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

That was the end of it and everyone was silent again, until my mother’s face went completely red. I saw her shoulders starting to shake and then she made a big snort with her nose, too, and suddenly had to run upstairs. We were left at the table with my father looking at us. We were afraid to laugh any more and everything was so quiet in the house, until my father spoke up at last to make conversation. There was a sign near the door with a well-known phrase in Irish that said: níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin : there’s no fireside like your own fireside. So my father turned it around and tried to make a joke of it. Níl aon tóin tinn mar do thóin tinn féin , he said, which meant that there’s no sore backside like your own sore backside.

Then everybody in the house suddenly laughed out loud at that. Even though it was an old joke that everybody had heard a hundred times before, they still thought it was the funniest thing they ever heard in their whole lives. My mother came back down again and said the best thing is to laugh at yourself before anyone else does. My father says that if you laugh against yourself the whole world will laugh with you, and if you laugh at other people, you laugh alone. But my father is not good at laughing at himself. And he never laughs at other people either. He’s much better at making a sacrifice. After Mass, we met the dictionary man and all his friends again outside the church. My father was afraid that he would be famous all over Connemara for falling into the leithreas rather than for his speech. But there was no mention of it and everything was forgotten, because there were too many other things to remember and Irish people don’t say everything that’s inside their heads.

We were going back home to Dublin the next day, so my mother asked us what we wanted to do most on the last day. We went back to the sea and played with the lion tails and then up the hill behind the house to be the last people to look out over the sea to the Aran Islands. We sat on the grass with the sheep all around us, waiting for the sun to go down. We looked out along the coast where the sea was just mixed in with the land, with inlets and islands and peninsulas as far as you could see. The sun went down and An Cheathrú Rua was even redder than it ever was before. My father said it was time to go, but my mother said we would wait until the very last minute, until it was completely dark, until all the colour had disappeared and there was nothing left except the lights in the houses and the smaller twinkling lights further away along the coast that told you where the land was.

Nobody was sad to go home the next day because my mother said we would remember this place for ever. Nobody was sad because my father said we would be coming back again soon. Nothing would change, he promised, not one rock, not even one stone wall. We would come back and see that everything was still there in the same place as it was before. Nothing was going to be in the past.

That summer the garden was full of flowers. There was so much fruit, too, raspberries and blackcurrants and plums, that my mother started making jam again. And there were so many tomatoes in the greenhouse that we had to give lots of them away to the neighbours. There were flowers on the table every day and my father said we should keep bees. He started buying books on beekeeping and said it would make sense to put a few hives on the roof of the breakfast room where they could fly straight out to collect the honey and pollinate the fruit trees.

The same things were forbidden in our house as always. There was a song on the radio that said we had all the time in the world in the deepest voice in the world. My mother liked the song too, but only when my father was out at work. Ita started saying ‘good morning’ to all the people on the street, and when there was nobody else to say good morning to, she said it to the lamp-posts and the gates, all day until she was back in the kitchen saying ‘good morning’ to the cooker and the washing machine as well. My father said the rules had to be obeyed even though she was still a baby. So then there was trouble because Ita went on hunger strike and wouldn’t eat or speak any more, and my father had to hold her head with one hand and try to force her mouth open to push the spoon in with the other. All the time she was shaking her head and I thought it was funny because Ita was winning. But my mother didn’t want us to see what would happen next, so she closed the doors and brought us outside and told us to run down to the shop to buy ice cream until it was over and Ita stopped crying.

My father said he couldn’t understand why the stick wasn’t working any more. He said he was doing his best. Everything was for us. He made the trolleys, he made a wooden see-saw, he was even building a real puppet theatre, and if we kept on breaking the rules he would have to find new ways of punishing us that would hurt more. Sometimes I tried to punish Franz and Maria to see if they would feel pain, so my father said anything I would do to them he would give me back a hundred times, and I said anything he would do to me I would give back to Franz and Maria a hundred times, until nobody could feel any more pain. He brought me upstairs and we kneeled down again to pray in front of Our Lady that he was doing the right thing. But that didn’t work so he had a better idea, something that would make me ashamed. He confiscated the braces on my lederhosen and I had to go down to the barber to get my hair cut, holding my trousers up with my hands in my pockets.

In the barber shop we sat on the wooden bench reading the comics. Most of them were torn and falling apart, but it was good to see them, even the ones I had read before. I didn’t like the comic called Hotspur as much as the Dandy , and I didn’t like it either when somebody was punished and put across the teacher’s knee. There were lots of other boys waiting and reading comics, too, but none of them noticed that I had no braces and couldn’t walk around without my hands in my pockets. The barber kept clicking the scissors all the time, even when he was not cutting hair, and there was a huge pile of hair swept into one corner on the floor. We waited and read as many comics as we could and pretended that we were Irish and spoke English like everyone else, even though everybody could see that we were from a different country.

When we came out I tried to speak English to Franz but he was afraid. The barber, Mr Connolly, always gave every boy back a penny, so you could buy a toffee bar. But that day we put our pennies together, along with other pennies that Franz still had from Tante Lilly, and we bought a brand new comic called the Beano . We took turns reading it and spoke Irish to each other in between. My mother said it was good to buy something that lasts longer, not like a liquorice pipe that’s gone within minutes and can’t be remembered, but there would be trouble if we brought the Beano into the house. So we pretended it wasn’t our Beano and hid it in the hedges of Miss Hart’s garden.

At night I thought of Mr Connolly still clicking his fingers, even when he was having his tea and there were no scissors in his hand. I thought of all the hair mixed together in a large wig, like the mane of a buffalo. I thought of Mr McNally reading his paper with crooked glasses held up only by one stick over his right ear, and I thought of Mr Smyth from the vegetable shop getting undressed and going to bed with only one arm. Downstairs my father was building the puppet theatre and my mother was making the costumes and the curtains. Outside it was raining and I thought of the Beano getting wet and all the colours washing out.