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

Every night, we pray for luck in business. We pray for people in Germany and for people in Ireland, for Ta Maria and for Onkel Wilhelm and for Uncle Gerald who drinks to much in Skibbereen. Then we pray for the new baby, too. One at a time, my mother allows us to listen to her tummy, a little brother or sister kicking and playing football, she says. Then I lie awake listening to them whispering as they go into bed. Every night I can hear my mother saying that money doesn’t matter, that there are far more important things in life than money, because we’ll be rich once the new baby is born. Every night, I hear her washing her feet because your feet are your best friends.

Every morning, my father walks up to the station with the suitcase in one hand and his briefcase in the other. He stops halfway to swap over the briefcase and the suitcase, then he carries on. At lunchtime he leaves the office and walks around the city with the suitcase, going around to all the different toy shops and department stores. And every evening he comes home again and stops halfway to change over, because the suitcase is getting heavier all the time, not lighter, and the handle makes a mark on his hand. He has tried every shop in Dublin, but not one single hat has been sold. He starts going to all the hotels and pubs instead, even as far away as the airport on the other side of the city. And one night he came home so late on the bus that he could not even carry the suitcase up the road any more, it was so heavy. He was limping and the suitcase was left beside the bus stop, until my mother went down to collect it with the pram. Then it was my father who took off his shoes and socks one by one to wash his feet, because your feet can be your worst enemy, too.

There is nothing wrong with the party hats and crackers and caramel canes. Everybody says they’re just lovely. The people in the shops and pubs and hotels say they would love to buy them but they can’t. It has nothing to do with them being German or Germany losing the war or what the Nazis did. And it’s got nothing to do with the Irish famine either, or the people of Ireland not having the money to spend on themselves and celebrating and having parties. The problem is not the party hats and crackers. It’s the name, our family name. My father will not sell anything to anyone unless they say his name properly in Irish.

It’s the name that causes all the trouble. The Irish name: Ó hUrmoltaigh.

People jump back with a strange expression and ask you to say it again. They don’t really trust anything Irish yet.

‘What’s that in English?’ they ask.

But you can’t betray your family name. My father says we can’t give the English version, Hamilton, no matter how often they ask for it. We can’t even admit that an English version exists. If they call us Hamilton, we pretend it’s not us they’re talking to. Our name is proof of who we are and how Irish we are. We have to be able to make a sacrifice, even if they laugh at us. They can torture us and make martyrs of us and nail us to the cross and still we won’t give in. It would be a lot easier to let them have their way, to give the English name, just to be friendly and make it simple so they’ll buy things. But my father says there can be no compromise. It’s hard for business, but you can’t betray your own name, because if the cheque is made out to Hamilton, he will send it back and not accept it until it’s paid in Irish.

Your name is important. It’s like your face or your smile or your skin. There’s a song at school about a man in Donegal who once wrote his name in Irish on a donkey cart. It was the time when Ireland was still under the British and it was forbidden to write your name in Irish. Every cart had to have the name of the owner written on it in English. So when a policeman saw the name in Irish, the man was arrested and brought to court. The bobby argued that he saw no name on the cart, because Irish was not a language that he could read. It was a famous court case with Patrick Pearse as the lawyer for the cart owner. And even though the law was still British and the cart owner lost the case and had to pay a big fine, it was still a big victory for the Irish, because after that, all the cart owners in Donegal started putting their names in Irish on their carts and there was nothing the police could do because there were too many of them. So that’s why we have our name in Irish, too.

My mother said she would try and sell the party hats with a smaller suitcase. Every evening she went out to the local hotels and clubs, while my father stayed at home to look after us. The Royal Marine Hotel, the Royal Yacht Club, the Royal Irish Yacht Club, the Crofton Hotel, the Pierre Hotel, the Castle Hotel, the Salt Hill Hotel and the Khyber Pass Hotel. She walked so much that the new shoes were hurting. She went all the way up the hill a second time to meet the manager of the Shangri-La Hotel, the man who could not say no.

The Shangri-La was an old hotel with long blue-velvet curtains hanging in the windows, full of old smoke. The man who couldn’t say no asked her to sit down in the lounge so he could look at what was in the suitcase properly. At first he shook his head from side to side and she thought she had come for nothing. But then he said they were absolutely beautiful. He praised them so much, my mother says, that she suddenly thought she had sold them all in one go, without even saying a word. She had dreams in her head of running home with an empty suitcase and ordering more and more of them to come over immediately. The problem was how fast they could get the Irish government to let go of the boxes when they arrived in future. The Shangri-La manager didn’t have to be told they were German-made, because anything that was really well made had to be German, he said. He knew that she was German, too, by her accent, but then he asked for her name and all the trouble started again.

‘Ó hUrmoltaigh,’ she said. Irmgard Ó hUrmoltaigh.

‘Good Lord, I’ll never remember that,’ he said.

He pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered her one, but my mother doesn’t know how to smoke yet.

‘Would that be Hurley in English?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she smiled. He picked up one of the sailor hats to admire it and she waited for him to make up his mind, to say how many of the party hats he was going to take, how many of the caramel canes and crackers. The people in all the other hotels and shops would soon be kicking their own backsides for not taking them while they had the chance.

‘Hermon, Harmon? What about Harmon?’

My mother repeated her name in Irish, because you can’t betray your skin. He tried again and again to get it out of her in English. And when he ran out of guesses, he finally tried to pronounce it in Irish, but it was such hard work.

‘Ó Hermity, Ó Hamilty, Ó Hurmilly … Ó Himmel.’

My mother could not help laughing. It was her feet, she says. Her feet were tired and singing and begging to be washed and put to bed. So when the manager scratched his head and blew out smoke and called her ‘Ó Himmel’, she could not help laughing out loud.

Mrs O’Himmel — Mrs O’Heaven.

Nobody had come up with that one before. The party hats and caramel sticks were lying all around and she was laughing at her own name. It was the hardest name in the world. Nobody in the whole of Ireland got it right, not even those who spoke fluent Irish. Most of the neighbours and people in the shops made a complete mess of it, so that after a long time, my mother didn’t mind what way they said it as long as it still proved how Irish she was and it didn’t get her in trouble with my father. The postman called her Mrs O’Hummity, and the man in the fish shop called her Mrs O’Hommilty, and the man with one arm in the vegetable shop did his best and called her Mrs O’Hervulty. If only they could have agreed on one version. But it was different every time. And there was always something funny about it, too, that made people smile, or try not to smile. Some people could only manage Mrs O’Hum. The butcher with the cigarette in his mouth just called her Mrs O … And sometimes she came home with no name at all and wished things were still as plain and simple as they once were long ago when her name was Irmgard Kaiser.