Knuckle

Chapter 1

BORN A TRAVELLER

Growing up, this fighting thing never came into my mind. I never thought either about being a policeman, being a solicitor, being a fireman – none of those. I was a traveller, and they weren’t things that I would even have thought of doing with my life. I would do what travellers did. That was the only path open to me.

I was born in County Westmeath in 1967. For my first few years I lived with my grandfather, Auld Daddy, my mother, older brother Curly Paddy and older sister Bridgie, all of us in an old-fashioned barrel-top wagon, the kind pulled by horses. The main bed was inside at the back of the wagon, and there was a little stove to keep us warm and a box for the bread. To keep me safe when I was a baby while he slept, my grandfather would loop a bit of rope around my middle and tie the other end around his ankle. If I tried to crawl off, the rope would tug and he’d wake up.

Auld Daddy had two horses, one to tow the wagon, the other to breed from, so we could sell the foals. We wouldn’t sleep in the wagon, not us kids anyway; we would sleep under the wagon, or at the side of the road in a ‘tent’ made of branches from the hedges. The dogs would sleep anywhere they could; they weren’t pets, they were working dogs. My mother would cook on an open fire, and she’d wash our clothes with water from the river. In the summertime, when it was warm, we’d sit by the fire and we’d sing songs and be told stories of Irish myths from many years ago. The story-teller, usually Auld Daddy, would tell us ghost stories about the banshees, to frighten us off to bed.

We’d sleep in the tent, in straw that the farmer would give us when we arrived. My mother would shake it all up, spread the blanket out, and I’d climb in. I’d wrap the blanket round me and as I sank into the straw it would just fall around me. It was like a big quilt, nice and warm on a cold night.

To an outsider it might have looked romantic, a simple life like that, but it wasn’t, it was very hard. In the summer it might have looked the same as a nice camping trip but if you go camping you only go for a few days and then come home, whereas we were living like that all year round. In the winter it was a very harsh life. Rural Ireland was poor then and travellers were the poorest of the poor. In those days travellers lived off the land, making things like clothes pegs that could be sold door to door and at the markets, and from the seasonal work farmers would give them, such as picking spuds in the autumn. We had to beg for clothes from the local families, the settled people. We had no other way of getting basics of that sort.

I was born when my father was in England. He’d travelled over there for work, got mixed up in some trouble, and ended up in prison. If years back a man was in jail or away working, his wife would go back to her family, so my mother went back to her father, and he looked after her. The first time my father saw me I was 2½ years old.

My father was Jimmy Quinn, son of Mikey Quinn. Those names go through the generations: I’m James Quinn, it’s my son’s name, and my grandson’s name, and before Mikey came Martin, and before him was Mickey McDonagh. Mickey married a woman called Judy Caffrey and together they had five sons and five daughters. Mickey’s mother was one of three sisters known as ‘the Long Tails’ for the dresses they wore. All these names I grew up with around the fire; there was nothing written down about our family and stories like those, about these memorable dresses, only survive because they were passed on. Travellers’ lives were mostly just hidden away in history. Mickey’s son Martin was my great-grandfather and he went on to have five sons as well. His wife was a Joyce, Winnie Joyce, and her brother Patsy married Martin’s sister, linking the Joyces and the Quinn McDonaghs together right through to this day. One of my grandfather’s brothers also had several children, among them Padnin Quinn, Davey ‘Minor Charge’ Quinn, and Cowboy Quinn – and my mother. The Nevins also married into the family back in those generations – so we’re all related, even if we do feud with each other.

There is a Quinn connection going back a long way, even though we’re the Quinn McDonaghs. I never knew why we always made such a thing of the ‘Quinn’ part and didn’t really pay much attention to the ‘McDonagh’ bit, but I was told two versions of the story when I was growing up. Both involve Mickey McDonagh coming back into a camp, chased by the police. One version says it was because he was running from them after stealing something, the other says it was because he didn’t want to be conscripted into the British Army for the First World War. Either way, when the police came into the camp and discovered there were five Michael McDonaghs on the site, he was asked, ‘Are you Mickey McDonagh?’, to which he said ‘Me? No, I’m Michael Quinn,’ taking his mother’s maiden name (Abigail Quinn was another of the Long Tail sisters), and from then on the Quinn McDonagh name was used.

