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

‘I’m not German,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

‘I know that, love. I believe you.’

It should be easier to sell a crucifix in Ireland. My mother closes the front door and stands in the hall with her coat still on, looking up at the picture of the Virgin Mary. She throws her arms up in the air and says she can’t understand it. She has been to every church and every convent and every hospital in Dublin. We went with her on the bus one day and a priest gave us a sweet each, a satin cushion. He smiled and nearly said yes to the cross, but then he shook his head at the last minute. Beautiful hand-carved oak crosses from Oberammergau and nobody wants them, my mother says. It’s hard to believe, when you think of everyone in Ireland praying twice a day at least and all they still have to pray for.

‘Surely somebody needs a crucifix,’ she says.

That’s the whole idea of my father starting a business, to sell something the Irish people really need, something you believe in yourself. We believe in crosses, so we kneel down every night and pray that we will have God on our side as a partner in business. But in the end, nobody wants them and my mother sits down in the kitchen without even taking her coat off, shaking her head from side to side and breathing out slowly as if she wants to be the best at not breathing in again until you have to. Maybe they’re too expensive, she says. Maybe it’s too late and there are too many crosses in Ireland already. Or maybe they’re the wrong kind of crosses and Irish people only like the ones where Jesus has blood on his hands and feet and there’s a gash in his side and a scroll at the top saying INRI.

She doesn’t understand Ireland sometimes, because they like strange things like pink cakes and soft ice cream and salt and vinegar. They spend all their money on First Holy Communion outfits. They don’t like serving people and they don’t like being in a queue either, because when the bus comes, they forget about the rules and just rush for the door. The bus drivers in Ireland are blind and the shopkeepers don’t want to sell things to you. The butcher has a cigarette in his mouth while he’s cutting the meat, and nobody knows how to say the word no. In Ireland, they nod when they mean no, and shake their heads when they’re agreeing with you. She says it’s like in the films, when somebody looks up with a worried face and says one thing, it means that the opposite is going to happen. When somebody says nobody is going to come out alive and that they’re all going to die, then at the last minute somebody comes along to the rescue. And when everybody at the bus stop begins to say that the buses have stopped running, along comes the bus at last and they all rush forward to get on.

Sometimes Irish people don’t understand my mother either. When she’s trying to be helpful, they think she’s interfering and being nosy. When she tries to warn some of the other mothers about their children eating too many sweets or crossing the road without looking, they say they don’t want some German woman telling their kids what to do. One day, there was a woman outside the shop with a brand new pram with big wheels. It had the word Pedigree written on the side and the woman was very proud of it, because it was like a new car. My mother admired the new pram, but she warned her to be careful it didn’t fall over with the baby inside. So then the woman called her a Nazi and told her to mind her own business.

Nobody knows what my mother is trying to say sometimes. And nobody has any idea where Oberammergau is either. She tells them it’s a place in Bavaria, where they have the crucifixion every ten years, a bit like going up to Croagh Patrick. They nod and say yes and look very interested, so why don’t they buy hand-carved oak crosses with no blood, just nails and the rest left up to your imagination?

‘It’s the shoes,’ she says at last.

Nobody will buy anything if you don’t look half-decent. You can tell a person’s character by their hands and their shoes, she says, because that’s what Ta Maria always said. Even though Onkel Gerd always said the opposite, that it’s only what’s inside your head that makes you either a scoundrel or a saint. But when you’re trying to sell something, my mother says, it doesn’t matter if you’re a scoundrel or a saint, because what you’re wearing is all they look at. You have to be honest, she says, but you can’t let people know that the wallpaper is hanging off the walls at home.

Then we head off into the city so she can get a pair of decent shoes. I swing around the bus stop and climb up as far as I can until the bus comes. We fight over the window seat, and over who gets the ticket, until my mother says that’s enough, it’s not important to win. Everybody on the bus turns around to look at us because we’re German again. Then we have to behave and sit quietly and bless ourselves whenever we pass by a church, to prove that the Germans are decent people and we did nothing wrong. I pretend to be Irish and look at the IMCO building passing by like a white ship.

My father says the Irish people can’t live on their imagination for ever. They need money in their pockets now. It’s time to work hard so we can be free and so that nobody will ever starve or be poor again like all the people in west Cork were. He doesn’t want the song about emigration to go on for ever, so it’s time to speak Irish and make Ireland a better place to live. He tells us how his mother Mary Frances spent all her money on putting him through university in Dublin while she fasted and hardly had anything to live on herself. He tells us exactly how much he had to spend each week on food and lodgings, and how he had two pennies left over, one for the Mass on Sunday and one for a razor blade. He sent his washing home by post and cycled all the way home to Leap at Christmas because he could not afford the train or the bus. He had no way of borrowing from a bank, and if it wasn’t for the Jesuits who lent him the money for the final year, we wouldn’t be here now but in America or Canada maybe. He paid back the money as fast as possible when he got his first job as an engineer in Dublin, making matches with Maguire and Patterson.

Even when my father started sending money home, Mary Frances was not able to spend it on herself, because Irish people didn’t know how to do that yet. All she wanted in her life was to make sure that her two sons were educated, one an engineer and the other a Jesuit. And that was the happiest day of her life, when my father came home to Leap with initials after his name. Better than that, the Jesuits even allowed Onkel Ted to go home for a day to see her for the first time in seven years. So she sat looking at her two sons together in the kitchen for a few hours at least, until Onkel Ted had to leave again very early in the morning to get back to the seminary in the Bog of Allen.

His father died in Cork and the navy refused to give them a pension at first. His mother spent all she had on getting the body home for burial in the mountain graveyard above Glandore. After that she could no longer pay the rent and the landlord wanted her out of the house. A letter went to the local police station telling them to ‘proceed with eviction forthwith’, so she walked up to the church and told the priest she was going to bed. She was not a political person, and some people didn’t mind all too much one way or another who was in the government, because it didn’t make a bit of difference to them. Some people in Ireland had no time for guns either, only education. But everybody hated landlords. So she took her two boys upstairs and got into bed. If they were going to evict her, she said, they would have to drag them out of the bed.