Thai word for gipsy

[Fiery Jack]

There was a gypsy half caste bird at my junior school for a while called Katherine Carter. Her dad was a huge black feller from Leeds who'd been inside for armed robbery and did the dustbins later on and sold dope, and her mum was some tattooed alkie bottle-blonde barmaid strumpet or other that usually stayed in bed all day in the sky blue and cream rusty caravan they lived in on the "wreck" which is what we called the old council "recreation" land at Gallows End, where all the biggest tinkers and dangerous thieves lived.

 

I don't think we thought of Katherine as worse than us, as a lesser child, as white or black or anything really. I got on well with her, liked her. She was very pretty. But she stank of piss because they lived in a caravan and had no washing machine. And she had epilieptic fits, I remember that too. Some of the older children sometimes used to all gather in a ring around her at playtime in the playground, all holding hands and chanting "Carter, Farter, Silly Tomato!" until she started to cry or sometimes she fell over frothing at the mouth and started sort of breakdancing on the tarmac till one of the teachers on duty but having a sly smoke had to put out his fag and stroll over and tell them to stop.

 

Sometimes she just stood there and didn't cry. Like she froze like a ghost, staring straight ahead, hypnotized. And I always wished the teacher would hurry up and come and tell them off when she went like that because I felt frightened. But I couldn't do anything because I was frightened for myself too.

 

I often think about Katherine Carter, and I hope she thrives now. I've forgotten the faces and certainly the names of most of the kids in my class then, but I remember Katherine as clearly as the rural stream I also once stood beside and cried because my second dad had hit my mum and he'd packed his little oblong brown leather holdall case with the broken straps that he usually kept his important papers and his condoms in and gone to stay at his friend Gordon's flat in town and that meant him being drunk for a week then coming back with a beard. I wished someone would come and make it stop then too. But no one came. As if Katherine were here beside me now.

 

jack

[spirit_of_town_hall]

FJ,

 

Those memories are very vivid, as childhood memories are. My grandad died aged 94 and towards the end of his life; last few days he was calling out the names of childhood friends from the 1920's

 

Katherine doesnt sound like a real gypsy. A real gypsy would have fetched her mates and beaten up all the tomatoe name callers.

 

Gypsies, even the supposed travellers gypsies only marry their own kind.

 

I can remember I guy at my school who couldnt walk properly, he had these special orthopedic shoes people used to tease him and try and throw him in the pond as he couldnt swim.

 

STH

[SatRai]

This Katherine Carter of yours is not a gypsy at all in the actual sense of the word. The real gypsies originate from India.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people