My uncle Michael was known as Chappy; my uncle Martin was known as Buck; my uncle Kieran was known as Johnny Boy. Most of the time I never knew why some people had the nicknames they had, but even as children we all knew why my father’s cousin Bullstail Collins was called Bullstail and not Martin Collins. One day he was standing by a farmer’s gate and the bull in the field was scratching his arse against the fence. Martin Collins decided to tie his tail onto the gate and hit him with the stick. The bull went and the tail stayed – and that’s why he’s always known as Bullstail.

When I was growing up my dad travelled with his family round the area of Ireland we lived in, and when I was a little boy I loved to hear their stories. My father grew up with seven brothers and five sisters, and with all those mouths to feed everyone had to contribute. (Large families were a feature of traveller life, and my sister married a man with twenty-two brothers and sisters. My own wife Theresa has seventeen uncles and aunts.) In the 1940s and 1950s life on the roads was very, very rough, and my father used to say if it hadn’t been for the farmers the travelling people of Ireland wouldn’t have survived. The farmers gave them work and – when they were able to – donations of food and clothing as well. My father’s family lived off what they could earn and what they were given.

One of the stories we all heard when growing up was about the Christmastime when my father went out, with two of his older sisters, to see if they could get him some shoes. He was only 3½ years old. ‘I was walking out with nothing on my bare feet, in the snow,’ he’d say, and we’d all try to imagine how cold that must have been. His childhood had gone quickly and by the age of 11 he was in the fields with his family picking spuds from August through to the winter. ‘The first day’s wages I ever got,’ he’d tell us as we sat by the crackling fire, ‘was a half a crown for walking with a plough over at Carnaross, County Meath, and that’s back in the 1950s.’ He would describe his battle with the heavy plough and the thick, heavy soil. With his wages he bought a beer but he’d always make sure we knew that he’d ‘given my mother a shilling’.

The family would eat what they could find, and share what they had with whoever was around them. My father loved to tell us about the time he and his brother Buck went out and gathered some spuds and carrots from the field, which they gave to their mother to put in her large pot (as children we all feared the witches’ pot, as we called it). Then they went out and caught a couple of rabbits and a hare, and then managed to catch a duck in a local pond, and – and this was the risky thing – a pheasant too. All of these went into the pot with whatever else my granny could find and their family, and the five families around them, feasted on that for dinner. As children we couldn’t understand how anyone could eat all of those things at one time, but I suppose if you’re very hungry, as they all were, you wouldn’t care. Certainly my father remembered the entire pot being emptied that night.

Just as we were told how good and kind the farmers and their families were in those days, we’d also be reminded of what could happen if we weren’t respectful of them in return. When my father was young, his uncle was out in Galway somewhere and had a confrontation with the farmer beside whose land he was staying. The farmer accused him of raiding the hedges for timber to keep his fire going and my father’s uncle denied this, saying he’d scavenged the timber from where it had fallen on the side of the road. He stood up to talk to the farmer, and the farmer claimed he saw him pulling out an iron bar and thought he was going to hit him, so he produced a gun and blew my dad’s uncle’s head off. Killed him like that, over his own fire by the side of the road. The farmer was taken to court about it but he claimed he’d shot him in self-defence and no one disagreed with him. So we were told always to mind what the farmer told us and not to think we could do as we liked. That story was often repeated to us to remind us that the law didn’t always look too favourably on travellers and so we should be careful not to come into contact with the police if we could help it.

There were times when we relied on the Guards – what travellers called the Garda, the Irish Police. In my father’s young days no traveller had a telephone – just as we didn’t when I was young, of course – so if there was a death, or another reason to need to meet up with another family, then it was the Guards who would pass on a message. A traveller would go into the local Garda office and ask them to pass on a message to the Quinn McDonaghs up in Meath. The Garda would then ring some local stations and ask if we were known to be in the area, and if so, could an officer go out and find the family and carry a message to them? Usually the Guards would know who was in their area and roughly where they were, so it wouldn’t take them long to find whoever they were looking for.

The story we liked best was the one about my father meeting my mother for the first time, in 1963. He was back in Ireland, home from work in England. In the 1950s and the early 1960s many travelling men left Ireland and went to Manchester. They had heard there was work to be had there; on the side of the roads there was work in the Irish construction companies. Names like McGinley, McAlpine, you name it, my father worked for them all. Back home on holiday, he was on a bike, heading down to the water pump, when he happened upon this girl on her way to fetch some milk. At this point in the story my mother would interrupt. There was no accident about it, she’d declare; he knew where she’d be and he’d ridden down there to the pump deliberately, in the hope of seeing her. That she was related to him made the meeting easier, as there wasn’t much mixing with other clans when they travelled. People mostly stuck to themselves. It was usually only at arranged events, like the horse fairs, that boys and girls would get a chance to see each other and talk. That, and family get-togethers such as weddings.

