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

There was lots of talk about making the evening meal and who would be eating what. Did Irish children like Wurst ? Was there anything we didn’t eat? They had black bread and black jam, and plates made of wood. They kept tidying up even while they were eating because nobody likes the table to be ‘ abgegrasst ’, like a field where the cows have already eaten all the grass. Then there was lots more talk about who would be sleeping where. Everyone was counting heads and spaces in beds. In between, they would sometimes remember a story and laugh so much that they had to lean on something to stop themselves from falling down. ‘ Zu Bett, zu Bett wer ein Liebchen hat, wer keines hat geht auch zu Bett ’ — ‘To Bed, to Bed if you’re in love, to bed if you’re on your own.’ The soap was different, and so were the basins and the toilets. The pillows were square and there was a big duvet instead of blankets. I was allowed to sleep on the sofa with the curtains moving slowly and the light coming in from the street outside like my mother’s film on the wall, and when I woke up the next morning I found that I was still in Germany with my arm hanging over the side.

It was like being at home because they were always talking about things to be cleaned. There was a smell of washing and the white sheets were hanging out on the line outside so that you could run through them with your eyes closed, like running into the smell of baking in the Kranz Café. Tante Lisalotte kept checking through our things, examining the collars, picking up shirts and asking if they had been worn, as if she wasn’t happy until she found something to wash. And then we had to help with the sheets and everyone picked a corner each and walked in towards the centre like Irish dancing, until they were folded and ironed and counted and put away again.

Tante Lisalotte was the aunt with a cravat-making factory in the house, so we got a coloured cravat each. She was married to Onkel Max and they had two boys called Stefan and Herbert who showed us how to throw water bombs out the window. They had a box of matches and a cigar in the basement, but Tante Lisalotte could smell trouble and came down before they had a chance to light it up. Four boys in lederhosen, she said, like Max und Moritz multiplied by two. Tante Minne was a doctor who wanted to collect lots of valuable antiques and Onkel Wilhelm was an optician who had hundreds of guns and antlers covering all the walls of the house. He was the uncle who kept a bottle of schnapps hidden in the aquarium of his surgery, behind artificial plants and the two lazy carp swimming back and forth. They had two children called Mathias and Ursula who also wore lederhosen and taught us new words in German. Ursula had blonde plaits, too, and knew how to whistle with two fingers in her mouth.

All our aunts in Germany had the same nose, so they could sniff what was going on anywhere, even things that had not happened yet. My mother said it was a gift that the Kaiser girls inherited down through the generations and that maybe all the Germans had. They could sniff every warning signal, every danger and every possible misfortune. My mother could sniff a lie from a million miles away and Tante Lisalotte could sniff trouble around the corner. Tante Minne could look at you for a long time and sniff what was inside your head. They knew if you had brushed your teeth or whether you had washed your hands. They knew if you had said your prayers or not. They could walk into a room and tell what you were talking about. They could sniff where you had been and they knew if you were wasting your money on chewing gum. The Irish aunts and uncles gave you money but the German aunts never gave you money, only clothes and toys. The German aunts and uncles told you not to spend any money, even the money that the Irish aunts and uncles gave you.

My father was different in Germany. He wore a cravat and a new suit, and he also got a new pair of glasses from Onkel Wilhelm that had a brown tint and made him look more German. He stopped wearing his tweed cap and his face was brown from the sun, right down to the collar of his shirt. He smiled a lot and one day Maria even made him eat chewing gum, just to try it. He liked talking to people about technical things, about all the new inventions in Germany. He had lots of new friends, like Onkel Willi, the priest who drove too fast with a cigar in his mouth and played chess with a box of cigars on the table beside him. I watched them one afternoon playing quietly until the room filled up with smoke and my father won and they shook hands like friends for life.

My father drank beer and sometimes he was nearly as German as any of the uncles, telling stories and laughing. With his brown face and his new cravat he looked so German that I thought he was going to buy a car and start smoking cigars as well. We didn’t need to be Irish and there was no point in speaking Irish to people on buses in Germany. Tante Minne knew that Ireland was full of monastic ruins and valuable antiques, and Onkel Wilhelm knew it was full of rivers with salmon and trout. Onkel Max said it was a small country with lots of big writers. Onkel Willi knew it was full of priests and sheep and holy shrines along the road, and Tante Lisalotte knew it was full of rainbows and lots of trees bent over by the wind. They said Irish people were very friendly and very generous, but my father said that was because they didn’t know how to own anything or keep money in their pockets. The poorer you were the more generous you were, he said. Irish people were so afraid of being poor that they spent all their money, while German people were so afraid of being poor that they saved up every penny.

My father said Irish people lived like there was no tomorrow and Onkel Wilhelm said the Germans lived like there was no yesterday. Onkel Max said that’s why Germans were busy trying to invent lots of new things like cars and tinted glasses and the Irish were busy inventing stories and literature instead. My father said the Irish invented lots of other things, too, like the hunger strike and Irish coffee. Tante Minne said it was a pity nobody in Germany thought of going on hunger strike against the Nazis. Onkel Wilhelm said it was a pity the Germans weren’t more like the Irish and my father said it was a pity the Irish weren’t more like the Germans. He said it was a pity that Ireland wasn’t closer to Germany and Onkel Max said it was a pity that Germany wasn’t surrounded by water. My mother said Ireland was a place where you still needed luck and prayers, and Ta Maria said Germany was a place where you made your own luck and deserved everything you got. They all agreed that the Irish never hurt anybody. They said the Germans tried to drive everybody who wasn’t German into extinction, unlike the Irish who were nearly driven into extinction themselves. Would you rather kill or be killed, my father asked, and nobody knew how to answer that question. Would you rather trample or be trampled, he said, because one language always goes into extinction in the end and nobody knew how to answer that either. Instead they agreed that Ireland and Germany were both still divided countries. The only difference was that the Irish won the war and still hated the British, while the Germans lost the war and had nothing against the British. And then there was an argument because Tante Minne wanted Mathias and Ursula to practise speaking English to us, but my father said that wasn’t allowed. So Tante Minne said my father was a welcome guest but he couldn’t start making rules in her house.

‘If you hate the British so much,’ Tante Minne said, ‘then why don’t you teach your children the most perfect English.’

My mother didn’t know how to fight back like that any more, even though she was in her own country. She had other ways of going around trouble. And anyway it was soon forgotten because it was time to start visiting more people and travelling around Germany. We took the train to Neuss to visit a bishop who had a large bowl of fruit on the table and a painting of a fruit bowl on the wall. He asked me if I preferred the real fruit or the painting of fruit, so I pointed at the bowl on the table and his housekeeper packed it all up in bags for us. He gave me his name too, Hugo. Then his driver drove us all the way to Cologne on the autobahn that went straight for ever. You could trust that there would be no cows chewing on the road and no ‘ Reifenbeisser ’ dogs running out to try and bite the tyres. We saw the Cologne Cathedral and the railway station and the bridge that once fell into the river during the war and the big number 4711 lighting up at night.