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

So then we had a friend for life. We learned swimming and diving and went down to the public baths every day for the whole summer. We saved up and bought goggles so that we could dive down underwater and have contests picking up pennies from the bottom of the pool. We would throw the penny into the deep end and watch it turning as it sank out of view. Then we dived down to reach it underwater, where there was no language only the humming bubbles all around. We timed each other to see who could stay down for the longest and I was nearly always the winner because I could stay under until my lungs were bursting, until I nearly died and had to come up for words. I was the champion at not breathing. Sometimes the three of us went down together and shook hands, and it looked like you could live down there, just sitting on the bottom of the pool signalling to each other. When we got out of the water, our knees were purple. We had purple hands and purple lips and our teeth were chattering. Then it was time to go home and we bought chewing gum. Noel found there was still water in one ear and he had to lean over on one side to let it pour out like a jug. We were friends for life and walked home with our towels around our necks, slapping the swimming trunks against the walls and leaving wet marks behind, like signatures all the way home. Then we waited till we got to the last lamp-post before we stopped speaking English.

You stand behind the puppet theatre with the puppet in your hand, completely hidden. Nobody knows you’re there. Then you pull on the string to open the curtains and make the puppet walk out in front of the audience. You can say anything you want. You can change your voice and make up any story. You can hide behind the story, and it’s a bit like being underwater because everything you say goes up like bubbles to the surface.

‘Have you seen the dog?’ Kasper the puppet asks.

‘What dog?’ the puppet man answers.

‘The dog that has no name and belongs to nobody and barks all day until he’s hoarse and has no voice any more?’

My mother helps us to make up a story. She goes upstairs to get the hairdryer. She takes out a thin blue scarf from her dressing table and when she comes back down she goes in behind the puppet theatre with me. She plugs in the hairdryer and the blue scarf starts crashing on to the beach and the dog starts barking and biting at the waves because he doesn’t know any better.

Everybody has a story to hide behind, my mother says. In the vegetable shop one day, Mr Smyth started talking to her about a wall in Germany. He doesn’t normally talk very much, but that day he was talking about a wall and that nobody had any courage left to stop it. Then he asked her when she was going back home to Germany, but she gave the oldest answer in Ireland and said she didn’t know. Missersmiss, she calls him, because of her accent. He asked me if I had ever been to Germany. The little German boy who has never been to Germany, he said, and even though he only has one arm, he’s able to keep talking and put the potatoes in a brown bag and take the money all with one hand. I wanted to know why he only has one arm and what story he was hiding behind, but we can’t ask those questions. Sometimes he uses his chin to hold things like an extra hand. He picks up the bag of potatoes against his hip and slips it into my mother’s net shopping bag. He said Germany was very far away. He spoke as if he had been there once himself, but couldn’t say any more because of his missing arm. And my mother just kept looking at the Outspan letters hanging in the window, until Mr Smyth said ‘please God’, it would not be long before she could go back to Germany. He said he had brothers and sisters in America who would give anything to come back to Ireland even for a day.

Other people started talking about the wall and asking the same questions. After Mass one day, a woman whose name was Miss Ryan asked my mother about going home and she said she wasn’t even dreaming about it. But that’s not true because, later on, she said it felt as though people in Ireland knew what you were thinking, long before you even thought of it yourself. Before you opened the door to go outside, they knew what was on your mind, even something you had already put out of your head for good. She made up a story to hide behind and said she was nowhere more at home than in Ireland with her family.

Everybody knows how far away Germany is by looking at our family. They know that my mother is homesick. They can see it in her eyes. They could see her dreaming again that morning. They could see us all from the back, standing at the seafront, looking out at the waves, until my mother heard the bells and remembered what time it was and what country she was in. On the way back, my mother was trying not to step on the cracks in the pavement. I was hiding in doorways and she was pretending that she didn’t know where I was. Maria was talking to herself and stopping to point at a spot on the wall. Ita was smiling and saying ‘thank you’ to all the lamp-posts and gates. Franz went ahead and waited at the corner for us with his scooter, one foot on and one foot off, while Maria was still trailing far behind. Maybe we look like the children who are always thinking of home. The homesick children.

Outside the church the next day, Miss Ryan stopped to speak to my mother again and asked if she wanted to borrow the money to go back to Germany. There would be no rush in paying it back, she said, but my mother shook her head. They were whispering for a long time until all the people had left the church, until Miss Ryan told my mother to go home and have a think about it. But my father didn’t want that. He says you can’t borrow money from the neighbours and he doesn’t want my mother to go home on her own because she might never want to return.

My mother said it was time to stop dreaming. Instead, she asked her sisters to send over lots of books and magazines about Germany so that she could tell us what was happening there. She showed us the pictures of people running through the streets with suitcases. She explained how the Russians had put up a wall right in the middle of Germany and there was nothing the British or the Americans could do except watch. There was lots of barbed wire and tanks in the middle of the streets. There were people climbing out the window and letting children down slowly on ropes. And when the wall was built, people still tried to escape to the other side but they were shot and there were pictures of them lying on the ground bleeding to death and nothing anyone could do to help.

Onkel Ted came to talk to my mother because she didn’t know what to do. She told him that Miss Ryan offered her money to go back to Germany and that she would not have to pay it back or ever mention it again. There were two Miss Harts and two Miss Doyles and two Miss Ryans, and they always went to Mass in pairs on Sunday. The Miss Ryans said they had set aside the money as a gift, but my father didn’t want money from the neighbours. After dinner and after the sweets in Onkel Ted’s pocket, we went to bed and they sat in the front room until there was nothing more to say about it. I heard my father taking out the cognac and putting on some music. It was the record of the two women doing a duet in French. I could hear the sound of the two high voices, like two sisters singing together. I thought it was like the two Miss Ryans going up the stairs together, arm in arm, up one or two steps and then back down two steps, then up three or four more and back down two, until they finished on the landing at the top with their arms around each other, saying goodnight and lying down softly in their beds.

After that, Onkel Ted was only afraid that my mother was homesick so he started sending her more books and pieces about Germany cut out of newspapers. He wrote long letters, too, in German and she wrote letters back, but my father said that had to stop, because he didn’t want Onkel Ted to be her friend for life, only himself. He didn’t want anyone to know more about Germany or to read any more books than he did. He was able to read five books at the same time with a bus ticket sticking out of each one, but Onkel Ted was able to read so fast that he didn’t need a bus ticket and a book still looked brand new when he passed it on to my mother. My father didn’t like my mother reading books that he didn’t read first himself. He didn’t like her talking too much to the neighbours either or getting friendly with people in the shops or going to coffee mornings and getting ideas from other people, only Catholic ideas. He was afraid she would not listen to him any more. He started slamming all the doors in the house because he didn’t like anyone else calling her Irmgard. And one time there was a French woman living on our street who kept dropping in and talking to my mother. Even though they were from different countries, they had the same questions and the same answers when they talked. She wanted to become my mother’s friend for life, but my father stopped all that because she was talking about going back to France to get a divorce from her Irish husband who was friends for life with other women. That was the worst thing that could happen, if Irish people started getting French ideas. That would be the end of the family. That would be the end of Ireland, he said.