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

It was not the first time something like that happened in Ireland either. Her uncle was put out of his home and the cottage burned down because he refused to pay rent to the landlord any more. He had nowhere to go after that and if it wasn’t for the local people who built him a tiny cottage to stay in, he would have become a traveller with no place to settle any more, like all the the people on the move after the famine. We would have been travellers, too, moving around from one place to another all our lives and knocking on doors to sell carpets, my father says, so that’s why he gives them money when they come to the door and say ‘God Bless.’ In the end, her uncle went to America. But before he left Ireland he made one great speech for the Land League on a platform in Skibbereen. He stood up and said it was time to wipe landlords off the face of this earth. Then he swung his right arm over the crowd and knocked the hat off the priest sitting down behind him as he was doing it, so that everyone laughed about that story, long after he was gone. There were lots of people put out of their homes, my father says, until Michael Collins stood up for them and started the resistance.

Sometimes my mother goes over to the neighbours for coffee mornings. Mrs Corcoran invites all her friends around for sandwiches and cakes and gossip. They think my mother is very posh and unfriendly, because she has no gossip and speaks in a German accent all the time. My mother says Mrs Corcoran has a funny accent, too, because she and her friends all speak English like no other Irish people. My father says it’s the famine. Even the people with money to burn and accents that hurt your mouth are still afraid of the famine. They speak like that because they’re afraid of the Irish language coming back and killing everybody in the country this time. He says Irish people drink too much and talk too much and don’t want to speak Irish, because it stinks of poverty and dead people left lying in the fields. That’s why they speak posh English and pretend that nothing ever happened. My father talks about people dying on coffin ships going to America and my mother talks about people dying on trains going to Poland. My father talks of evictions in Leap and my mother talks of evictions in Kempen. My father says our people died in the famine and my mother says those who died under the Nazis are our people, too. Everybody has things they can’t forget.

My mother likes Irish people, but she doesn’t want to go to any more coffee mornings. They talk about going on holidays all the time and about new things like cars and washing machines. Mrs Corcoran talks about where she has been in the summer and shows the souvenirs she brought back, like the black bull from Spain and a big bowl with zigzags from Greece. This time, my mother says, she was in South Africa and brought back lots of wood carvings. But that’s not all she brought back either, because right in the middle of the coffee morning, Mrs Corcoran started saying that black people would never be the same as white people. They would never catch up no matter how much education they got.

In the shoe shop, we sit in a line and get a liquorice shoelace each while my mother tries on shoes for a long time. She taps the heels together to hear what they sound like. She says it’s as hard to buy shoes in Ireland as it is to sell a crucifix. Sometimes you have to beg people to sell you something. At first the assistant smiled and said every pair of shoes looked gorgeous. She thought people from Germany had to try on every pair in the shop before they could make up their mind. My mother started imagining shoes that didn’t even exist, shoes from Italy, great shoes she had seen in the past sometime. My mother and the assistant didn’t understand each other. In the end, she went for the dark blue pair that matched her blue dress with the white squiggles, the shoes that made her feet look smallest of all. She walked up along the floor one last time, turned in front of the mirror, then came back and paid.

Now my mother can sell anything. Franz carried the box with the new shoes and we walked across O’Connell Street holding hands in a chain. When you look up at Nelson’s Pillar you sometimes think the white clouds are standing still and the city is moving, running fast out to the sea. If you close your eyes you can hear the sound of footsteps and buses and cars all around you. Seagulls, too. There were seagulls on the roof of the GPO and seagulls standing on the shoulders of Daniel O’Connell.

My father took a half-day and came to meet us in the restaurant. He looked at the new shoes and said they were beautiful. He said it was a great day for us because we would soon be in business, making a profit. There was a big smile on his face. He has lots of straight teeth and when he starts talking, he sometimes sounds like he’s making a speech. He starts blinking and speaking fast, as if he’ll never catch up with all the things he wants to say. My mother says there are lots of men who like to turn things into a joke and make people laugh. She says it’s good to laugh, but my father has a different way of doing things. He can laugh too, until the tears come into his eyes. But then he’s always serious again afterwards, because he is a man with ideas. A man, my mother says, who could never live for himself, only for his children and his country. That’s why he frowns, even when he’s not angry, because he’s in a hurry to do all the things that are still left unfinished in Ireland.

My mother said we could have a cake each, but not one of the pink ones because they’re too sweet and leave nothing to the imagination. My father didn’t want a cake because they were nothing like hers. He said people would fight each other over my mother’s cakes, and anything else that she put her hands to. Then he took her hands and held them up in the air for everyone in the restaurant to see. My mother smiled and got embarrassed. It looked like he was going to stand up and make a speech to the whole restaurant about her. My mother says you can sometimes be overcome by the smell of coffee. His eyes were soft. He said they were precious hands. He said it didn’t matter that we were left with hand-carved wooden crosses from Oberammergau all over the house, because there were plenty of new ideas. He mentioned other things that the Irish people needed very badly. Like umbrellas. And Christmas-tree stands. And German toys. We would sell things that were so well made and so beautiful that people would fight each other to buy them.

Afterwards my father bought hurling sticks, but said he would take them off us again if we used them as swords for fighting. It was dark by the time we went home and my father showed us the glass of whiskey that kept filling up again and again on the side of the building. There was a packet of cigarettes too that kept disappearing and lighting up again slowly, bit by bit. The seagulls were not there any more, but there were men shouting the names of newspapers on the street like seagulls. Herald-a-Press. Herald-a-Press. On the train, everybody was looking at us because we were the Germans with the hurling sticks. My mother told us the story about Rumpelstiltskin, who gave away his secret in the forest when he thought nobody was listening. Everybody on the train was listening to her. They all surrendered to the story, even though it was in German. One man was already asleep and Maria was trying hard to keep her eyes open. At the end of the story my mother always says the same thing: ’and if he isn’t dead yet, then he must be still alive’. So I think about that for a while and look out at the lights of the city, moving along and blinking.

It takes a long time for things to come to Ireland. My father and mother are waiting every day for a big box to arrive from Germany. He sits at his desk in the front room and my mother is in the breakfast room typing. Then my father gets a letter to say that the box has arrived in Dublin, but the Irish government won’t let it go until he pays them lots of money, nearly as much as he already paid for what’s inside. Then he collects the box in a taxi. In the front room, we sit around and wait for him to open it. It’s full of party hats for policemen and sailors and firemen and doctors and nurses. There are German crackers, too, and lots of caramel walking sticks in all colours. My mother says they’re beautiful, but we can’t play with them because they have to be sold. They put on some music and drink cognac, because a little bit of Germany has come over to Ireland at last and my mother doesn’t feel so homesick. Maybe Germany is not so far away as we thought, she says. Then it’s time for my father to put some of the hats and caramel canes into a suitcase, so he can take them around to the shops the next day. It won’t take long before the whole box is sold. It won’t be long before these party hats will be seen in every shop all over the city and people will be fighting each other to get more.