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

One night he was working so late it was after midnight. You could hear him sanding all the time and it sounded like he was telling everyone to be quiet.

‘Shish … Shish … Shish …’ he kept saying.

Then there was a smell of paint in the whole house that was nicer than any other smell in the world. And in the morning when we got up, the first Wägelchen was standing all ready in the hallway, painted red with black wheels and a rope for pulling tied at the front. My mother clapped her hands and said it was beautiful, just like one of the toy trolleys she had when she was small. There was a new baby in our house called Ita and everybody was always gathering around her and trying to make her smile. My mother took the baby and laid her in the new red Wägelchen so that we could make her smile and my father could take a photograph. And then it’s time for him to go to work with the trolley under his arm and a list that my mother typed up of all the things that went into it, how much everything cost, from the wood to the wheels, down to the cheapest thing which is the glue.

In the shops in Dublin, they kept saying it was beautiful but too expensive. Even when my father told them it was made in Ireland, even when he showed them the list of materials and explained how long he spent working on it, they still shook their heads and said nobody in Ireland had the money to spend on a boxcar. A boxcar is not something people buy in shops, no matter how beautiful it is. When he walked around the city at lunchtime every day with the Wägelchen under his arm, people stopped to ask him where he got it. Which doesn’t mean they want to buy it or that the shops want anything that’s handmade. But that doesn’t stop him either. Every night after he comes home on the train he goes into the Kinderzimmer to work on the next one. Because one day, he says, Irish people will stop buying only things that are made in Britain. One day Ireland will have its own great inventions.

Everybody in our house is busy working and inventing things. Franz is making a bridge with Meccano and Maria is learning how to knit. If my father is not busy making more trolleys, then he’s in the greenhouse sowing trays of seeds so that he can plant as many different flowers as possible when the summer comes. There will be lots to eat as well like cabbage and peas and tomatoes from the greenhouse. My mother is busy all the time, too, trying to make the new baby talk and eat up, but Ita just keeps moving around and my mother has to chase her. She sits on the potty all day and my mother is still trying to make her eat the last spoon. Ita knows the fastest way of getting around the house, sitting on the potty and pulling herself along by the heels of her shoes without saying a word because she still hasn’t swallowed the last spoon and her mouth is full. My mother is trying not to spend money, and one day she bought a big tongue from the butcher, a cow’s tongue which she said was very cheap and tasty. We got up on the chairs to look at it curled up in a big jar on the kitchen windowsill, beside Our Lady. It was purple and grey, with lots of little spikes and cracks. Maria stuck her own tongue out to look at in the mirror and I thought of what it would be like to put your tongue in the vice, because that’s what my mother said she would have to do with the cow’s tongue. She said she would boil it and press it in the vice.

Some days when my father is at work, I go into the Kinderzimmer and make my own inventions. I put lots of things into the vice and squeeze them as hard as I can until they change shape. Franz, too, likes to crush down the hard-boiled sweets to dust. I have some English words in my head that I want to keep saying out loud because I like them. Don’t forget the fruit gums, chum. I get bits of wood and spare buttons to see how long it takes before they bend or break. And all the time I say my secret words, don’t forget the fruit gums, chum.

One day I got a splinter in my foot from running on the floorboards in my bare feet. But my father knew what to do right away. He got a needle and told me to put my foot up on the table. He took off his glasses and started to sting me with the needle, until I pulled my foot away. I thought it would hurt, but he said nothing hurts except what’s in your head. Then he slowly lifted the skin with the needle and got it out without hurting, and afterwards he showed me the tiny splinter that caused so much trouble and everybody was smiling because there was no pain at all.

‘There’s no such thing as pain,’ my mother said. ‘The only pain is when you’re ashamed. When you’re ashamed, everything hurts.’

It’s true because one day when I stole money out of her coat pocket, she brought me into the front room and tried to hit me on the legs with her hand. It didn’t hurt because she’s not very good at it. But I was ashamed and I had nothing to say. I just felt sorry and that was much worse. My father is better at punishment, and one day when he heard that I brought English words into the house, he was very angry. I couldn’t stop saying ‘don’t forget the fruit gums, chum’ and hitting other people like Franz and Maria because the words were stuck to my mouth and I had to keep hitting people even if I didn’t want to. My father knew what to do. He picked out a stick in the greenhouse and said we had to make a sacrifice. He brought me up the stairs and my mother closed all the doors in the house so that nobody would hear anything. When we got up to the landing, my father said we would kneel down and pray that he was doing the right thing for Ireland. We kneeled down and asked God how many lashes he thought was fair and my father said fifteen. I was hoping that God said no lashes, because I didn’t mean it and maybe it was better for Ireland to give me a last chance. But my father heard God saying fifteen and not one less. So then he brought me into a room and told me to lie down on the bed and take down my trousers. I heard the stick whistling through the air, but it didn’t hurt at all because I knew I was making a sacrifice. My father told me to count up to fifteen to make sure that he didn’t forget what number he was on or leave one out. I wish I never learned to count in Irish and when it was over we had to kneel down again and say thanks to God. I was ashamed because I thought everybody in the world was laughing at me now. That’s worse than anything that can happen with a stick, when everybody is laughing. Even if you squeeze your finger in the vice, even if you squeeze your tongue in the vice, it’s not as bad as when you’re ashamed and can’t speak.

I know that people laugh at our family. I know that we are funny people because we don’t speak English while we’re eating our dinner or playing with cars on the granite steps outside the house. We are funny because my father goes into a hardware shop to buy wood in Irish from a man who can also speak the language. We’re funny because we’re German and my mother just closes the doors and keeps saying the same things over and over again and telling everybody that it’s not good to win and it’s better to pretend that there’s no such thing as pain and nobody can make you smile and you should keep saying the silent negative all the time. On the street I feel ashamed because they know I got the stick on the backside and I can’t speak English. My father says we don’t care about the people outside, because we’ll show them how to be Irish. We have to be as Irish as possible and make a sacrifice.

Then my father sits down and tells me the story of his grandfather again, Tadhg Ó Donnabháin Dall, Ted O’Donovan Blind. He was called O’Donovan Blind, not because he was blind himself but because he was the son of somebody who was blind. He was an Irish speaker with a beard who wrote books, a land-surveyor by profession and he travelled a lot around west Cork all his life and loved poetry in the Irish language.