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

It’s a funny song and very polite. It says to the British that we hope they’ll keep healthy and have a good trip home. When you sing this song you feel strong. You sit in your desk with all the other boys singing around you at the same time and feel strong in your tummy, right up to your heart, because it’s about losing and winning.

The master says Irish history is like a hurling match in Croke Park with his team, County Mayo, losing for a long time, right up until the end of the match when they start coming back and win the game at the last minute. He says that’s the best way to win, to lose first. He tells us the story of a man named Cromwell who was winning and sent the Irish to Connaught or Hell. But they made one big mistake, leaving lots of dead people in Ireland to keep talking in the graveyard. The fools, the fools, he says, because then the Easter Rising happened and there was lots of fighting and dying and the British had to go home, even if they didn’t want to. Then the game was over and the British flag had to be taken down in Dublin Castle. Michael Collins arrived late and kept the viceroy waiting, but he said the British had kept him waiting for eight hundred years so a few minutes wouldn’t make much difference. The master taps the tuning fork and we sing again. Even when we’re not singing the song in our class, you still hear it coming from another class somewhere else down the corridor.

My brother gets in trouble because he writes with his left hand and the master wants everyone in Ireland to write with the same hand. Franz can only eat with his left hand and write with his left hand. He’s a ciotóg , the master says. My mother has to go into school and tell the master that Onkel Ted was a a ciotóg , too, and now he’s a Jesuit. But that makes no difference and the master ties Franz’s hand behind his back to make sure he can only write with his right hand. All that comes out on the page is a scribble. I want to help him, because the master laughs and says it looks like a snail has crossed the page with ink.

I know what it’s like to lose, because I’m Irish and I’m German. My mother says we shouldn’t be afraid of losing. Winning makes people mean. It’s good that the Irish are not losing any more. It’s good to love your country and to be patriotic, but that doesn’t mean you have to kill people who belong to other countries. Because that’s what the Germans did under the Nazis. They tried to win everything and ended up losing everything. Like a hurling match? Yes, she says slowly, like a very brutal hurling match.

The master says I’m a dreamer and that’s worse than being a ciotóg . He says I’m always disappearing off to some other place. He wishes he could tie my head down, but that isn’t possible, because no matter what happens, you’re still free to go anywhere you like inside your own head. You can travel faster than the speed of light to any place you want in the universe, but now it’s time to be here in the glorious Republic of Ireland, he says. He bangs his stick on the desk and asks me what blasted country I’m in at all. Germany? So then he has to come down to my desk and drag me back home to Ireland by the ear. The only way that he can stop me from emigrating again is to tie my head down with a poem after school. I have to stay behind and learn a big poem about a priest who was hanged long ago in the town of Ballinrobe where the master comes from in Mayo. We sit in the classroom alone when everyone else has gone home and learn all the verses about the priest being hung, drawn and quartered because he spoke against the British. I can see that the master has hair growing in his ears, like grass. I think of blood on the grass in Ballinrobe.

There are gangs in the school. At lunchtime, they fight each other in the yard and it’s all about winning and losing. One of the gangs is called the cavalry and they are looking for Indians to kill. When you’re in a gang, you feel strong in your tummy. You run and shout and everyone else is afraid. But they don’t want me any more because I’m a dreamer, so it’s best to stand with my back against the wall and make sure they don’t get my brother. One day, I saw them running through the yard and they punched a boy right in the stomach. The boy was eating lunch and when they hit him, he dropped his sandwiches and opened his mouth. There was no sound, only a piece of sandwich that came out and dropped on the ground, too. He stayed like that for a long time, leaning forward with his mouth wide open and a dribble coming down. I could tell they were jam sandwiches because the white bread was coloured pink. I thought of his mother making them and now they were wasted. Somebody came and picked them up but he didn’t want to eat any more, only cry. Then you could hear his voice coming out loud, like a high screech with lots of pain.

Back in class, the master said there would be no more gangs. The boy who was hit by the cavalry had gone home and the master made a big speech about the potato famine in Ireland. He said the people had green mouths because grass was all that was left to eat. He said it was a disgrace to hit anyone in the stomach while they were eating. I looked out and saw the sandwiches still lying on the ground. The yard was empty. I stared at the seagulls screeching and fighting over the jam sandwiches.

And then the master bangs the desk again, as if he wants the stick to be a tuning fork and give a long humming note. He says he’s fed up with me dreaming and not knowing what country I’m in, so now there’s trouble and I feel like going to the toilet quickly. He’s going to punish me, but not with the stick, and not with a poem about Ballinrobe or a song about the famine. Instead he’s going to send me over to the girls’ school and that’s the worst punishment of all, to go over there with ribbons in your hair. He takes me by the ear and we travel at the speed of light over to the girl country. I sit at the back of the class and see the girls looking around and giggling, until it’s time to go home.

At home, my mother says we have started doing strange things again. When it was nearly dinner time, she told us to put the bowl of mashed potato on the table. My father was talking to her in the kitchen and she was listening and cooking at the same time, so I carried the mashed potato up to the room where we play and took the lid off. With the spoon, I threw a bit of the mash at the wall. It stayed there and we looked at it for a while. I threw another spoonful at the ceiling and it stuck as well. It made a strange sound each time, like a click. It made a different shape each time, too, sometimes like a little cloud, sometimes with a spike pointing downwards.

Maria said she was going to run and tell on me. But I told her that we had to make a sacrifice. I closed the door and said it was our duty to do this for Ireland. We had to make as many shapes as we could. Franz took lumps out with his hand and together we tried to cover the whole ceiling. Sometimes a lump came unstuck and fell down again and Maria screamed. We laughed and threw more and more of it up, until it was all gone and the whole room was covered. My mother came in and saw the glass bowl, empty on the floor. She said we were going out of our minds. My father rushed into the room and looked at bits of mashed potato on the ceiling and said they would never come off. They would be there for ever. We were in real trouble. But my mother wouldn’t let him hit us. Instead of getting angry, she said you couldn’t punish a thing like that because it happened only once in a lifetime. My father was still frowning, but then she put her arm around him and said it didn’t matter going without mashed potato for one day. She said they were lucky to have children with such imagination. She smiled and said you had to have an imagination to do something as mad as that.