00:00:00:11 - 00:00:28:15 Marnie Hi, and welcome to Dwelling, a podcast that explores how we find and fight for feelings of home. I'm Marnie, and this episode we're doing things a bit differently. We're not speaking to people who've decided to live differently, but to people whose nomadism is part of their cultural history. Roma. The restrictions that affect all of our homes and freedom to roam are often directed towards GRT communities and they often feel the sharpest impacts first.

00:00:28:23 - 00:00:59:11 Marnie Narratives about GRT homes are often heavily influenced by hundreds of years of discrimination, both by legislation and by the media. So hearing firsthand their stories of home so, so important. You can't tell the history of nomadism or the history of home without speaking to GRT communities. These voices don't represent an entire ethnicity, but instead individual stories of what home means to them and how they have fought for fairer futures.

00:01:02:02 - 00:01:28:03 Millie My name's Millie Cooper. I'm a Romany Gypsy, I work for Warner Brothers and the visual effects department. I'm a visual effects production assistant. So, yeah, that's a little bit about me. Home is all about family, really. We're very family orientated. I lived on a site where when I was a baby and then moved to Canterbury, my mom and dad bought a plot of land and we lived in a trailer in there.

00:01:28:03 - 00:01:41:10 Millie And then my dad built a house. I've kind of lived here my whole life, pretty much. But yeah, I think home to me is the people that you surround yourself with.

00:01:41:10 - 00:02:07:11 Gemma Trying to get the light, it's dark outside... Hello. My name's Gemma Lees. I am a Romany gypsy, a disabled creative from the North West. So my home is a beautiful council house on actually a really nice estate with my husband and my son and our greyhounds that Fetchy von Stick and ball. I don't know. We we had that.

00:02:07:11 - 00:02:32:01 Gemma We had the dog before and we had the for 11 years and she just love my life and and it felt very empty without her. So yeah, we we decided to adopt another one and yeah, I think a dog makes a house home. Probably in that I see the building in which my family lives as sort of the, you know, the, the the house is the house, the family is the home.

00:02:32:14 - 00:02:57:08 Gemma We are like super family orientated people. Yeah, my, my home is, is we have a kind of joke The, the dog get's very nervous when not everybody who lives in the Fetchy house is in the Fetchy house. And my husband went out the other night with his friends and he was out quite late and my son kind of came into my bedroom and he said, well, when will daddy be home?

00:02:57:12 - 00:03:10:07 Gemma And I said, Are you wanting all the people that live in the Tommy house to be in the Tommy house? And he said, Yeah. So I think we're all very much you, all four of us have to be here for it to be our home.

00:03:11:10 - 00:03:44:12 Rosa Yes. My name is Rosa Cisneros. Rosa Kostic Cisneros, I should say. Well, the full name is actually Rosemary Elizabeth Kostic Cisneros. And I'm Spanish Roma and also Serbian. So I'm a mixed background. Yeah, I am now based in the UK, but I grew up in between the US and Spain, so my home life was very small, actually. It was my mom and my two brothers.

00:03:44:13 - 00:04:13:24 Rosa So my mum was really hard working. She cleaned houses, she was beautiful. Strong woman, also had lots of things she carried with her from her background and her traditions. Some great, some not so great. So I grew up kind of feeling the tensions of that. So I clocked very early that our home was very different from some of the people that say that she was cleaning houses for.

00:04:13:24 - 00:04:15:16 Rosa We were very poor.

00:04:15:16 - 00:04:40:23 Millie Primary school was hard to kind of moved from Medway where there are a lot of travellers and there are a lot of like there are lot more sites and it's just it's a little bit more normal to be a gypsy in Medway coming to Canterbury where it's like fairly middle class. And yeah, the kids are like more religious, I suppose.

00:04:40:23 - 00:05:00:04 Millie And I went to see a primary school. I remember just getting really badly bullied like, Oh, I can't come to your house. Mummy says, I can't come to your house because you, you live in a caravan. And when I was like young, like all didn't really understand why. So I ended up on my own, you always end up if that is the case.

