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

My father carried in the suitcases and smiled at everyone. Christiane talked to us and Tante Marianne talked to my mother as if they couldn’t waste a minute. They went through each of the names one by one — Ta Maria, Elfriede, Adam, Lisalotte, Max, Minne and Wilhelm, and all the children, as if they had to travel around Germany in their heads until every question was asked and every story was told. My mother had to hear everything twice and clapped her hands around her face as if she could not believe what she heard.

Tante Marianne brought new perfume into the house. Everyone wanted to be close to her all the time and sit beside her at the table. Maria followed her everywhere. My mother and Tante Marianne could not be separated either, because they kept talking, even when they were not in the same room. Even when Tante Marianne was upstairs and my mother was in the kitchen, they kept remembering things out loud, calling up and down the stairs as if they were at home again in the house on the Buttermarkt square. Tante Marianne called her Irmgard. We still called her Mutti, and it was like having two mothers in the house, because they had the same teeth and the same eyes and the same hair. They had the same words and the same way of laughing out loud until the tears came into their eyes. They had the same way of peeling an orange in strips along the side and the same trick of cutting the peel into the shape of teeth. Two mothers playing the monster with big orange teeth while my father was out getting coal for the boiler.

‘Vooo, vooo, vooo, vooo …,’ they both said. Then they started laughing so much that they couldn’t stop any more. Laughing and shaking, so that my father stopped pouring coal into the boiler to come and see what was happening.

Tante Marianne’s suitcase was full of toys and books for everyone. There were lots of gummi bears and chocolates and biscuits that you would never get in the shops in Ireland. She brought a spirit level for my father, and a toy train for me and Franz. Some other presents were wrapped and put away immediately, for Christmas. There were biscuits to be eaten now and biscuits to be kept for later. One by one, Tante Marianne took things out with great care, explaining where they came from. We were allowed to read the Mecki books immediately, about a hedgehog who travelled all over the world in a hot air balloon with his crew — Charlie Penguin, and a cat called Kater Murr. Nobody in Ireland knows about Mecki, and they laugh at us because we don’t know who Red Riding Hood is and we don’t realise it’s the same as Rotkäpchen.

Everything in our house was German again. Around the table every evening, all the stories were German. Tante Marianne’s daughter Christiane had plaits tied up over her head and she wore a dirndl like in fairy tales. Maria got a dirndl as well. Tante Marianne said it was lovely to see Franz and me wearing lederhosen and Irish sweaters, German below and Irish on top. She said it was remarkable that we could speak three languages. My mother told her how we sometimes got things wrong and how Maria came home one day and said: Ich kann es nicht believen , which is a mixed up German and English way of saying: I can’t believe it. Tante Marianne said our German was different, softer, more like the old days. And she wanted to hear some Irish spoken, so we said a prayer and she said it sounded different too, not a bit like English.

I wanted Tante Marianne to stay in our house for ever. I went with her down to the seafront. I showed her all the street signs that had been changed into Irish. I showed her where the doctor lives and where the shops are. I told her that when you pass by the shoemaker’s shop you get an echo, because when you shout in, the shoemaker shouts back without looking up. She laughed and said it was just like something her father would do. People stopped to speak to her. The man in the fish shop recognised her immediately and said: ‘You must be the sister.’ He talked to her for a long time and Tante Marianne had to explain that she was from Germany, too, but that she was now living in Austria, in Salzburg.

‘Salzburg,’ he said. ‘I know the place you’re talking about.’

We went with her on the bus to Glendalough to see the round tower. We had tea and cakes in a hotel and helped her stick stamps on lots of postcards. She said Ireland was so beautiful. She envied my mother living in a country where the people were so friendly and spoke English all the time. But my father didn’t like her saying that. He tried to stop himself being angry at the table that night. He didn’t want to make any trouble while there was a visitor in the house, but there was something Tante Marianne didn’t understand yet about Ireland, something that had to be explained.

‘One day, the man in the fish shop will speak his own language,’ he said.

Tante Marianne said there was nothing wrong with speaking English. But my father shook his head. He said we were the new Irish children and soon the whole country would be speaking Irish in the shops. He said children were the strongest weapons, stronger than armies. But then Tante Marianne had an argument with my father. She said all the things that my mother can’t say. She said it was wrong to use children in war. She kept her arm around Maria all the time as if she was going to protect her for the rest of her life.

‘In Germany,’ she said, ‘they used the children, too.’

That was the only argument in our house while she was there. On the last evening, before she was going away, she showed us a photograph of the house where she lived in Austria. It was a house with a small wooden fence outside, near the castle on the hill called the Mönchberg. One day we would go and visit her. And then they talked about all the other well-known visitors that came to stay there every summer. People like Oskar Kokoschka, the famous painter. People like Ernst Rathenau, whose cousin Walther was assassinated by the Nazis in Berlin. My mother looked at the photograph and said it was a good place to breathe in deeply. She said you could look out the window and see the castle above you every morning, as if it had just grown out of the rock overnight.

When Tante Marianne was gone home again, Christiane stayed with us so that she could go to school in Ireland and learn English. My mother told me the story of going to visit her sister Marianne in the snow. It was during the war, when nobody had much food. My mother took a train all the way to Salzburg and walked up the Mönchberg in winter with a bucket of sauerkraut, because Marianne had nothing. She says she remembers the thick snow all around and the silence. Tante Marianne was always very strong, even though sad things happened in her life and her husband Angelo never came back from the war. My mother and Marianne met Angelo on the same day, when they were out in the country one time, on holiday. And afterwards Angelo sent a parcel to each of them with the exact same gift inside, a book by Thomas Mann. But it was Marianne who married him while the war was still on. They married by proxy, my mother says. One day Marianne sat in the house in Salzburg with a picture of Angelo and a glass of wine in front of her, while Angelo sat around with his friends in Split and a picture of Marianne in front of him. They got married miles and miles apart. And that’s why they’re still so close, even though she heard nothing more and no more letters came home. She waited and waited, but he never came back from the war. And then one day, Marianne started up a guest house. And that’s why all the famous guests like Ernst Rathenau and Oskar Kokoschka are coming to stay in her house on the Mönchberg, because Marianne was kind to people with bad lungs who couldn’t breathe very well in Germany and now they’re being kind back to her.