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

Gearóid has a car, a blue Volkswagen full of newspapers on the back seat written in Irish and English. The newspaper is called Aiséirí , which is the Irish for resurrection, and there is a photograph of corporation men taking down an old English street sign and putting up a new bilingual one, with the Irish on top and the English below in second place. There’s an article in the paper, too, about my father and a letter from Mullingar. One day at work, my father refused to answer a letter because it was addressed to John Hamilton. He kept sending it back because that was not his name. He told them there was nobody by the name of John Hamilton working at the Electricity Supply Board in Dublin. He pretended there had been a big mistake and the letter was for somebody in a different organisation, maybe even in a different country, at the electricity board in England or America or South Africa maybe. There was a lot of trouble with this letter going back and forth for weeks and weeks, because the people of Mullingar had to wait all that time for their electricity masts to be repaired. My father didn’t care if the whole country was left in darkness. And in the end, the people of Mullingar got their electricity back only when they learned to respect his proper name. But then the boss at the ESB refused to give my father promotion because the Irish language was bad for business.

In the front room, Gearóid smiles and claps his hands together with a bang. He says my father is a man who does what he believes in, not just for money. He’s a real fighter who wrote articles for Aiséirí and made great speeches on O’Connell Street once. He says people will still throw their hats up in the air these days for a good speech. Ireland is far from being finished and there is a lot of de-Anglicisation still left to be done. My father says he loves his country as much as ever, but he has a different way of fighting now, through his children. From now on he’s going to use his own children as weapons, he says, because children are stronger than armies, stronger than speeches or articles or any number of letters to the government. One child is worth more than a thousand guns and bombs, he says.

‘You’re the lifeblood,’ Gearóid says to my mother in Irish. He says the Irish language is dying, day by day. It’s choking to death slowly with everybody speaking English on the radio and in the government. But he means the opposite, like in the films. He holds his fist up in the air and says the language is not dead at all, and there’s a few shakes left in the animal yet, as long as there is one family like us in the country. Even if Irish is not our mother tongue and we speak German, too, we are still more Irish than many others. Teaghlach lán-ghaelach , he calls us, a full-Irish fireside. Then he has to leave again. He doesn’t stay for tea because he has to go to visit some more families and deliver the paper to them, too. We stand at the door and watch him getting into the car. We hear the car starting with a big growl and then we wave goodbye, the full-Irish family on the doorstep.

Afterwards, my father tells us about the time he made a speech in Dublin, with thousands of people looking up at him. He can still hear the sound of them cheering every time he walks up O’Connell Street. It’s something you never forget, something you carry with you, like the sound of the sea in your ears. He takes off his glasses and starts making a speech at the dinner table. His face looks very different, like a different man in the house, a man I’ve never seen before. There are two red marks, one on each side of his nose. His eyes look smaller and darker, and his voice gets harder and stronger, like the radio. It looks as if he has never seen us before either, as if he’s surprised to be here in this house. And he talks so fast that he has a little white blob of spit on his bottom lip. Every time Gearóid comes to the house he’s like this afterwards. Happy and proud one minute, sad and angry the next, because not everybody in Ireland is doing what he told them to do.

He tells us about the time he went all over the country on his motorbike, frightening the cows as he drove past. He saw cows shaking their heads to try to get rid of the noise, like a bad dream. He tells us about a time when the police tried to stop one of the articles he wrote. They came to the offices of Aiséirí and said they would close down the paper, but Gearóid wasn’t afraid of them. They weren’t afraid of going to prison for what they believed, even if the whole country was against them. So they printed the paper with the article in it, because you have to do what’s right, he says. My mother nods, because she’s thinking of the time when Onkel Gerd refused to be a Nazi. I want to be proud of my father, too, so I asked him what was in the article and why they tried to stop it, but he wouldn’t say. My mother doesn’t know either, so we all wait for him to tell us.

‘Explain it to them,’ she says.

It’s not something he wants to talk about. I know it’s all in the wardrobe upstairs, but I’m not allowed to go near anything. I know there are piles of old newspapers and things from the time he made those speeches, hidden away in boxes. So I ask him again, why the police tried to close down the newspaper. But then he slams his fist down on the table and all the cups and spoons jump in the air. Maria shivers.

‘I won’t be interrogated by my own family,’ he said. Then he walked away to the front room and slammed the door. My mother sits with us for a long time and tells us her stories about Germany instead. She doesn’t mind being interrogated. And sometimes she says things that we don’t understand. She looks far away and says we will be putting our parents on trial one day and asking what they did.

‘You are the fathers and mother now,’ she says. ‘And we are the children.’

She is starting to clear the dishes without thinking. She’s not even looking at what she’s doing. It doesn’t make sense stacking up plates and unstacking them again. I know she’s thinking right back to when she was a girl in Kempen. She says things were different when she was small in Germany and my father was small in Ireland. We will soon be adults, she says, and they will be the children. We will grow up and look back at all the things they did in their lives, like trying to sell crucifixes and party hats and sweets. We will go over the secrets, too, that are hidden in the wardrobe.

‘You’ll say we’re children and we didn’t know any better.’

Then she starts clearing the dishes all over again, stacking up the plates and collecting the knives and forks. We start asking her more questions. I want to know if she’s Irish or German now.

‘What country do you love?’ Franz asks.

‘Ireland,’ she says, because that’s where she’s living now and that’s where the postman brings her letters and where her children are going to school. But what about Germany? And then she says she loves Germany, too, very much, because that’s where she was born and went to school herself and where she remembers the postman coming to the door.

‘You can’t love two countries,’ I said. ‘That’s impossible.’

‘Why not?’

‘What if they start fighting against each other?’

‘I don’t just love one of my children,’ she says. ‘I still love all my children, even when they start fighting.’

In school, they teach us to love our own country. They sing a song about the British going home. The máistir takes out a tuning fork and taps it on his desk. It rings, and when he stands the fork up on the wood it makes a long note. We hum the note and sing about the British getting out of Ireland.

Ó ró sé do bheatha ’bhaile …