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

‘Ó hUrmoltaigh,’ she tried once more, because you can’t hate your own name. ‘It’s a Cork name. My husband is from County Cork.’

‘That explains everything,’ the manager said.

He wanted to know what brought her over to Ireland, and how she had married a man from Cork of all places. She said she loved the sea. She loved the smell of the sea and the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks. He asked her if she got homesick. He knew that she was only trying to sell these German things because she was so far away from home, because she could not go back to Germany herself and wanted instead to bring a bit of her country over here to Ireland. He asked her did she want a drink. He said she had a lovely accent and a lovely voice. He said he would love to hear her speaking a bit of German, anything at all, but then he wasn’t even looking at the hats any more, only at her and her shoes. He said he would love her to come back and have a drink some other time when she was not so busy. And when she asked him finally straight out about the hats and crackers, he threw out his arms and couldn’t say no. He couldn’t say yes and he couldn’t say no either. He said he would love to take them all, every last one of them, but he couldn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

It was all for nothing. It was even harder putting them back into the suitcase. It looked like there were more than she started with. Instead of any of them being sold, my mother says it looked like they were starting to reproduce. On the bus home she fell asleep and only woke up after she had gone way past her stop. She walked back and when she arrived in the door she had to sit down with her coat still on and take off her shoes first because her feet were on fire. She had to close her eyes and wash her feet until they were friends with her again. She was very quiet. She could not speak and she would not let us listen to the baby in her tummy. She had no name any more.

One day, a man with a car came to take away the box with the party hats and crackers. We were allowed to choose one hat each, but the rest were sold off all around County Cork for nearly nothing and my father said it was a mistake to try and bring things over from Germany. He said it was better to produce things at home, so then my mother started a sweet factory instead. For weeks and weeks there was a smell of caramel and chocolate all over the house. Every night she was mixing and baking. Sometimes the sweets came out too hard or too soft, but my father said that’s the way any business started out, by experimenting. If they were not like shop sweets it was because they were far superior to shop sweets. My mother put them all in little jars with labels and ribbons. Soon there would be people queuing up outside our front door, my father said. But the problem was that nobody wanted home-made sweets. So the jars kept piling up, waiting and waiting on shelves under the stairs, until they eventually had to be given away or eaten by us. My mother laughed and said we were our own best customers, and when the last of the jars were gone we didn’t talk about the sweet factory any more either.

My father says the only way to make money in Ireland is not to spend it in the first place. So then he started switching off lights and using as little coal as possible. He made new rules. We would make our own bread and our own jam. He found a supermarket where groceries were cheaper than anywhere else, so he went there on the bus to bring home what was needed. When my mother ran out of butter one day and had to buy it in a local shop, he wanted to know why she was breaking the rules. She explained that to get the cheap butter, she would have to spend more money on the bus fare, so if you worked it out, the local butter was cheaper and quicker. She said you couldn’t save what you didn’t have in the first place. Anyway, there was nothing to worry about because we would be rich when the baby was born. But he frowned and slammed the door because everybody was breaking his rules.

After that my father sat at his desk in the front room on his own every night, until at last he came up with the right idea. Then he came running out, telling us that he had found it, what Ireland needed most. He was blinking again and talking very fast, trying to catch up with all the ideas in his head. How had he not seen it before? One Sunday afternoon when we were out walking he discovered that all street names were still in English. He stood by a sign that said Royal Terrace and wondered how any Irish speaker could walk around these streets without getting lost. So then he started writing letters to the government and to the corporation. The machine printed the address at the top of the page every time and my mother typed out the letters for him. Now things were working at last. Every morning he took a stack of letters with him to the post office. He had tried so many different things like crosses and hats and crackers and sweets and savings, but now he was in business, changing the names of the streets.

De Vesci Terrace, Albert Road, Silchester Road, Neptune Terrace, Nerano Road, Sorrento Road. He had them all changed into Irish, one by one. Royal Terrace became Ascal Ríoga, because money and profit were not everything, he said. On Sundays we walked everywhere to make sure that we covered them all. He told us about the great Irish poets and scholars who once lived in Munster where he came from, among them his own grandfather who was known as Tadhg Ó Donnabháin Dall, or Ted O’Donovan Blind. When the names of people and places all over Ireland were changed into English, all those poets and Irish speakers lost their way and suddenly found themselves in a foreign land. He told us how they all went blind overnight, stumbling around in the dark with no language. And now it was time to change the names back to Irish so the people knew where they were going again.

Then my mother was sick and had to stay in bed. We were allowed to go up to her room for a while and talk to her. Maria stroked her arm and I was the doctor. Until the real Dr Sheehan arrived and we had to wait outside the door. We could hear her crying because the baby had stopped playing football. It was still inside her tummy but it would not come out alive. I knew she was crying for other things, too, because Germany was so far away, because nobody in Ireland wanted party hats, and because she had no name any more, and no face and no feet in Ireland. Onkel Ted came and made the sign of the cross. There were shadows around her eyes when we were allowed back into the room, but she was trying to smile and she put her arms around us and said she was rich because she had three children.

Downstairs in the kitchen, my father tried to bake a cake. He wanted to help and make everything better again, so he put on the apron and mixed the ingredients the way my mother told him to. Now and again he sent us back up the stairs to ask her what to do next and my mother smiled and sent us back down again to tell him to switch on the oven. He did everything he was told, step by step. He held his hands up in the air, quietly counting to ten with cake mixture on his fingers, repeating all the German instructions from above in his Cork accent. And when he was finished he put the cake in the oven and there was a smell of baking all over the house and everyone went around on tiptoes. But when it came out it was all wrong. There was a frown on his forehead and he blinked quickly when he saw the cake had sunk down in the middle. My mother didn’t laugh. She said it was fine. He had done his best, but there were some things that could not be translated into Irish.

There’s a man who comes to our house to see my father. His name is Gearóid and he’s not very tall, but he smiles a lot and has a strong voice, like the radio. In the hallway, he shakes my hand with both of his and then pats me on the shoulder and looks into my eyes in a very friendly way, because he likes hearing Irish. He is my father’s friend and when he comes to visit everything in the house changes. Everything is translated into Irish — the tables, the chairs, the curtains, even the teacups and saucers turn Irish. The music on the radio has to be Irish. We have to go and play and be happy and not fight in Irish. My mother has to sit down in the front room and listen, even though she doesn’t understand a word. There’s not much laughing either, or drinking cognac, only Gearóid and my father talking and foaming at the mouth about all the things that are not finished yet in Ireland.