I was driving along the road headed for the supermarket about two months ago when an interview on the radio grabbed me by the throat. I was so moved by the story of the interviewee, and his gentle manner when describing even those who had really seriously wronged him (and wronged is a euphemism for beaten and abused) that I had to pull the car over because I was getting too tearful to see the road properly.
Anyway, my husband took to bed with a migraine the other day and left to my own devices for the evening, I picked up one of my copies and read and read and read.
Mikey’s writing is so warm and so funny that both books are a far cry from misery memoirs. Without excusing, he explains, without complaining, he describes.
I don’t want to give away details of much that happens, because if you have read Gypsy Boy, then you will want to find out for yourself what happened for Mikey in detail, when Caleb drove him off in a little car…
Mikey was born into a gypsy family. And is one of the first gypsies to write a book. A closed and mysterious world to us ‘gorgias’ (as gypsies call non-gypsies), our images of gypsy life vary from the judgemental to the frightened.
Gypsies, tramps and thieves – as the first lady of camp, Cher, sang – and do many of us know the difference? But gypsy culture is amazing, and to have maintained tradition alongside the snowballing modern world takes true grit, and dedication. And rigid control.
My kids once went to school with some children from a gypsy family, who by then lived in a house. There were eight children in the family when we started at the school, and by the time we left 18-months later, the mum of the family was pregnant again. We would see the father cycling daily from the village to the town and back with a basket of shopping and most days the mum, dad and numerous older brothers would walk to the school, laughing and joking and very much a tight unit.
And you know what most people (including me) saw? Poverty. We saw rotten teeth in the youngest children and we heard a muttered speech pattern that we didn’t understand. And I didn’t know, until I read both of Mikey’s books, that poverty is not a gypsy trait. That gypsy men earn, that gypsy women are incredibly house proud and children-proud. That it is that gender-divided too.
That those children I saw probably had a gum disease of some kind rather than lack of a toothbrush and how difficult it must have been for the father of the family to ride a bike rather than a car. That the transition from traditional gypsy life to rooted house-based life had been punishing.
And what I should have seen, and did see but didn’t notice at the time, was how close they were. How much they loved each other’s company, how the older children were so attentive to the little children and how in love the parents looked.
And that’s one the best things that Mikey’s books have opened up, a level of understanding and a recognition of my own stupid assumptions, and he manages all of this without lecturing, without moaning, and with dazzlingly entertaining words that beat hands down anything on TV or any work of fiction I’ve read in a long time.