Streetfighters: Real Fighting Men Tell Their Stories by Davies Julian

Author:Davies, Julian [Davies, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908479266
Publisher: Milo Books Ltd
Published: 2011-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

JOHN “LAMBY” HATFIELD

Leicestershire

Life on the road was tough in the Forties and Fifties, and John Hatfield learned to look after himself from a young age. Some of his earliest memories are of fighting for his family’s honour. Fellow travellers, local hard men or nightclub bouncers, it made no difference, they all went the same way – down.

I HAVE ALWAYS been a travelling man. I was actually born in a caravan and lived most of my early life travelling. My mother was a proper gypsy but my father wasn’t. They had 15 children, with only seven surviving. We had a hard life but we all mixed in and got through it all. We would travel around picking strawberries, potatoes, beet and any other work we would find on the farms. It was hard times for our parents, but we kids didn’t see it like that, we were travelling the countryside in horse-drawn caravans and loving every minute of it. We didn’t have any schooling and had to work from an early age to survive. It’s the only life we knew.

We would make new friends every time we set up camp, only to get up some mornings to find they had moved on and we would meet up again at some later date. All the money us kids earned went straight into the pot for the whole family. Sometimes we would stay somewhere for a few months, other times we would only stay a few days, never knowing from one day to the next where we were going to end up.

I’m 66 years old now but can still remember like it was yesterday being a small, 14-year-old travelling lad. We had set up camp not far from here. We often travelled around with the Gaskin family, who are a big travelling family. We all grew up together and go back a long way. There was this older boy at the camp who was a good fighter; he was from the Shackle family. He was about 17 and had beaten all the other gypsy lads. In fact he had beaten one of my older brothers and three of my cousins. Well, it turns out everyone thought I was too young and small to be fighting, so nobody thought about me fighting him. One day my father and his good friend John Gaskin came back to the camp with all the men; they had been out to a pub and were in good spirits. Someone shouted to John that the Shackles’ lad had beaten all the other boys and was the best fighter.

John said to the Shackles’ boy, “So, you beat all these lads then?” and he points around to all the boys around the camp.

“Yes, I did,” said the boy.

John looks at him and holds out two large apples. “You fight Lamby here, who’s only a baby, and the winner gets these two apples.”

He looks at me and asks me, “Lamby, will you fight him?”

“Well, he’s a big lad, but yes, I will fight him,” I answered.

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