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

In Munster where my father comes from, there were lots of poets who spoke and wrote their own language. But that was long ago when people still spoke Irish all over and poets were welcomed in every house and treated like kings. If a poet came to the door of a big house where the noble people lived, my father says, they were offered food and a bed for the night. If you were nice to them, if you had a party and made them feel welcome, then they would write long poems telling the whole world how generous and how cultured you were. But if you were mean and turned them away, they’d write bad poems about you that would put you to shame. They were called the bards, and what happened one day was that the people who looked after the poets, the earls and all the other noble people, lost the war with the British and had to leave their houses and flee to France. There was no place for the poets to go, so they disappeared as well and Ireland was left without any poetry for a while.

After that, the Irish people didn’t know where they were going any more, because the names of the streets and villages were changed into English. People lost their way because they didn’t recognise the landscape around them. Léim Uí Dhonnabháin became Leap. Gleann d’óir became Glandore and Cionn tSáile became Kinsale. People’s names were changed, too. Ó Mathúna became O’Mahony and Ó hUrmoltaigh became Hamilton. My father says the Irish were all stumbling around, not knowing who they were or who they were talking to. They could not find their way home. They were homeless. And that was the worst pain of all, to be lost and ashamed and homesick.

And that’s how my great-grandfather became blind, because he was descended from a poet who had lost his way and went blind. Ted O’Donovan Blind got a job as a surveyor and travelled around west Cork all his life, speaking Irish and reciting some of the old Gaelic poems to make people feel at home. But it was too late, because most people were already speaking English and following the English road signs. And nobody wanted their children to speak Irish any more for fear that they would not be able to find their way in places like America and Canada and Australia.

Gaelic in Ireland is called Irish, so that Irish people will remember what country they’re living in. Some people say that the Irish language reminds them of the big famine when they had nothing to eat except the old poems in Irish. My father says people transferred everything they owned into English, their stories and their songs, even all their memories and their family photographs. They deny that Irish has anything to do with them any more, but some of their ways of saying things come down from the old bards, even if they don’t know it. Time didn’t just begin in Ireland with the English language, he says. And just because they all speak English so well doesn’t mean the Irish are not blind any more or that they know where they’re going. There are some things you can only remember in Irish.

‘One day the Irish people will wake up and wonder if they’re still Irish,’ he says.

And that’s why it’s important not to bring bad words like fruit gum into the house. That’s why it’s important to work hard and invent lots of new things in Ireland and fight for small languages that are dying out. Because your language is your home and your language is your country. What if all the small languages disappear and the whole world is speaking only one language? We’ll all be like the Munster poets, he says, lost and blind, with nothing to welcome them only doors banging in the wind. We’re living on the eve of extinction, my father says. One day there will be only one language and everybody will be lost.

‘The world will be full of homesick people,’ he says.

In the evenings, my father stays outside in the garden as long he can because it’s still bright. It’s time to plant all the flowers and vegetables, and to get rid of flowers like dandelions that he doesn’t want. There are pink and white flowers growing out of the granite walls, too, that look beautiful but everybody hates them, because they’re wild and wreck the walls and make a good hiding place for snails. There are bushes that only grow by the sea with purple flowers, too, and leaves that keep growing from the inside so that when you peel off the outer leaves it’s never-ending, until you get to a tiny green bud inside. My father says all plants were wild once and he’s growing sweet peas. And then he always lights a fire that crackles and whistles. You can’t see any flames, but you can see lots of smoke going all over the garden, as if he’s sending a message all around the world.

Inside, my mother is boiling the cow’s tongue and there is a strong smell all around the house. That evening we watch as she wraps the tongue up in a white cloth and puts it into the vice. She winds the lever around and presses the tongue as hard as she can. Then she leaves it there for a whole night.

The next day we sit down to dinner and my mother brings out the tongue on a plate, all pink and pressed into a square shape by the vice and some glue around it as well. My father takes the knife and begins to cut. Everybody gets a slice along with cabbage. Franz wants to know if you eat a cow’s tongue, will you start saying moo. My mother laughs, but now it’s time to stop the jokes and eat. I don’t like the taste of tongue. It’s like eating rubber. I look around at Franz and Maria and they have stopped chewing as well. Maria is allowed to spit hers out on the plate because she’s going to get sick, but we have to keep eating until it’s finished and learn not to be afraid of new tastes.

‘It’s just exactly like ham,’ my mother says.

She eats it and my father eats it and they nod to each other.

‘Excellent,’ my father says.

But I don’t think they like it either. I think they’re just pretending because they don’t want it to go to waste and people to know they’re wrong. We have to keep chewing, even though I nearly want to get sick, too, and I can’t stop thinking of biting my own tongue and all the glue coming out from inside it. Everything comes to a standstill. There’s a big lump in my mouth and I’m like Ita on the potty, not swallowing the last spoon and not saying a word, until my mother says it’s all right, we don’t have to eat any more as long as we finish all the cabbage.

‘I suppose you don’t want to eat something that somebody else had in their mouth already,’ she says.

And then I can see her shoulders shaking. She starts laughing so much that she can’t even eat any more either. My father is laughing, too, and he has to take off his glasses. He has tears in his eyes this time and they keep laughing for a long time, until my mother tells us to clear the table and promises that we will never have to eat tongue again as long as we live.

The reason my father has a limp is that when he was a boy he got a very bad disease called polio. And that’s the end of it, he says. Except that it’s not true. It’s not a lie but it’s not the truth either, because he never told us about going to the doctor or staying in hospital and getting sweets. He never had polio, because Onkel Ted told me once that my father had a limp when he was born. So maybe his mother only made up that story about polio, because people were afraid of anyone who was deformed at birth and it was better to say you had a disease like everyone else. Or maybe my father made it up himself because they were always laughing and limping after him on his way to school and saying that he had a father in the British navy.

Sometimes on Sundays we go to visit our relations. Tante Roseleen smiles at me all the time with her eyes. Onkel PJ has a wristwatch with a silver cover on it to protect the glass from breaking if you go to war. Tante Lilly has two sons called Jimmy and Pat who toss coins up in the air and show us how to play cards. And sometimes they all come to our house and bring red lemonade, then Tante Kathleen comes up from Middleton and Tante Eileen comes up from Skibbereen with Geraldine and Carmel. Then the house is full of smoke and English. I’m still afraid to bring bad words into the house, but then my father starts telling stories in English, too, and everything is all right as long as the visitors are still there. They say that nobody in Ireland can bake a cake like my mother. They say nobody can build a wooden toy trolley like my father and there are no children as lucky as we are with three languages, because we’ll never be homeless. They sit around the table and talk until it’s very late, but nobody ever says anything about my father’s limp. We don’t know what questions to ask, until one day when I told Onkel Ted that the worst disease in the world was polio because it makes your legs shorter and you get a limp.