I’m from a travelling family. I was born in South Bank because my parents had winter quarters here. They stopped here for the winter months and travelled during the spring and summer. My dad collected scrap and we used to do some fruit picking and other farm work. He used to buy and sell the odd horse as well. We had an uncle who used to hire himself out in cowboy films doing rodeo. There were three caravans, one for my parents, one for the lads, and one for the lasses. I’ve got six brothers and three sisters. When my dad got older and started having heart attacks, which was when I was about ten, we settled here and we all lived in one house, seven of us boys in one room, though some of my brothers were grown up by then.

I didn’t have the heart to learn at school. I thought I could learn everything I needed from my dad so I never learned to read and write because I saw that he’d never needed to. My children are good readers and they help me if I want to know what something says. But I have no great desire for it.

I have two lurchers and I take them out poaching. I’ve some ferrets as well and I set snares. I go all over. You’re never far from open countryside here -  you can be up on Whitby Moor easily enough. I take my six year old who already knows all about the countryside and how to handle the dogs and the ferrets. But unlike me at his age, he’s also learning to read and write. He reads stuff out to me that falls through the door.

Most of my family are still on the road but their base, as far as they have one, is South Bank. That makes sense to me, that us gypsies should have South Bank as our base. My parents and their like were all encouraged to live in houses and to lead more stable lives and yet there’s nowhere less stable than here. They’re busy encouraging people to ‘move on’, which is a phrase travellers know all about. It’s like a big grass verge which we were told we could stay on but now we can’t.