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

‘I don’t want to be a Nazi,’ I told her.

‘But you’re not a Nazi,’ she said.

She smiled and tucked the blankets in around my neck so that only my head was out. I told her what the boys outside the shop were saying about us.

‘I don’t want them to call me a Nazi,’ I said.

‘Ignore them,’ she said. She looked at me for a while and said they were the real Nazis. She said I shouldn’t worry about it so much, because it was usually people who had something to hide who called other people Nazis. ‘They want to make everybody believe that they’re innocent. So they call other people Nazis, as often as they can. It’s the same the world over.’

She stroked my forehead. She said it was not important what the boys outside the shop said. If I was a real Nazi, then I would know it myself. Maybe you can hide it from other people by pointing the finger somewhere else, but you can’t hide things like that from yourself. What’s inside your head is what matters.

‘But that won’t stop them.’

‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You can’t go around telling the whole world what you’re not. That would be ridiculous. I can’t send you down the road to the shop with a sign around your neck saying “I’m not a Nazi.”’

It was time to concentrate on good things. Soon I would be better again, running around like before with no dogs howling in my chest. And my father has a new plan, she said, a plan to make money, so that we can take the wallpaper down. Sometimes he is very hard, she said, but he knows what’s good for Ireland. He doesn’t mean to be angry, but he has a lot to worry about and he’s doing his best. And the next day he was busy downstairs starting a new business that would make us rich, so we could take down the old wallpaper. He bought a desk for the front room. He put the telephone on it and a desk-light so he could sit down and have his own office. He bought lots of stationery, too, and gave the business a name. Kaiser and Co., he called it, because that was my mother’s name and her family had been in business for a long time in Kempen before they went bankrupt. He got a machine that printed the name on to paper, so he wouldn’t have to write it out every time. And when the business was set up, he sat at his desk waiting for phone calls and saying there should be less noise in the house, because he had to try and guess what the people of Ireland needed most at that moment.

My mother said I was getting better. She let me go downstairs to the front room to see the new office. My father was out buying stamps and I lay on the sofa with all the cushions and blankets while my mother sat at the desk with her diary, writing in all the things that were happening in our family. She glued everything in, like photographs and locks of hair and tickets to the zoo. She wrote in lots of stories, like me not giving the right answer and Franz going to bed every night, laying out his socks in the shape of a crucifix. She also put in things that were happening outside in the world, like the photograph from the newspaper of the tanks in Hungary, and a photograph of the Irishman, Ronnie Delaney on his knees thanking God for winning the race at the Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Then she went into the kitchen and it was our turn to play office. Maria started drawing a picture on the wall and Franz found a matchstick.

‘Light it,’ I said. But I didn’t even have to say that, because the match was saying it himself with his little red head, asking to be lit. Franz struck it along the wall and it flared up. He blew it out straightaway, but my father must have heard it. His good ear can hear things from miles away. He asked if we had lit a match. He called my mother in because she has a good nose and between them they were able to prove it. She said that’s why people get married, because one person has a good ear and the other has a good nose, and hopefully we would have both and that would help us not to do anything in our lives that we would regret later.

Sometimes my mother was able to talk around trouble. Sometimes you couldn’t stop things happening so you tiptoed around them instead, she said. Even when there should be real trouble and my father should be much more angry than ever before, she was able to find another way out. My father proved that we had lit a match but he had other things to get angry about. He saw what Maria had done. She had taken a crayon and drawn lines all along the wall, right around the room.

‘Look at that,’ my mother said, and my father was frowning hard. But then she had an idea to stop him getting angry. She clapped her hands together and said it was the most beautiful drawing she had ever seen in her life and they had to take a photograph of it for the diary. It was a drawing of my mother with her arms stretching all the way around the four walls, embracing everyone who came into the room. And anyway, she said, there should be no more anger in our house, because we had a big plan for the business, Kaiser and Co. My father thought of something that the Irish people needed most. They were going to import crosses from a famous place in Germany, hand-carved wooden crosses from Oberammergau.

I was still sick. The howling dogs came back again, and something started happening to one of my legs as well. It swelled up bit by bit, until it was twice the size of the other one. Onkel Ted came to make the sign of the cross and Dr Sheehan came too, because I was still a Nazi and I knew it. He called me ‘young man’ and said it was serious this time. My leg was about to explode. I had to go to hospital and an ambulance came. I couldn’t walk, so the men came up the stairs and wrapped me up in a red blanket, then carried me down, through the hallway and out the door, past the people on the street standing around the gate. My mother was crying and the neighbours said I would soon be better again, please God. They would all pray for me every day and every night.

Inside the ambulance I couldn’t see where I was going, so I tried to follow the streets in my head, around each corner, past the church and past the people’s park. But then I got lost and I was blind with my eyes wide open and I knew they were taking me to a different country again where they spoke only English. I could smell the hospital and the doctors and nurses were standing all around me looking down. They listened to my chest and heard the dogs howling. They looked at my leg and measured it. Every day, new doctors came to examine it and stick needles into it. Some of them said it was a mystery. It made them scratch their heads, because nothing like that had ever happened before in the medical books and they had no way of making it better. And then one day, the howling stopped. The swelling in my leg started going down again, and my mother came to visit me with a new toy car and said I was getting better. The nurse showed me the measurements on the chart. The doctors were amazed and said my leg would be famous and would enter into history, if only they could explain it. The nurse said I was famous already, because I was a German-Irish boy and everybody knew me. At night I begged her to let me go home. She smiled and stroked my head and said I still had to stay in hospital until the doctors said I was fully back to normal.

‘I’m good again,’ I said.

‘You mean you’re better,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m better,’ I said. ‘I’m too better.’

‘Of course you are, love,’ she said. But still she could not let me go until the doctors said so. Everybody was gone and the hospital was quiet. All lights were switched off except for the small one at the door. The nurse was tidying up all around me and not saying very much. Her white shoes were making tiny squeaks on the floor.

‘I’m not a Nazi,’ I said.

Then she looked up and smiled.