Tales from the Tent (31 page)

33

FORGET US NOT

M
y last year at the ‘berry picking’ went out like a damp squib. Not a single friend or foe came to share our fireside. I stood on the
same braeside where ‘Stone Nuts’ took my forceful kick the previous year, and scanned every inch of my beloved memory-laden berryfields. I doubted if we’d come back, and with that
knowledge, knew life would never be the same again. Another brick in the traveller’s house of freedom crumbled. Tears rolled over my cheeks, leaving a salt trail of misery, and I
couldn’t have cared who witnessed it.

Deep inside the pain was almost unbelievable. It was like Death himself visited my heart like a phantom surgeon to wrench out my roots. I could hear the Ancient Ones, those hardy craturs, my
ancestors, calling me. I closed out the river of tears and heard them in my mind. ‘You had better believe the inevitable, lassie, Scotland doesn’t look kindly on the travellers. Only
way to get on is to be ashamed of us.’

‘Never, as long as I live, will I deny my roots,’ I called back to them through the window of my mind. ‘I’ll never be a zombie!’

Every day I say a silent prayer for my people. This is for them.

A circle of tents snuggled into a secluded forest, it was a freezing January.

There was a woman with a newborn baby. The tiny bundle came into the world after two days of pain-wracked labour. The young mother was screaming at her husband. He took her baby, their first
child, a beautiful boy. The poor little mite was blue dead. She bit into her horsehair mattress and heard the starving dogs eat her child. They hadn’t eaten for days, but now they were fed
would be able to hunt for food to feed the members of that lonely circle of nomads forced to live on the edge of society.

The tinker children buried their innocent little faces into mother’s skirt. ‘Don’t look, my lambs,’ she warned them, ‘else this memory will stay
with you all the days of your lives!’ Doing as she asked they closed their eyes, and didn’t see the men from the nearby village batter their father to death with hammers and axes.

‘Run, ma bairn, or the bad men will get you too.’ She ran as fast as she could, not faltering or turning to look back once. The bad men took turns doing things to
mother, things that innocent young mind did not understand. Then they left her stone-dead on the bleeding grass. The child waited hours in the thick rye grass before going back. She sat all through
the night holding mother’s cold hand, then at daybreak took a stone and hacked off a piece of mother’s flaxen hair to remember her by.

The old man came back from gathering sticks. An eery silence had spread itself over the moor and not even the dogs barked. With shaking legs he crept slowly towards his
campsite. The sight that met his eyes had him fall upon the ground: they’d come visiting, the body snatchers. What could he have done, if he’d been there? Nothing! He piled his
family’s bits and pieces and set fire to everything, then sat under a laburnum tree to wait for the scythe of death. It was well known amongst travellers that because of their non-registered
existence they were easy prey for dissection-hungry doctors willing to pay whoever brought them good healthy specimens.

‘Go and stand in the corner, you’re a waste of my good teaching skills.’

‘Tinky, tinky, cold bum, yer mammy canna knit, yer faither kicked the polisman an’ is lying in the nick.’

‘Please, miss, I can’t sit here beside her, she’s a dirty tinker. I’ll catch a disease, my mother said.’

‘Wullie, how can we get the tar and feathers frae aff the bairn?’

‘Please, Mammy, don’t send me back to that horrible school.’

‘I’ve been asked to inform you that the school nurse said she hasn’t enough liquid paraffin to treat your children’s lice. Please don’t send them to
school.’

Then, just when I thought my heart would burst with sadness I saw the weddings, the music and the laughter. Storytellers and balladeers entertained with pipers and box players.
The hot summers with happy-faced bairns running and playing upon heather-thickened moors. Cutting bracken and maggot-scouring the sheep. Children seeing how long they could string the daisies
before one separated the chain.

No, my ancestors, I’ll never forget you. This is my pledge to you. You can take this Traveller off the Road, but you’ll never take the road off this Traveller.

They’ll aye be here in the morning
.

Ye canna dream them awa,

They’ll surely turn up wi’ yer dawnin
.

Or scarper ower the heather,

They widnae abandon the show

They’re joined tae you forever
.

They are here like an oncoming tide
.

Ye canna just wish them away,

Ach, ye widnae anyway
.

But they’re nae hidden treasure
.

They’ve nae misgivings, they’re sure,

They’re travelling folks forever
.

They’ll stand firm: ‘Esprit de Corps’
.

They’re the essence o’ what yer aboot,

Ach, they canna just sling their hook
.

For they’re yer bells, yer steeple
.

So never doubt how they feel,

They’re Scotland’s travelling people
.

Forced to carry this cumbersome load,

Their facet is your visage too,

They’re the splendid part o’ you
.

Tae oor hallowed glens within,

Tae oor ancestors steeped in past,

Here’s tae Scotland,

They’re still yer outcasts
.

34

CRIEFF
,
THE FINAL FRONTIER