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

‘A lot of people are being taken away these days,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to go with them, now do you? Nobody comes back, you know.’

Afterwards, when he put his clothes on again, he seemed to do everything in reverse order. The watch was first, the tie last. Then he lit a cigarette, every time, as if he wanted to keep her company for a while longer. He smoked his cigarette and sometimes he would tell her to smile. Where were all the smiles, he would ask, and then he looked at his watch and said he had to go. My mother sits in her chair and smells the smoke and stares out the window as if she will never escape.

I keep asking my mother questions about the future. What language do they speak there? Do they have cars and buses and streets like here? Will you have to walk any more or will people have legs like wheels? Will people be able to live without breathing? Will there be shops with machines outside where you put in a penny and twist the handle for chewing gum? Will there be money or will people just be able to draw things and sprinkle salt on the picture to make it come true? She stretches her hands out in the kitchen and says she can’t look into the future, only saints can do that. All she knows is that the future is far away and it will take a whole day to get there, first on a bus, then a train and then another bus. It might rain there a bit, she says, so she has to go out and buy a rain mac for each one of us.

Everybody is busy preparing for the journey. I watch my father making the last of the trolleys, concentrating hard with his tongue out the side of his mouth and saying nothing, only yes or no. Then I go upstairs and watch my mother laying everything out in rows on the beds first before she puts it all into the suitcases. We’ll be sleeping in new beds, she says, so we’ll need new pyjamas. Maria keeps counting and saying that there’s only one more sleep and one more bowl of porridge before we go. Ita keeps mixing up words in every language in her mouth, like bye bye Baümchen and go go maidirín . She is very kind to everybody and always wants to give you things, even things that you didn’t ask for. But you have to say thank you and then she goes off again to get something else. She goes around the house and comes back with a pencil and a cup and a broken umbrella. And those things have to go into the suitcase as well, my mother says, it’s all coming with us.

Then everything was packed and ready in the hallway. My father lined up the trolleys one by one — blue for Franz, green for me, red for Maria, and the pram at the back for Ita. Each trolley had a rope at the front and pictures on the side. Each trolley was packed with a colouring book, a box of crayons, plasticine, sweets, biscuits and a grey, plastic rain mac. Behind the trolleys and the pram were the suitcases all in a single line, like a long train ready to move out of the station. And before we went up to bed for the last time, I felt strong in my tummy because we looked back from the stairs and saw how close we were to leaving.

The next morning we got up and had breakfast very early. When it was time to go we all kneeled down in the hallway first to pray for a good journey, then my father carried each trolley down the granite steps, followed by the pram and the suitcases. My mother stood with us on the pavement, while he went back in to lock the front door from the inside. We heard the big bolt sliding across and waited while my father closed all the windows and doors in the house and made his way out the back door, across the garden wall and all the way around the lane to meet us again on the street. There was nobody up and nobody there to see the Irish-German train heading off into the future, nobody to hear us squeaking and rattling down the street with my father out front carrying the suitcases, wearing his tweed cap and his own grey, plastic rain mac and with the umbrella hanging around his neck.

It took a long time to get down to the bus stop because one of the wheels came off Maria’s trolley and had to be fixed. But there was no shortage of time, my father said. The bus conductor stacked the trolleys carefully one on top of the other under the stairs, and then we were moving at last with a long ticket flapping like a white flag out the window. On the train we had a table where we could take out the colouring books and draw. In Galway we sat by the river and looked at swans while we were eating our lunch. Then we got the bus to Connemara and my mother said it was more like being on a roller-coaster because the driver had a cigarette in his mouth and drove so fast it was impossible to see around the next turn or over the next hill. She said the bus drove itself. Chickens were scattering off the road. Sometimes a dog ran alongside, barking and trying to bite the back wheel, and my mother called them Reifenbeisser , tyre-biters. People waved at the bus and one time an old man sitting in the long grass held his cap in the air without even looking up to see, as if he knew it was the bus passing by and everybody on the bus knew it was him. Once or twice the bus had to stop because there was a cow in the middle of the road that wouldn’t stop chewing. But then we were off again, going further and further into the empty brown land, full of rocks and stone walls that my mother said looked like a place on the moon.

It was the evening by the time we arrived and there was a man waiting for us. It was Seán De Paor, the postman, and we were going to stay in his house. He smoked a pipe and there was a smell of turf all around and sometimes you didn’t know which was which. The place was called An Cheathrú Rua, which was true because that’s the Irish for ‘The Red Quarter’, the land that’s brown red all around. There were no road signs because everybody knew the names of the streets in Irish. We followed him up the road past the handball alley, up Bóthar an Chillín to his house, and all the way the trolley train rattled so much that people came out of their houses to tell the dogs to stop barking.

My father was speaking Irish all the time and laughing and I knew he would never be angry again. There was Fear an tí, the man of the house, and Bean an tí, the woman of the house. There were two boys called Seán and Máirtín who had never seen plasticine before. Everybody said lederhosen were the best trousers they had ever seen and wanted to know where they could be got. All the men wore caps like my father and asked you what story you had. Some of them even wanted to learn German, so my mother had to give them German lessons on the road through Irish.

It was like being at home in the place where we all wanted to be for the rest of our lives. Every day we went for long walks down to the sea, down to the beach beside the graveyard with all the Irish names. We met the old people who could remember as far back as infinity and didn’t even know any English, my father said. We didn’t understand them either because they spoke very fast with no teeth, but my father took photographs of them outside their houses with thatched roofs, to make sure they wouldn’t disappear. Sometimes we walked further up to Pointe, to the little harbour where the lobster pots were stacked up and where you thought you were standing on the furthest piece of land, looking right out across the bay to the Aran Islands, like black whales coming out of the sea.

This really was the future, my mother said, because when we were playing on the rocks, there was lots of seaweed that looked like the tails of crocodiles and some like the tails of lions. We laughed and dragged the lion tails across the sand behind us. It was the future because sometimes the tide went out so far that you thought the sea had run away and disappeared altogether. The water drained away and left the land behind, silent and deserted, with black seaweed draped across the rocks like hair. As if everything had gone to sleep. As if we were the first people ever to discover this place. Sometimes there was nobody out under the sky and we didn’t see anybody for hours. It was the future because when we climbed up the hill it was like walking on the moon, with nothing but grey rocks and rusty brown colours all around. And behind us the black line of the coast going in and out as far as your eyes could see.