my brother’s wedding – and I had to be reminded who she was. Within a few days of that meeting she’d agreed to marry me.
When I’d been at the school for a while I was moved up into the next class and I stopped learning altogether. But my experience wasn’t quite as bad as my brother Paddy’s. He and several cousins, boys from the Joyces and Nevins, as well as our cousin Sammy, all roughly the same age, were put into a pre-fab building by themselves at their school. There were no desks, just a few chairs for them to sit on. ‘Here you go, lads,’ said the teacher, handing them a pack of cards. ‘Keep quiet till break time.’ That was their education, five days a week. On other days, they’d be led into the playground when they arrived in the morning and told to get on with kicking a ball about, but not to make too much noise or they’d disturb the children from settled families, who were all in class learning.
That I never learned much at school wasn’t just down to my being ignored by the teachers, or not caring; it was also because I never stayed in one school long enough. When I’d been at the school in Mullingar for a while, my father came home one night and with absolutely no warning said, ‘I’m moving us to Dundalk.’ We moved the very next day and after we’d settled into our site I was taken into a school in Dundalk, another school run by the Christian Brothers, but much better than the one in Mullingar. No one chased us to find out why I wasn’t at school; the school I had been at had no contact with us, as we had no phone and no forwarding address. No one came round to the site to see if there were any children who should be at school; the system wasn’t interested in forcing traveller children to attend school. Why should it be? We weren’t going to be doing anything with what we learned; we would be out in the fields long before the other children would be just starting to study for their exams. Travellers wouldn’t use what they might have learned because they didn’t get jobs that needed an education. That was the attitude people had then. Maybe the authorities also knew that the reason I was going to school was for what I would be given – free uniform and free shoes.
All I could tell my new teachers about what I’d learned was where I went to school and what class I had been in. I couldn’t remember what I’d learned and I still couldn’t read or write, so whenever I started a new school I was always put into the first class. They never asked me, who was your teacher, how far did you go through the school? Whatever picture books I’d been given were gone, left behind, and that was one of the main reasons my reading and writing never improved. No one at the school ever tried – as far as I know – to contact the previous schools to see what records about me they had. The teachers at each new school seemed to think it was ‘easier if we start again, James’. Which meant I never made any progress.
The time that most upset me was when I was taken aside at school and asked about my family. I didn’t know what the teacher was getting at until she used the word ‘adopted’. I couldn’t work out