Old Traveller Woman

My mother and me outside our caravan, Ireland 1949


OLD TRAVELER WOMEN


Through songs and stories, the Traveler People of Ireland keep their heritage alive.

Old traveler woman,
Where are your kin?
Where is your wagon,
And what do you sing
As you hang out the washing
On a backyard line,
With a fence all around you
And more houses behind.

My aunt sent me a photo. She sits in the garden of her retirement home, at ease in a deck chair, but her eyes are looking far away. I wonder if she is thinking of the old days, when her husband was still alive, and they lived in a leaky wagon. She was always on at him to fix that leak. When the weather was fine, she told him it was a good time to do it.
``Sure, woman, the sun is shining. There’s no need to fix it.”
When it rained, she shoved a bucket under the leak and berated him.
``Sure, woman, it’s raining, I can’t get up on the roof in this weather.”
Her complaints wore him down, but instead of fixing the leak, he bought a new wagon. He gave the old one to my father to store canvas.
``To be sure,” he said as he walked away, ``you’ll have to fix that leak in the roof before it rains.”

When you were a chavvie
You never wore shoes,
You never read schoolbooks
Or watched the day’s news.
The world rattled past you
Like a runaway tram,
But you took no notice
In your old caravan.


I was born a traveler, or as the Irish say, `born on the straw’. As a chavvie (child), my life was a series of campgrounds and crossroads. I never attended a school, but the whole of Ireland was my classroom.
My mother was one of the Settled People until she married my father, and she taught me to read and write. None of the other travelers saw the point in that. Stories and information were saved in the head, and passed on round the campfire.
Did they ever tell a story about me? I wondered. Like the time I was running down the road and cut my foot on a piece of broken glass. I left a trail of blood all the way back to the campground, where the traveler women washed my foot in a bucket of water and poured vinegar over the wound to `kill the gerrems (germs).’ Then the women held the edges of the wound together and smeared honey on it before bandaging it with a strip of linen. I hobbled about for a bit, but it healed perfectly without stitches.
My father demanded to know what I had done with the boots he had bought for me. I didn’t tell him I had hidden them under a hedge. I couldn’t wear shoes at all. I still prefer to go barefoot.


You were a young dona,
and a mother and wife,
Thinking you’d be a traveler
For the rest of your life.
But the fences, old woman,
Were closing you in -
You’ve a house and a yard now,
Like the rest of your kin.

My mother recalls her first glimpse of the traveler’s campground after she married my father. Raised in a village, she married my father against her own mother’s wishes. Coming into the traveling life as an adult was a shock, she admitted. Women had to do without the refinements and comforts of the Settled Life. She did the laundry with a tin washtub and a rubbing board.
Then there was the strangeness of the Irish culture – my mother was English, and here she was, surrounded by people who believed in fairies and ghosts.
One night she gathered in the washing from the makeshift line and was walking back to the wagon draped in white sheets when she heard an unearthly shriek. A man was running away from the campground as fast as his legs could carry him.
My aunt looked out of the door of her wagon.
``Oh, Maire, it’s you,” she said. ``You gave me a turn. I thought you were a ghost.”
So did the fleeing farmworker, who had popped down to see if anyone wanted milk.

Old traveler woman,
I know what you sing,
You sing of the old days,
On the road with your kin.
You peg out your washing
And dream of the day,
When you leave this fine prison,
And go traveling away.

My aunt’s picture was sent to Australia, where I now live. I have traveled far from Ireland. Like her, as I look out on a suburban backyard, I dream of the old days. And though I can read and write, I keep the stories and songs in my head, and pass them round by the fire’s glow.

Gail