I felt Travellers were strange and different until I befriended them. Then their similarity astonished me

I was cleaning my studio last week when I found a box of old cassette recordings; stories I heard from Travellers many years ago. I became interested in Travellers when I was a young boy observing the “exotic” nature of their life in barrel top wagons along a narrow road beside the golf links. Children my own age who didn’t go to school, but sat in shelter tents made of canvas, tossed over wattles that had been soaked in the ditch, and then solidly built; calm and cosy children staring out at me as I cycled by. Occasionally one of the men would address me with a common salutation of the time.

“Good lad!”

And I’d stop the bike to converse and he would ask me where I was from, and I’d point back at the rear windows of our house. I’d ask him if those were his children, pointing at the dirty faces gazing out from the tent, and he’d laugh and say, “Yes, them is all mine.”

Such simple interactions fired me to learn more about these semi-nomadic children, and years later I was thrilled to become writer-in-residence for three months with the Irish Traveller Movement in Tullamore.

‘I’d hate to be seen searching for a grave in case people might think I wasn’t a regular visitor’

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I felt Travellers were strange and different until I befriended them. Then their similarity astonished me

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A teacher in school convinced me I was a useless lump of dung

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Michael Harding: At one time, having a pair of binoculars on the back seat of your car in Fermanagh was unwise

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I had just become a father and realised that a child was the most important thing in my life. I stayed in a barge on the canal and I wandered into the halting site every day with a tape recorder; listening to romantic stories of long-ago weddings when the bride wore wellingtons or when an old tartan shawl adorned her shoulders and a few grains of rice was the only confetti thrown over a new couple in the church yard. I heard of children born under wagons and in shelter tents, or in the back of a van.

My own mother lived lavishly among her teapots and vases of flowers, and her golf clubs poised in the garage, but she loved her children. So it was amazing, for me as a child, to realise that these Traveller women held their children with the very same tenderness.

It was the calm with which the Traveller woman placed the child on the rug that alerted me. The detail gave psychological intent to the drama; a detail that Chekhov might have been proud of

I heard one story of a woman who gave birth in Mullingar during the war when the hospital windows were all boarded up. She discharged herself in the middle of the night. The child was stillborn. And then half way home to Kinnegad she asked her husband to stop the van because to her astonishment another child was coming; a twin to the stillborn, surprising her on the side of the road. And as I listened, she pointed at a big man passing the window of the trailer and said, “That’s him now.”

Such moments moved me because when I was a boy I felt Travellers were strange and different, but when I befriended them, it was their similarity that astonished me. And it wasn’t just about being a parent.

I soon realised that I could learn as much from those elderly women about storytelling as I could ever learn in a decade of university courses; and their unrestrained exuberance for storytelling completely changed me as a writer and showed me how bearing witness to one’s own life is the core of a writer’s destiny.

I remember one story about a woman who had an altercation with a shopkeeper. She was holding a baby in her tartan shawl and the shopkeeper insisted she had concealed a turnip beneath the very same cloth. He followed the Traveller out of the shop, shouting for the guards.

The Traveller woman calmly spread the tartan rug on the pavement, laid the baby safely down on it, and then picked up a turnip from the street stall and flung it through the shop window. The guards arrived and the Traveller ended up in Mountjoy for a month.

But it was the calm with which she placed the child on the rug that alerted me. The detail gave psychological intent to the drama; a detail that Chekhov might have been proud of.

As I listen to the tapes today I can still hear a wonderful music in the recordings. Phonetically the stories contain complex cadences and rhythms, and are as musical as any song. And when I think back on those mornings in trailers long ago I realise how fortunate I was; to meet folks who knew that bearing witness to one’s own experience of life is the most authentic pathway for the storyteller. It’s no wonder I cherish those tapes, and that they are all dusted down now and sit proudly on the top shelf.