I was born on a Tuesday in hospital and christened the following Sunday, 23 July, in the Cathedral of Christ the King in Mullingar, County Westmeath. (Years later I was married there.) My father was by then in prison in England – there was a stabbing incident in a pub and he was put inside for three years – and I was brought up by my mother and my grandfather. My mother told me many years later that she found it hard going, raising the three of us boys without her husband there. She’d go door to door looking for hand-me-downs, trying to make the money she had been given last a week. The relieving officer would give her money or sometimes a voucher to exchange for food. His title was shortened to ‘leaving officer’ and the one I can remember my mother mentioning was called Mr Scally. He was nice to us and if we were out on the road he’d come past in his car, pull over, and come out with the money or the voucher for us. No more than four or five pounds, it wasn’t much, but it helped.

Eventually my father was released and he came straight over to see us. Well, not exactly straight; he went to meet my mother’s brother to find where we were and the two of them – drinking companions from their young days – went out to celebrate his release that night. This is what travelling men do, so I suppose it’s no surprise that the following morning they did it all over again, and it wasn’t until much later that day that my father finally laid eyes on the son he’d not yet seen.

‘What do you remember about seeing me for the first time, Daddy?’ I asked my father once. He thought for a moment or two. ‘You was in bed, and you were a big lump of a boy,’ he said, which wasn’t exactly the touching memory I’d hoped to hear.

The very next morning my father saddled up the horses, which up until then my mother had looked after, and we set off, leaving Auld Daddy behind. There was no time to waste. Having no one he could turn to for help, my father needed to earn some money as quickly as he could. For the next few years we lived on the side of the road, although when my father first came back we moved about a fair bit. Maybe he was restless after being locked up in England, I don’t know, but every three weeks or so we would dismantle the tent, harness the horse up, and get out on the road looking for somewhere new where we might get some work. We would only go ten or fifteen miles down the road, because that distance was enough for the horse pulling a wagon. It was a big thing for my father too, because he’d have to rebuild the tent as well. Having the horse was all very well, but my father couldn’t do much with it. Besides, he’d seen what other travelling men could do with their trucks in England, so, soon after returning home, he bought a van for his work. He’d haul scrap in it, or put it to any use he could, to earn some money.

When we stopped for the night, the first thing my father would do was make the tent, one that would last us as long as we needed to stay put. My brother Paddy and I would be running alongside him, helping to carry the wood. The first job was to cut down the poles that would form the frame, and here hazel wood was the best as it was the easiest to get into place. A long pole would be trimmed of its bark and stuck into a bank. That would hold one end firmly while we watched my father bend the other end over and force it into the ground, making the main stay of the frame – and somewhere to hang things off the floor. This was called the rigging pole. He’d then strip smaller poles until there were enough to start weaving the wattles, as we called them, to form the canopy. Knowing there was now someone living there, the farmer might come by and give us some straw to put inside to make us more comfortable. To finish off the tent, my father would dig a trench around the sides to take away the rainwater. A tent like this could last all winter if it was properly made.

When I was a little older, Paddy and I would have our duties. I would have to get the sticks for the fire in the mornings, and Paddy had to get the water to drink and cook with. The following day I would fetch the water, while Paddy would have to go root in the farmers’ hedges for wood for the fire. Doing this meant we learned the layout of the land and all the little places where we could catch our food. My favourite was snaring rabbits. I’d be happy spending time getting my snares ready, waiting to catch some. I’d go down with a set of snares in the evenings and be there for three or four hours. Then, in the morning, I’d go round and check the snares, take the rabbit out if I’d caught one, club it, and carry it home. Sometimes of an evening I’d take the dogs up with me to chase rabbits out of the hedges. I’d send in the little terrier, he’d flush the rabbits out into the open, and the greyhound would race over and pick them up. My father would skin the rabbit (we didn’t sell the fur) and gut it and clean it up and my mother would put it in the pan with a few vegetables and boil the whole lot, and that was a lovely dinner.