00:05:00:04 - 00:05:23:00 Millie Generally travellers, we spend a lot more time with our cousins anyway, but you do end up being more with your family because you're kind of put into gorja settings. So that's like, non Romani people or settled people. You get put into those settings and then you're othered again. So yeah, it is a bit difficult with where my house is though.

00:05:23:00 - 00:05:47:04 Millie It was, it was it changed when my dad built the house, My dad worked really hard, built a beautiful house, but then it was like, oh, suddenly like people want to come around. But you didn't before. It was odd and I didn't, it's only as I've got older that I've clocked what that actually was. And since I started making the film and like speaking to a couple of people about it, that kind of made a lot more sense.

00:05:47:04 - 00:05:55:17 Millie And we all kind of felt the same way. We kind of understand the nuance of being othered, you know what I mean?

00:05:56:16 - 00:06:24:09 Rosa There was like no day off for her, and that was that energy, you know, I suppose I, I could feel the energy of like, you know, taking care of the family, taking care of each other, take getting things done. There was always music and whether that's flamenco music or the radio and in the kitchen we had a tiny we only had it one TV.

00:06:24:11 - 00:06:40:17 Rosa It was a tiny black and white TV that you had to turn the dial. So I remember that sort of chck chck chck of the dials turning. There were just two dials and you had to turn that thing quite alive about our household, even though there were just a few of us there.

00:06:44:24 - 00:07:17:05 Rosa It's still very loud. I love our home. I really do love our home. One of the things that I think I carry with me is that there's always music or sound in the background. I have two little ones, so it's quite tricky. They're also always laughing or fighting. They do. They have dance parties as well, so they decide they each have to pick a song that they want to hear and dance to, and then they turn on the Bluetooth speaker and, you know, just kind of have a party.

00:07:17:05 - 00:07:56:00 Rosa You know, we always had, you know, crafts and different things we could make. And I want my girls to have that as well. And I think, you know, that's that's something I'm passing on to them. But that's just so beautiful that, you know, a common thread is family and kind of coming together and engaging. And, you know, sometimes families break apart or families have to are fractured or families, you know, they move across to other countries, across continents.

00:07:56:00 - 00:08:01:02 Rosa But there's still something I think, that we hold on to in some way.

00:08:01:14 - 00:08:28:03 Millie Well, actually just moved back home with my boyfriend and try and save the somewhere else to live. And I've moved around a lot in my adult life, as everyone does. And I love it when I went to uni and first generation in my family to to ever go to university. So that was quite a big deal. And yeah, so I moved to London and lived in Cornwall for a little bit.

00:08:28:19 - 00:08:53:13 Millie But as I've got older, I've kind of got more family orientated. I think I've wanted to be closer to my mom and not wanting to move away from family as much. Yeah, it's really strange. You spend your whole teenage years being over, I need to get away from here like, but yeah, I think I always come back, but it just, it feels like it feels normal.

00:08:53:13 - 00:09:00:20 Millie It doesn't feel like it. It doesn't feel like I've been away or, like, lived in other places. And. Yeah, homely, I suppose.

00:09:02:11 - 00:09:34:18 Rosa Because it's a hard it's actually really hard topic to talk about, I find, you know, because it brings up a lot of emotional things for someone as well. And I'm really mindful that not all homes are like safe or happy spaces. So I don't want to kind of... and my home wasn't always a safe or happy space. So, you know, how do you, you know, you honor that, but also say that there is a way to to build and to create things that you want and that you deserve.

00:09:34:18 - 00:09:44:19 Rosa And we all deserve to have that. It's just sometimes some of us aren't given that. So how do we do that? How do we create these safe spaces?

00:09:44:19 - 00:10:31:13 Gemma Yeah. So everything was fine until I was 20 and I found myself homeless and having to drop out from my second year of uni due to my mental health. Um, so I was, I was put into a young person's hostel, which is both very supportive, but also quite there's a, there's a violent undercurrent, but I mean it's safe, you get a, you know, a key for your room and things like that, but it's also not safe at the same time you, you feel the impermanence of it constantly.

