Tears for a Tinker Read Online Free

Her face drained of colour. ‘Oh, oh, bucket
o’ shit, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she said, tightly squeezing my arm.
    ‘I hope for your sake those fine Irish linen sheets are intact,’ I told her, unfolding her fingers from my pinched flesh.
    Mammy threw up the mattress and opened her blanket box. ‘Hold that candle down there,’ she ordered Daddy. I swear, on my Granny’s low grave, I have never seen such a sight; no
wonder Mammy shrieked louder than the Banshee. Piled high inside the box were mounds and mounds of shredded sheets, blankets and eiderdowns, and curled in a corner was a terrified wee mouse with a
dozen and more tiny weans, all squeaking and squirming.
    Mammy never knew it was Shirley who caused that catastrophe by introducing a pregnant mouse to our home, but I knew, and boy, did I put the tighteners on her when I wanted something!

3

    ON THE ROAD AGAIN

    N ow, back to the pokey flat in Crieff where Dave and I were living. The postman made me cringe each time he pushed mail through the
letter-box—with me feeling trapped behind four concrete walls and a heavy oak door, it seemed to me that he was a prison warder having a peek.
    Davie was born and reared in a house, how could he possibly understand my anguish? The poor man had enough to do keeping down a job without having to take my constant nagging about how unhappy I
was in that house. ‘Listen pet,’ he assured me at nights when I tossed and turned in bed, ‘you have more to think about nowadays than yourself.’ He’d point across at
our sleeping infants, and I knew what he meant.
    In all honesty, though, as days turned into weeks, I began to hate my basic but comfortable home, and could hardly wait for morning, when my little boys were rushed into their clothes and popped
into the pram. Like a miniature gypsy wagon, that pram was crammed with enough food and drink to last all day, as I got as far away from the four walls and into the fields and woodland surrounding
Crieff. Stephen’s baby milk was wrapped in tin-foil and nappies to keep it warm. When we stopped, out would come blankets for the kids to lie on. Then my shoes would be discarded, as Mother
Earth and my feet joined again. It was as if I was retracing my steps to old tinker ground.
    Listening to the different birds singing to each other, it seemed as if they were including me and my wee lads. I’d sing a lullaby to my tiny infant, then when he was asleep I’d
teach Johnnie how to tell the difference between trees and bushes. Tell him tales of the Tree people who lived under bark, and Giant Mactavish who spent all his two hundred years living in the
forest fighting off the Smelly Sock frogs. (When I recall how his big hazel green eyes lit up at those stories it makes a dull day disappear.)
    Rain or shine, it made no difference, just so long as me and my little half-breeds could escape to the open spaces. When the sunshine of summer shone in cloudless skies, going back to the house
was more than I could bear. Selfishly, I’d leave my wristwatch at home, and one day, when we eventually arrived back, it was a very angry, hungry husband who confronted me.
    ‘Jess, I can hardly work for worrying about you.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Trekking lonely byways with my wee sons, that’s why.’
    ‘They’re fine; do you think I’d put my boys in danger?’
    ‘If you’d come down out of your silly cloud for one minute and listen to me. What if one of them got sick or something?’
    ‘Davie, travelling people live like that, we cope with everything, even sickness.’
    My stubbornness hit a raw nerve, he thumped the kitchen table so hard all four legs bounced off the floor. Cups wobbled in their saucers as sugar scattered between them.
    ‘I am not a traveller, though, and these are my sons! And by God, I don’t want them dragged around the countryside because their stupid mother won’t let go of a dead lifestyle.
Now stop it and get a grip.’
    That night I wrote