To get vegetables I would sometimes raid farmers’ fields. Of course the farmers would warn us never to steal from them, but I had found a way to take what we needed without being caught. I’d go into the centre of the field where the farmer wouldn’t notice anything missing, rather than at the edges where it was obvious, and I’d lift out a few vegetables – just enough for the pot that night. When I brought whatever I’d collected home, no one said to me, ‘Where did you get them from?’ So as long as it wasn’t necessary, then no questions would be asked.

I was very proud of helping to feed my family, and I brought my first rabbit back when I was only 7. The dogs helped me; we had three, all called Jack. We had Auld Jack, who was the boss. When he was 16 we had to get him put down because a weasel blinded him. Then we had young Jack, his son; he was half bulldog, half terrier, and we had him for ten years, until he was killed by a car. We had greyhound Jack and then later on we had a little Jack Russell. All the dogs were there for hunting rabbits and hares. Hare hunting was something I never liked. I don’t really know why; whether it was because it involved a lot of running about, or because of the stories we were told round the fire when I was little. I never liked the tales that had me laying awake in bed. One was about some boys who were chasing a hare with their dog, only for the hare to turn into a banshee and kill their dog. Or there was the story where the boys were following a hare and it went out of their sight and turned into an old woman. That one also reminded me of the tale we were told of the little girls who were turned into swans by their stepmother. Some of those stories had a purpose. For instance, we were told never to throw stones at swans – ducks we could chuck stones at, and if we were lucky enough to hit and kill one we could take it home to eat – but never a swan, because of the law.

It was an essential part of a travelling man’s life to have a dog and I liked our three – Auld Jack, young Jack and Greyhound Jack – very much. They worked as a team and my father had them together for over twelve years; he always kept dogs rather than bitches, because he wasn’t into the hassle of breeding from them. They were pets to us children but their purpose first and foremost was to hunt – they were as essential to our hunting as a fishing rod is to a fisherman. (Talking of fishing, eel rolled in pastry and fried was my favourite dish of all.) The dogs weren’t allowed inside the tent, where we slept. They were rough and ready dogs, and had to fend for themselves outside.

When the older boys and the men went out hare coursing I’d try to hang back. It just never seemed to interest me, so I didn’t even try to get to like it. The greyhounds were essential for this, because they were the only ones with the speed. They were used for pheasants as well, although we always had to be careful not to take the farmers’ birds.

We were careful always not to upset the farmers, because without their help things could be very tough for us. When we left a site we would always clear up properly, because if we didn’t, then we’d never be welcome there again. We’d go round the site and bag up any rubbish so there was no sign that we’d been there. It wasn’t in our interests to leave it untidy at all, because we’d probably come back that way in four or five months’ time and want to feel the farmer was friendly towards us. There would be times when we’d arrive at a site and find it left dirty by someone else – usually someone who’d come from outside our area to use it and so not likely to have to return there. Then we’d end up clearing away their mess.

Whenever a site had been left in a mess, I would feel some prejudice towards us when we arrived. Sometimes when we turned up the farmer – or even the police – would come along and say to us, don’t stay there tonight. We knew that if we ignored that advice the likelihood was that a few bricks would be hurled our way later on, that the van windows would be broken. Obviously the family that had stayed there before us had caused trouble, and that hadn’t been forgotten. It made no difference if we said we’d not take anything we weren’t offered and clear up after ourselves: we were classed the same as the troublemakers. We would have to move on down the road a little bit. Luckily, other farmers would be on the side of the road, and accept us with open arms. They’d give us milk and water, they’d give out straw for the tent, they’d give us all a bit of farm work. It seemed to me that if we behaved like my mother and father – and the older generation – and treated the farmers and their workers with respect, we would probably be given it in return. But because of the behaviour of a few that didn’t show them respect, at times we were all treated as one and no longer welcomed where we’d been able to stop before.

Eventually we stopped travelling in a wagon. In 1971 my father bought a caravan to pull on the back of the van. Having the caravan was a big thing for us; we were on the move as my father hunted work, and all went where he had to go. But now we had moved from a tent to a caravan at the side of the road, it was all so different. Like moving from a one-bedroom apartment into a penthouse. We even had a gas cooker in there. My father and mother had the caravan for themselves and the girls. Paddy, me and my younger brother Dave had a bed made for us on a mattress in the back of the van. We’d happily sleep in the back of the van; for us it was like going camping, and it felt like a break from what we’d been used to.