00:10:32:01 - 00:11:02:04 Gemma It's, it's, it's a very insecure environment. You have to be in for a living every night. They don't open the doors, get a sense that like, you know, having to tackle something in that respect. And there's a lot of rules. And so yeah, it's it's obviously massively better than sleeping rough, but it's not a home. It's somewhere to stop you sleeping rough and keep you safe at night.

00:11:02:04 - 00:11:26:15 Gemma It's, you know, rather than a home in any sense. I think the worst thing is when you bump into people who you knew from school. And the first question everybody always asks, and I never ask this ever, because I know what it feels like when you haven't got an answer or you say, Know, how are you supposed to answer that?

00:11:26:23 - 00:11:32:05 Gemma If your life is on, it's on hold. You can't do anything while you're there. You can't you can't move forward.

00:11:32:05 - 00:12:13:23 Rosa It's impossible for those communities that continue to, you know, criminalized for a lifestyle that is their tradition. But that's not entirely new to us. You know, I remember when I used to live in Kenilworth, there was a fair in Kenilworth or in Leamington, right in between the two. And I think it happens in May. And every time this horse fair was coming into town, the the rhetoric, you know, the way people talked about it, the police, they would set up these bouquets and there would be all of this stuff like preparing for war.

00:12:13:23 - 00:12:38:15 Rosa And it was it's just a market, it's an outdoor market and they're horses. And it struck me, you know, how they were preparing for these families to come in. And I know that there's a historical kind of tension there, and I'm not best placed to really talk about that. I can only say what I've observed and what I've learned from speaking to some families.

00:12:39:00 - 00:13:02:17 Rosa And that's part of my activism as well, because I didn't live that lifestyle. So I don't have that lived experience. But I just remember that I was very saddened by that. So you have that and then you have community ties that, you know, are used to not being accepted wherever they go. You know, there's always a challenge for being who they are, their home is not accepted.

00:13:02:17 - 00:13:27:20 Rosa Their home is seen as either going to be overcrowded or their homes are going to be seen as being dirty or this and that. And those are a lot of assumptions that are wrong. And so it just, you know, for a young person kind of now growing up in this climate where on top of that reality, you have the cost of living, you have, you know, a real right wing government.

00:13:28:18 - 00:13:33:24 Rosa And the way that plays out and the numbers of places is really sad.

00:13:35:01 - 00:14:03:09 Gemma Yeah, so that was my piece I did for British Art Show Nine as an art agent for Manchester. So the and install was a tent and a sleeping bag installed under an archway near a home gallery. And then much of the tent was covered with embroidery that I did working with the charity the men's room, who work with men and trans folk who sex work or homeless or both.

00:14:03:16 - 00:14:25:13 Gemma And they were in answer to five questions that I came up with, which I called the fundamental questions of homelessness. Where do you sleep? Where do you feel safe? Where did you get food which bathe in, which goes to the toilet? And I embroidered those words exactly as told to me into pieces of fabric that was taken from old clothing.

00:14:25:13 - 00:14:54:06 Gemma And I stuck them onto the tent. And we also did some protest badges that we also put on the sun. And the idea with that is that our experiences, good and bad, are embroidered into the fabric of our lives. And if you never truly get over a trauma and it does inform the rest of your life and I also wanted those those way those words heavy that that, that heavy was heavy concepts.

00:14:54:06 - 00:15:19:23 Gemma And I wanted everyone that was in the tent. And when we were getting in the tent and breaking the law, technically to look up and feel the weight of those words and and sort of wear them for a moment, there was two things that inspired it. The first thing was the Vagrancy act, many parts of which are still in the law and in actionable.

00:15:19:23 - 00:15:42:04 Gemma And it makes sleeping on the street illegal and it makes living in a tent on the street illegal. I mean, it was instituted before Queen Victoria. The hashtag that went along with it that I came up with was to discuss how old is. And the other thing that inspired it was that I think you can get away with breaking the law sometimes in the name of art, such as?

00:15:42:04 - 00:15:54:21 Gemma Like no one's ever tried to find Banksy and charged him under the Criminal Damage Act or anything like that. So I thought about kind of breaking the Vagrancy acts in the name of art as a sort of way of shining a light on it.

