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

She woke up once or twice and saw that she was dribbling on to Herr Stiegler’s jacket and there was a white mark on his collar like a new badge. Then they put her into the back of the car with her suitcase beside her and Stiegler handed the driver some money. She heard the engine starting with a growl. And as the car drove away she looked up and saw Herr Stiegler taking out his handkerchief to wipe his suit.

Then it was the time of the bees.

My father had been preparing for a long time, talking to other beekeepers on the phone and planning everything like a new business. He worked out how much he would have to spend on one side of the page and how much the bees would pay him back with honey on the other. He bought a jungle hat with a wire cage around his face and leather gloves that reached all the way up his arms, past his elbows. He bought the hives and the frames and a smoke gun where you could put in a piece of rolled-up sackcloth on fire and shoot smoke out through the spout to calm the bees down. Everything else was free. The bees would fly out from the roof of the breakfast room from morning till night and nobody could stop them collecting pollen.

On the evening they arrived, my mother got out her special tablecloth, as if the bees were coming to tea like relations from Germany or west Cork. It was like having a party because she put flowers on the table for them and bought lemonade, too. From now on we knew we would never be the same as any other family, because we had friends who were bees and everybody on our street thought the bees were sitting at the table with us eating bread and jam. We even said a special prayer for them, and when the bell rang we all jumped up from the table together and ran to the front door. There was a tall man standing there with a straw skep in his hand. He smiled and spoke to my father in Irish. Then they both went up the stairs and through my bedroom, and we watched from the room above as my father stepped out the window on to the roof of the breakfast room with the cage around his head.

My mother had a picture in the diary of a man named John Glenn who was dressed like a beekeeper. He was the first man to go into orbit, but then he lost his balance in the bath one day and broke his middle ear and stayed in orbit for the rest of his life after that. My father looked like he was in space for ever when he came out in his overalls and his long gloves and with his heavy boots on. The tall man said there was no need to shoot smoke because the bees were very happy to come to our house. He banged the skep and threw them all out on a board where they marched into the new hive with their white tails up in the air.

My mother and father are not afraid to be different. Other families are getting a car and a TV and we want those things as well, but we’re German and Irish and have bees as friends. They say we’re lucky to be so different because bees were better for the world and better for us. Most other children don’t even know the difference between a bee and a wasp. The TV kills your imagination and makes you stupid. But I know the other boys are not stupid, they just don’t care if there’s a difference between a wasp and a bee. They don’t care about the famine either. They don’t care about coffin ships and they don’t care about concentration camps.

All they care is whether we can fight. They call us Hitler and Eichmann and they want to see if we can fight like Germans. They want to hear us saying aaargh and uuumph like they do in comics and films. We try and run away. One day when they came after us, I ran one way and Franz ran a different way. I got home first through the football field, back along the lanes and in the back door. I didn’t know where Franz was. He came home later and stood at the front door with blood on his face and blood on his shirt.

‘ Mein Schatz , what happened?’ my mother asked.

There was nothing we could do about it. She could not tell us to stop being German, so she brought Franz into the kitchen and began to clean up the blood on his face. She got some chocolate out of the press to make things better. She said it was good that we didn’t fight back because we are not the fist people. We are the word people and one day we will win them over. One day the silent negative will win them all over.

When my father came home he was very angry, because nobody is allowed to hit Franz except him. He examined the shirt with the blood on it and said he could not let it go. I thought it was great because he was going to pay them back for what they did to Franz. Maybe he would get the boys who did it and make them kneel down to ask God how many lashes. He put his cap back on again and went straight down the road to one of the small houses and my mother tried to hold him back by the elbow at the last minute to make sure that he would stay friendly.

‘I’m not going down with fists,’ my father said.

Instead, he took the bloody shirt and brought Franz with him. When they got to the house and rang the bell, a woman answered the door and pretended that they had come to the wrong house. It was a funny thing to say, because the boy who hit Franz was hiding behind the banisters right beside her. My father smiled and said he didn’t come with fists, but he wasn’t leaving until somebody listened to him making a speech. So the man of the house had to come out in his slippers and his sleeves rolled up and a tattoo of an anchor on his arm. He was very tall, almost twice the size of my father. He had twice as many children as my father and their house was not even half the size of ours. He was tired and he had a stubble on his face, and it looked like he had no time to listen to speeches from people in bigger houses. The television was on in the front room and he was missing half the football match. My father didn’t care how big the man was or how small his house was or if he watched TV all day. He wasn’t looking for revenge. He just held up the shirt with the blood on it and let the tall man look down at it for a long time.

‘This is your own blood,’ my father said.

Then he recited pieces that he remembered off by heart from books he had read. He said it was time to fight for the rights of small people and small nations. He said the reason we were all on our knees was that others thought they were so great. He said it was no use fighting each other all the time because then Ireland would never have its own inventions and its own language.

The man with the tattoo started scratching his belly. He thought he was back at school. He had no idea why my father was coming down to his house to start reciting things from books and saying a few words, too, in Irish with a bloody shirt in his hand. Maybe he thought it was like a new religion or a new political party looking for money. Maybe he thought my father was a Communist. And that was even worse than being a Nazi, that was like the nuclear thing, when the air is full of red dots and everybody stays inside for the rest of their lives watching television. The man with the tattoo started looking down at the sour sallies that were growing beside his slippers at the door. Then my father said goodbye and insisted on shaking hands. He didn’t even mention the boy who hit Franz. He just left it at that. He even closed the gate after him, the gate that was never closed in its life before because the man with the tattoo and his whole family just left it open all the time and didn’t care how many dogs came into their garden to lift their leg and scratch the grass. As they walked away, my father told Franz not to look around.

‘Did you win them over?’ my mother asked.

‘They laughed,’ Franz said.

My mother said it didn’t matter because they were the fist people and you were right not to fight back, otherwise you would become just like them. My father didn’t even mind that they laughed and ignored his speech.