Hugo Hamilton - The Speckled People - A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

My mother says you can’t, keep people from talking in the grave. And you can’t keep them quiet by making them stay at home or locking them up or stopping them from writing in newspapers. That’s why you should never be afraid to speak. My father says that all the people who died in the Irish famine are still talking. They’re whispering with dry lips and staring out with empty eyes. He says you can’t go anywhere in Ireland without hearing them. You go out into the fields around west Cork, he says, and it’s never silent, not even for a moment. He says a lot of the people born after the famine could not talk because they had lost their language and that’s why they speak English and have to listen to the words first before they can be sure of what they’re saying. But all that will be put right now that we’re speaking Irish again.

You’re better off dead than not being able to speak, my mother says. That’s what they tried to do to Onkel Gerd. He was the Bürgermeister, the lord mayor, and they came to him every day and asked him to do things he didn’t want. Ta Maria was the sister of my mother’s mother Berta and she was called Frau Bürgermeister, Mrs Lord Mayor. Then they suddenly had five daughters to look after and send to school every day on the train to the convent in Mühlhausen. So when people came to the house and said the lord mayor should belong to the Nazi party, he said he was the father of five girls and shook his head every time. They were friendly and polite and spoke to Ta Maria, too, on the way across the Buttermarkt square, hoping that she would change his mind. They liked Onkel Gerd and said he was a good lord mayor, so they didn’t want him to be made small like the other man Lamprecht who had to be taken away to a camp in Dachau because he kept on writing in the newspaper. They said they were hoping that would not happen to a man with five lovely new daughters.

Onkel Gerd sat in silence for a long time every evening, my mother says, because it was not easy to know what was right and wrong sometimes. My mother and her sisters kept on going to school and every Sunday they went to the graveyard to visit their father and mother. They passed by the old house on the Buttermarkt square but never went inside again because there were other people living there now. The town had changed. Everyone was poor and it was all right to beg and have a leg missing. People who had never dreamed of asking for things before were coming up to the house looking for help. So then there was an election and the Nazi party promised there would be no beggars in Germany ever again. At night, people said there were groups of men gathering around fires outside the town. People didn’t know whether it was exciting or frightening or both, because on the day of the election the town was full of cars and people drinking beer in their best clothes, and when Onkel Gerd went up to vote, there was trouble.

My mother says they were very sly. They wanted to see what side Onkel Gerd was on, so they gave him a ballot paper with a special mark on it. He looked at the names of the parties and the boxes beside them to make an X in, with the Nazi party at the top and all the other parties like the SPD and the Central party below. When he held the ballot paper up to the light he found a small watermark in the corner that should not have been there. He knew they could check afterwards to see where he put the X.

‘This is still a secret vote,’ Onkel Gerd said and handed back the paper.

Everybody had their eyes on him and the hall was silent. He knew there would be trouble because he asked what the watermark was doing on his ballot paper, but the official just smiled and said he was making too much of it. In any case, they said, if he had a clear conscience and had nothing to hide, then the watermark wouldn’t bother him because everyone else was voting for the Nazi party, too.

‘What about the secret ballot?’ Onkel Gerd demanded. If everyone was going to vote for the Nazi party, then wasn’t it better if they did so by choice? He refused to leave. He knew it was the only way that he could be honest and not take the easy way out like everyone else. He didn’t say he was against anyone or for anyone else. He just stood and waited while the officials all whispered among themselves and wondered what to do. Until they gave him a clean ballot paper at last, because they couldn’t bear to look at his face any more and they didn’t want the lord mayor standing around in the polling station all day with his arms folded for everyone to see.

My mother says it’s important to make a stand. Onkel Gerd won his fight in the polling station, but he went home and knew that everything was lost. Within days they heard from the other towns in the Rhineland that the lord mayors who had not spotted the watermark on the ballot paper were not so lucky. They were put out of office immediately the following day and replaced by people on the side of the Nazi party. Many of them were beaten up, my mother says. The fist people came to their houses and some of them were sick for a long time and couldn’t hear properly afterwards or had trouble with their kidneys and never went to work again.

Onkel Gerd stayed on as lord mayor because nobody knew where he put his X. But that didn’t last long either because they came to his office every day and asked him to do things he didn’t want. And one day, when it was suddenly against the law to be a lord mayor without belonging to the Nazi party, he had to go. They gave him a last chance, but he still shook his head. Another man was waiting to take over and sit down as soon as Onkel Gerd cleared his desk. There was some handshaking and polite conversation, but then it was over quite suddenly and it was hard to walk home that day. It was hard to walk past people on the street because everybody knew he was nothing any more. And it was even harder to explain to Ta Maria and their five new daughters. She had her apron up to her eyes as they gathered together in the living room. He stood there to tell them that even though he was not the lord mayor any more and nobody knew where the money was going to come from, he would still do everything he could to look after them. He had been made small, but he would not let them down. Some of the women still called Ta Maria Frau Bürgermeister on the street, but that was just a habit and it didn’t really matter. Anyone who was not with the Nazis had nothing more to say.

After that, Onkel Gerd would sit at home for a long time without saying a word. Sometimes he played the lute in the evening and sometimes he lit a cigar and let the smoke fill the room until nobody could see him any more and it looked like he had disappeared. It looked like the Bürgermeister had vanished from the town altogether because that’s what the Nazi people wanted, and even when he went for the short walk to Mass or to the library, nobody saw him. Mostly he stayed at home reading books, because there were very few people he could talk to and reading was the best kind of conversation you could have. With no secrets held back. It was as good as any conversation you could have in the graveyard.

I am the boy who slapped his teacher in the face. I’m the boy who’s not afraid of anything, my mother says. One day she didn’t come to collect me. I ran up to the gate of the school but she wasn’t there. She was late because the bus driver didn’t see her, even though she had her hand out. She says bus drivers in Ireland are blind because they don’t know what it’s like to be a passenger. So she didn’t come and I ran all the way home in the rain. She was waiting at the door when I got back. She took off my shoes and stuffed them with newspapers. She put them beside the boiler and started rubbing my head with the towel and laughing because my hair was standing up like a hedgehog. And then it was time to make a cake. I stood beside her in the kitchen and tried to teach her Irish. She was holding the bowl in one arm and stirring with the other. I looked at her mouth as she repeated the word in Irish for milk. But it was all wrong. Her lips were still trying to speak German and it was funny to hear her say it as if she didn’t know what milk was. I tried other words like the Irish for water, bread, butter, but she didn’t know what they were either. Every time she tried to get it right, she had to smile and surrender, because she knew that Irish was my language.