00:15:56:02 - 00:16:32:21 Millie Well, I mean, this country did it last year with the bill. I mean, first hand, I'm of a generation where it couldn't I don't know how how much it affected me personally, but I have seen it affect my cousins and my granny, my granny and my auntie still by Lorna site. And I feel really embarrassed and there's like lots of different families of travellers and on this one road and then there's this one plot in the middle that they wouldn't sell.

00:16:32:21 - 00:16:52:07 Millie And it was literally there was travellers on the left, travellers on the right. And it's the smallest plot. The council were like, No, you're not having it. You know, you're not buying it. So they lived there illegally. So it was covered. No one was not to see anyone. But the council came and they literally bulldozed that bit down, told them they had 24 hours to leave.

00:16:52:14 - 00:17:11:19 Millie And she had children at the time, young children. No one was wearing masks. We weren't allowed to like we weren't even supposed to be near each other. They were not served. I know as you need to go in 24 hours, bulldozed it down away from her family. She had to move away from her family. And it's like a family on the left.

00:17:11:19 - 00:17:18:02 Millie Her family are on the right. What have you gained by literally getting that small piece of land you haven't got? What have you gained from that?

00:17:18:09 - 00:17:55:14 Gemma From its inception it targeted GRT people people who traveled basically brand in them as vagrants because they didn't fit into that sort of sort of ideal way of living that was in a house, working in a factory or whatever that they traveled and they were sort of more free. It was seen as a negative thing. So there's there's one about there's a clause in it about wagons, which prior to the the new place in a crime that's come in that's that's sort of being is now it was used against people in a kind of contemporary trailers and things like that.

00:17:55:14 - 00:18:13:13 Gemma That was a bit about covered wagons but yeah it it targeted travellers because they were just seen as uncivilised that that lifestyle was seen as as not being proper.

00:18:13:13 - 00:18:32:17 Millie So I remember protesting against it. And, you know, actually what irked me quite a lot and annoyed me and I know everyone can't be an activist for everything, but I was trying to say my my friend friends as well I just finished uni and all of them are like, Yeah, we'll go to.

00:18:32:17 - 00:18:51:19 Millie We'll go to BLM marches, we're going to women's rights marches, we go to all of this sort of stuff. And I was like, I was posting all the time on Instagram and said that, and I was like, Right, this protest is happening. This bill was going to get passed. It's like it's so imperative to like my family's way of life and it's literally just a pure attack on guilty people.

00:18:52:08 - 00:19:17:11 Millie It's really serious. And I don't think anyone really understood how serious it was. And no one turned up to the protest. One, I had one friend from school because I was like, they're literally trying to wipe out and put all kids in care and put our men in prison when we already got really high.

00:19:18:01 - 00:19:39:24 Millie Like the statistics of male travellers and gypsies in prison is like off the record, really. And or have you ever put that down to them being bad people? Or is it the same as like, are they oversubscribed in prisons? Because because of laws like that? And then it goes back to the thing of family always trying to protect the family.

00:19:40:23 - 00:20:06:04 Millie But how are they supposed to when the government have literally just passed this massive bill which confiscates their homes, sets them with fines, children in care because both their parents are arrested, got arrested? It's sad, if you ask me. It's really sad. And it's frustrating as well because it's like the like I think they called us the government called us the traveler problem.

00:20:06:04 - 00:20:25:03 Millie And it's the same thing is what they do with asylum seekers. And it's like, that's the flag. So I don't know how I'd, you know what? I haven't seen a traveler pull up on a plot of land for maybe three or four years. So there isn't a traveler problem because that was, that was what you were trying to pull out.

00:20:25:03 - 00:20:41:04 Millie You settled all of us, the majority of us in the East. So what problem are you talking about? I used to work for the traveler movement and that's. That's what they. That's what they tried to take to government, like the last acceptable form of racism.

