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

‘ Ceol ,’ I said. ‘That’s music.’

‘ Ceol ,’ she repeated, but it was still not right.

She kneeled down and watched me say it again. She held her hands up in the air as if she was counting to ten with cake mixture all over her fingers. She followed my lips with her eyes but she could see no difference. Then she continued making the cake and trying the word out by herself.

‘ Ceol, ceol, ceol .’

She thought it was funny that I was teaching her how to speak. I was the teacher now and she was the schoolgirl learning to say the words and trying to grow up. Sometimes in the evening after dinner, she went back to the school on the bus to learn Irish and then we had to help her with her homework. But she can’t be Irish. It’s too hard.

Then I made a rule about Irish in the kitchen. I drew a line and said that anyone crossing the border into my land was not allowed to speak German, only Irish. If my mother or Franz or Maria wanted to come in, they had to stop and say something in Irish first. And if they spoke German, I expelled them. Even my mother has to cross over to Irish if she wants to get into my country. But she laughs. She says there will be no yellow cake with chocolate on top if I stop her. She says you can’t make rules like that in the kitchen. It’s like something the Nazis would do. I keep saying that nobody can break my rules but she keeps laughing at me. She says she’s going to cross over and tickle me. She puts the cake in the oven and then says the word in Irish for music again. And even though she doesn’t say it right, even though she’s still saying it with German lips, I can’t stop her coming across the line and I can’t stop her laughing and tickling me to death.

First of all you have to mix the butter with the sugar. You have to do it hard, my mother says, but after that, everything has to be done very gently because you don’t want to make an unhappy cake. If you bake in anger it will taste of nothing. You have to treat the ingredients with respect and affection. You lift the mixture and slip the beaten egg inside, the way you would slip a love letter into an envelope, she says and laughs out loud. You fold in the flour with air-kisses and you stir in one direction only, otherwise people will get the taste of doubt. And when you lay the mixture into the baking tin, you place a piece of brown paper all around the edge and another flat piece across the top to create a dome that will keep it from burning. And once the letter is posted and the cake is in the oven, you have to be very quiet and wait. You don’t trudge around the house shouting and slamming doors. You don’t argue and you don’t say a bad word about anyone. You whisper, you nod, you tiptoe around the kitchen.

My mother likes the radio. She likes the song ‘Roses Are Red, My Love, Violets Are Blue’, but she’s not allowed to sing it and she can only listen to it when my father is at work. When he comes home he switches on the news. The light comes on and you see all the names of the different cities like Budapest and Prague, but it takes a while for the radio to warm up and the voices to come out. After the news the radio should be speaking Irish. If you sing a song, sing an Irish song, the man says, and my father nods his head. If there’s a pop song in English my father suddenly pushes back the chair with a big yelp on the floor and rushes over to switch it off. The voice doesn’t take time to go away again, it disappears immediately. But even in the few seconds it takes my father to switch it off, before it gets a chance to go as far as ‘Sugar is sweet, my love …’, enough of the song has escaped and the words are floating around the breakfast room. We all sit around the table in silence, but you can still hear the song echoing along the walls. It gets stuck to the ceiling. Stuck to the inside of your head. And even though my mother is not allowed to sing it, she can’t stop humming to herself in the kitchen afterwards.

In Germany, my mother says, there was good music on the radio. You had great singers like Richard Tauber and you heard some good stories and theatre if you were lucky. But it wasn’t long before you got the speeches. Onkel Gerd said people thought Goebbels and Hitler had rabies because they were always foaming at the mouth. He said that having the radio on was like letting somebody into the house, somebody you thought you could trust, somebody who would pretend to be your friend and then start saying things in your ear. And once you invited them in for afternoon coffee and cake, you would be slow to argue back. Sometimes Onkel Gerd talked back at the radio, standing in the middle of the room and waving his finger, but there was no point because the radio never listens. Ta Maria said you could always tell a decent person by their shoes and their hands, but Onkel Gerd said the radio would sit there all polite and decent in your front room and, before you knew it, you found yourself agreeing with the most outrageous gossip and resentment. The radio made you feel that you belonged to a great country. It made you feel safe and hurt and proud, all at the same time. Some people had no friends at all and no mind of their own, only the radio and the voice of Hitler foaming at the mouth. The radio was a scoundrel who never listens, a scoundrel with nice hands and nice shoes and nice music.

‘You can’t switch off what’s happening,’ Ta Maria said.

But Onkel Gerd preferred the silence. Sometimes they huddled together and listened to jazz music from London in secret, like my mother does when my father is out at work. But that’s dangerous, too. In our house, it’s dangerous to sing a song or say what’s inside your head. You have to be careful or else my father will get up and switch you off like the radio.

In Kempen, the man on the radio could just walk in the front door of any house and invite himself in for coffee and cake. People threw their arms out. Sometimes they brought out their best linen tablecloth and lit a candle. Some of them got dressed up to listen to the radio. If it was a Strauss concert they clapped along with the audience at the state concert hall in Vienna as if they were there themselves. They believed what they heard. And before they knew it, they were clapping after some speech, too, because they had no idea who they were letting into their home. The town hall on the Buttermarkt square was then called the ‘brown house’ because it was full of men in brown uniforms. The newspaper man Lamprecht was taken away to the KZ in Dachau where he could not say another word and that’s what was going to happen to Uncle Gerd, too, if he opened his mouth. They had switched him off. He had no name any more and no voice. He had no face and no hair and no eyes. Nobody saw him, even when he walked over to Mass on Sunday morning. And then one day they made a rule that the Jewish people had no names and no faces either. Everybody had to pretend they had disappeared, too. When they came to the market square you could not buy their pickled gherkins, you could not even say ‘good morning’ to them. They still walked around the streets but nobody could see them. It was easy enough, because once the lord mayor was gone and the newspaper man was gone, anyone else could disappear, too.

‘ Unverschämt ,’ Ta Maria said. It was a rule that nobody would be able to obey. Onkel Gerd said it was un-German and wouldn’t last long. He said they would continue to greet Jews in the street as always. No matter what rule they made in the brown house, they would carry on recognising Jewish names and faces. But it didn’t matter any more because it was like the people with no faces saying hello to other people with no faces. They might as well be like the people in the graveyard talking to each other. Nobody in the brown house cared very much whether Onkel Gerd was still saying hello to the Jews or not because he didn’t exist anyway. What they did care about was my mother and her sisters. They didn’t want them to disappear, so they made another rule which forced them to join the Bund deutscher Mädels — the League of German Girls. It was another rule that could not be obeyed. So they ignored it and continued to attend their own Catholic youth meetings until people came around to the house and asked questions. Three hundred other girls from Kempen and the surrounding district had all joined in the BDM rallies without question, so why not the Kaiser girls.