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Scottish Traveller Education Programme

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Is a home a house? Reflections on a New Traveller childhood

‘Where are you from?’
It’s a simple enough question, with what should be a simple enough answer. I usually opt for the easy answer, the one requiring less explanation.
‘I’ve lived in Wales since I was ten,’ I say. That satisfies most people. Others are more curious.
‘What about before that?’
Here we go.
‘I’m a Traveller,’ I state simply, ‘I grew up living in vehicles. We lived in a lot of different places...’

I am a Traveller. Past, present, and future. This means that when I was born, I was taken home not to a house with a garden and a clock on each wall but to a small, green-painted caravan in a small, green field in Hampshire. This field was one of many locations that would become familiar to me. Such locations and our vehicles were like pieces of a jigsaw which when joined up, made home. Imagine having so many homes all over the country. And no need for a mortgage.

Growing up, I was just a normal kid, as far as I knew.

little girl
Ferdia age 4 or 5

All the other kids lived the same life, went to the same festivals, and liked to play the same games as me. The greatest differences were the spaces in which lived – tipis, trailers, trucks, and buses. For us, it was normal not to always have a toilet, tap or electricity. Fetching water, chopping firewood and lighting candles each night were all part of the daily routine. The whole world was our classroom.

Community was very important. The summer festival circuit thrived not only because it was such an opportunity to celebrate natural events such as the solstice, but a chance for this relatively small but scattered community to get together and catch up on each other’s news, as well as practice their various trades. The adults I knew didn’t wear suits or drive flashy cars to work – they were skilled recyclers, swing boat operators and hair braiders. The festivals were a far cry from the commercial culture that dominates them today. They were community events where it was safe for the grown ups to leave us to explore our new territory, dressed as pirates and Indians, whilst they sat around the fire. It was a truly fairytale existence.

Groups of Travellers and their vehicles convened all-year-round on sites they found – usually quiet, rural areas safe for the children and animals. My grandma recalls getting a phone call from me once:
‘Where are you now then?’ she asked.
I thought about this for a moment.
‘In a phone box of course,’ I stated matter-of-factly, forgetting to add which county the phone box might be in.

bus
Picture by Gubby in ‘A Time to Travel: An introduction to Britain’s Newer Travellers’ (1994).

Sadly, all fairytales have their goblins. By the time I was 5, though I didn’t know it, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 had come into existence, a culmination of the Thatcherite pledge to make things as difficult for the ‘hippies’ as possible. Its very purpose was to restrict the movement and gathering of groups of people, specifically New Travellers, and their vehicles. This was ironic considering the number of people who had opted for life on the road in order to avoid the poverty and unemployment, which occurred under a Conservative government in the first place.

To be ‘Public Ordered’ thus rapidly became a verb in the Traveller community, a game involving being constantly moved on or blockaded by police under section this or section that. Distinctive in our quirky and brightly painted vehicles, and no longer able to easily move or gather as a community, Travellers and their lifestyle became more and more politicised. Some opted to settle in permanent addresses.

Whilst I was aware of a general opposition to the authorities, life for me continued rosily. By now, my mother and I had traded in our caravan for a beautiful converted wooden horsebox, which attracted admiring glances at festivals; and I had reached school age. We began to park up or even rent houses throughout the winter months so that my mum could work and I could go to school.

As an English teacher, my mum instilled a love of reading in me from an early age. At 8 years old I could not read the time, but I adored the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton. The tomboyish ‘George’ was my comrade. At school my reading and spelling was better than many of the other kids’, and this perhaps aided the fact that I never really got any stick for being a ‘gyppo’. Indeed, I became immensely proud of what I quickly learnt was a very unique background. Stating you grew up in a horsebox is a pretty cool trump card when negotiating playground politics.

Over time, the summer festivals seemed to lose their spark, and we started to spend more time parked up or in rented houses. This may well have been related to the 1994 laws, but is difficult to disentangle from social factors, such as the educational needs of the first generation of New Traveller children. What is certain is that aged 10, my family settled down in south Wales so that I could go to secondary school full time.

Some of the festivals we used to go to have kept their names, but are unrecognisable from the gatherings we knew. We still see some of our old friends, mainly those with addresses. Those who did not want to give up life on the road are difficult to keep in touch with now the festival circuit is gone, and some have emigrated to more tolerant countries such as Spain or even Thailand.

I continue to feel at home wherever friends and family can be found, as I always have. After all, home is more than just a house; it is a whole community, identity and a sense of belonging. Perhaps, then, I had to move home in a spiritual as well as a physical sense when we settled in Wales, for the Traveller community that once existed had been fractured, and we had to find a new one. Unlike with a house, however, I cannot go back and revisit the Traveller life, and find all as it once was. Some of the vehicles remain – my dad can still coax his converted 1960’s bus to life – but the travelling community, the real heart of the home, has virtually vanished, like a fairytale.

Where am I from? I’d love to show you, but it’s not there any more.

Ferdia Earle
June 2010
contact at ferdia45@gmail.com