00:20:42:21 - 00:21:13:12 Rosa The communities are so diverse and so different. I it's easy to hate a community or communities when you know nothing about them. But when you hear and you learn that they're living, breathing, you know, humans with families, with troubles, with joy, with, you know, also incredibly intelligent, you know, it makes it hard to separate that person now, you know, and to just kind of make blanket statements.

00:21:13:12 - 00:21:26:24 Rosa Now, you can here's an offering and, you know, the community is alive and is. Yeah. Contributes a lot to society, to its own families, and is present in a number of different ways.

00:21:27:10 - 00:21:59:22 Millie I think if I could say ones that like that were to listen and wants to be like an ally to Jyoti people, it would be like we're not some scary monolith, which kind of thing that the media is trying painted at us, painted us up to be. And if you come if you have conversations with us or just just normal conversations, you'll think people will be very surprised on how either similar or not similar at all.

00:22:00:18 - 00:22:24:00 Millie And I think it's just to kind of keep an open mind and try and not let your preconceived ideas of what a gypsy person is rule your opinion on traveler people before you've actually spoken to travellers.

00:22:24:00 - 00:22:38:24 Gemma Yeah, we're just super crazy people. My dad is a famous bilingual children's author and storyteller. I do what I do. Yeah. Richard O'Neill. If you sure. If you Google him, you'll come up.

00:22:40:07 - 00:23:10:05 Richard I'm good. Thanks. I think you're going to go far in this year. You know the system in a nice way. That's great. Yeah. So that's why I got back to. And so. Yeah. What you want to ask me? One of the things when you walked into the door of any of my homes when I was growing off would be if it was a caravan, there would be the smell of cooking gas because a lot of the things that we'd be powering up before we had electricity would be gas and and also the smell of food.

00:23:10:18 - 00:23:35:07 Richard There was always food being cooked and you get used to those smells and a mixture of my mum was obsessively clean, but we lived in a house or whether we lived in the caravan and there would be the smell of food, there would be that lovely familiar smell but also be the smell of bleach. My mum was a big, big cleaner and that's the other thing that people often don't understand about nomadic people.

00:23:35:07 - 00:23:53:12 Richard And some of the slurs we've had all the time is because we might have lived a bit more outdoors in that actually, as a nomadic person, cleanliness is incredibly important because as we found out in the pandemic, cleanliness, washing your hands, all that kind of stuff is linked to health. And if you don't have health, you can't be nomadic.

00:23:54:06 - 00:23:59:00 Richard So cleanliness is very, very important. So those was lovely mixtures of smells.

00:23:59:05 - 00:24:22:11 Gemma He didn't do it for a job when I was little kids, he did. He sold like caravans and a burger van. At some point he did like roofing a painting and decorate and I would go along with it. I didn't know this at the time, but I was the perfect distraction. He did a lot of work for old ladies because he turned up and they did the job and he didn't rip them off.

00:24:22:24 - 00:24:40:06 Gemma So they sort of the old lady grapevine. They passed his name around. Now, I didn't know at the time I was the sorts of destruction, so I'd get paid pocket money. And I think I was sort of like, you know, shell shock in the work. But I'd go in and like, the little old ladies would, like, bake a cake or like, buy me some sweets.

00:24:40:06 - 00:24:55:24 Gemma And like, there was one day we used to cook pictures out of magazines and put them in a scrapbook and stuff. And they loved me. But what I realised, they Iran is that having this, like kind of tiny little cherub girl to play with was the perfect distraction to stop the winding Madonna while he was trying to finish the work.

00:24:55:24 - 00:25:11:12 Gemma They'd be out every 5 minutes. So do you want to go for tea or some cake or to come inside? So they've got this like, little, little girl to to to play with and and then go with. Yeah. And then my dad's was left that day. That was good he was happy with but he always, always told us stories.

00:25:11:22 - 00:25:35:19 Gemma The particular one about Fuzzy Peg, it was a car that owned the record shop. Yeah. And there was one about his painter's radio co gray radio, and he was like a radio that came alive. So that was always massively part of my childhood, kind of coming up with stories and narratives and characters, even when he didn't do it for a joke.

00:25:36:14 - 00:25:59:04 Richard Stories, for again, for Nomadic people, they would either some, you know, a lot of people could read, but a lot of people couldn't. If you think about having minimal space, then you didn't have places for lots and lots of books. So all of our history, all of our knowledge was stored in story. It still is to a great extent.

00:26:00:02 - 00:26:22:12 Richard So stories and being able to tell them was a really, really good skill, not only for your history to know where you come from and who you came from, but also we used it as a game. You know, it was an intellectual game as well. It was a it was a sign of intelligence. It was a sign of mental agility to be able to tell stories out of anything.

00:26:22:13 - 00:26:27:08 Richard And that's something my children grew up with and now my grandchildren.

00:26:27:08 - 00:26:47:04 Gemma Yeah, my son's getting involved now as well, is showing a particular love for taking photographs but pretty much for anything. And it's it's something we do to bond with each other. I got a3d pen delivered yesterday and he was so excited. I think we're just very crafty people at heart.

00:26:47:19 - 00:27:09:09 Richard Stories are just a great way to connect because, you know, we didn't build this in the past. We knew that stories connected to each other. We knew that stories connected you to your home. But what we didn't know was all of the chemicals that get released. When you listen to stories and all that bonding that goes on. So, yeah, stories incredibly important to nomadic people.

00:27:09:09 - 00:27:12:04 Richard It's another part of the glue that keeps us together.

00:27:12:16 - 00:27:38:03 Gemma So triple C and 53 to make another every year at Christmas time to do with disability and showcasing disabled talent. And the idea that I was chosen this year and it was inspired by me and it's about a little boy who wants to go to the grotto at the sea for the Christmas, but the Christmas market is just too, too much for him.

00:27:38:03 - 00:28:04:21 Gemma As an autistic kid. It's a sensory nightmare. It's just too much going on. And I said to me, I said, you've been invited to play the boy. If you want. No, no, no, no. I just want to see film going to be. So he's very excited to tell everybody kept I'm the inspiration. That night, his mom took him in and sees a letter by his bed and it says that, you know, Dear Father Christmas, do you have like a quiet letter that I can come to the mum's, get online and organise a neurodiverse friendly Santa's grotto.

00:28:05:02 - 00:28:21:16 Gemma And we were, we were filming at the Grotto in the Coronation Street set. So he's very excited to be there on the set and see how it works and see all the props and everything like that. But yeah, he was, he wanted to be sort of behind the camera looking at how it went on.

00:28:21:16 - 00:28:34:11 Gemma So I think he really has a future behind the camera. So yeah, it's all come out in different ways, but we're all creatives, warmth.

00:28:34:19 - 00:28:54:15 Richard Comfort, acceptance, all of those things that you need to create. So that they feel safe. And one of the things that you're always doing, I think, as a parent for any parent is to create a safe environment. So that child, whatever goes on on the outside world, that child feels safe in that environment.

00:28:55:15 - 00:29:29:12 Gemma Do you know what? It's probably the distant sound of my husband watching sport downstairs. Oh, my. Oh, my, my stuff, my work stuff is upstairs and sort of just the kind of distant sound of like American football or something from from downstairs. And the sound of Tommy in his room toppling over his. He's got, like, these giant Lego bricks they make very distinct sound.

00:29:29:17 - 00:29:52:12 Gemma So toppling over his Lego bricks or kind of laughing to himself. Just those kind of sounds of the house ticking on the washing machine. Go in and yeah, just just knowing that everything's. Everything's okay. Yeah.

00:29:52:12 - 00:30:18:10 Richard And for me, I mean, whether you're trampoline or whether you're static or wherever you are, it's people that make home it's, you know, the the old saying of home is where the heart is. I don't think home. Home is where the people are. So however those people are in your family, whoever they're close to you and whatever your family is, you know, it's not necessarily blood relations, is it, with family, whoever your people are.

00:30:18:24 - 00:30:32:01 Richard And that's where home is.

00:30:32:01 - 00:30:43:08 Marnie Find us on your favourite streaming platforms, released weekly on Mondays. Follow us on Social Media dwelling_pod powered by Transmission Roundhouse.