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

After that we tried to be as Irish as possible.

There was a new baby in the house named Bríd. Onkel Ted came out specially to our church to say Mass in Irish and we were the altar boys, Franz and me. Some people coughed and walked out because they thought they were in the wrong country and couldn’t pray to God in Irish. But Onkel Ted carried on without even looking around once. He baptised Bríd and poured holy water over her head, and afterwards there was a big cake in our house with a Celtic spiral made of Smarties. It didn’t matter who walked out of the church with a bad cough because my father said Bríd was born and baptised now and those people would soon be outnumbered. My mother wanted to know why they were more afraid of the Irish language than they were of the bees, and Onkel Ted said maybe the sting is worse. Franz said Irish speakers don’t sting and then everybody laughed and ate the spiral cake.

Then we went back to Connemara for three months to be as Irish as possible. We got new caps and new rain macs and went on a train with a group of boys who were all going to live in a full-Irish fireside. We were going to school in the Gaeltacht and we would come back like native speakers. At the station, a photographer came to take a picture for the newspapers and my mother kept it in the diary. Franz and me and the other boys waving goodbye on the platform, because we would not see or speak to anyone in our family until we came home fully Irish.

Franz went to An Cheathrú Rua and I went to a new place called Béal an Daingin, but I was sick again and the howling started up in my chest every night. The people in the house were very nice to me, but sometimes I wanted to go home because I couldn’t breathe. I had lots of trouble with the dogs howling in my chest. The local doctor came and he said I would soon get over it. But I was coughing all the time and had to stay in bed. Then Bean an tí gave me cigarettes that were good for asthma. She bought a packet of Sweet Afton and put them beside my bed with a box of matches. She told me that if I felt short of breath I should light up a cigarette and smoke away like a good man, because that would help me to cough up all the bad stuff and not be afraid of the dark. Then I got better again and forgot that I was German and started learning how to live in Irish.

There was a boy named Peadar in the house who showed me how to get water and how to milk the cows. Bean an tí taught me how to find all the places where the hens laid eggs. I helped Fear an tí to stack turf against the side of the house and I learned how to say ‘ go dtachtfaidh sé thú ’ which is the Irish for I hope it chokes you. I learned how to turn English words into Irish and to say ‘ mo bhicycle ’ and ‘ mo chuid biscuits ’. I learned how to walk to school backwards to stop the hailstones stinging my legs. I watched men gathering seaweed and putting it on big lorries to be taken away to Galway and turned into cough medicine. I saw people laying out salted fish on the stone walls to dry them in the sun. I saw the tide going out every day as if it was never coming back, and I saw donkeys with their feet tied together to stop them running away and laughing at everybody.

There was a curly piece of brown sticky paper hanging in the middle of every room with dead flies stuck to it. There was a dog beside the fire who had his chin on the floor and his eyes closed and only lifted one ear to hear if anyone was coming. Every day a man named Cóilín came to visit and sit by the window. He was a cousin belonging to the woman of the house and he would look out at the road and tell them who was passing by. There was a radio in the house but there was no TV and no need for one, because the man at the window was the man who said the news. The woman of the house could carry on making the dinner and the man of the house could sit with his pipe by the fireside without looking up. That’s Joe Phait going west now with his new coat on, Cóilín would say. Here’s Nancy Seóige making her way back from the east now with biscuits for her sister. There were four different directions you could go — west, from the west, east and from the east. Sometimes they came in to visit and then the whole house was like a television programme, with the man at the window keeping everybody talking. Nancy Seóige came in to smoke a fag out of the wind and explain that the biscuits were for her sister, because she was ill in bed for a long time and the Sweet Afton were doing her no good any more. She came in from the east and when she finished her story she went back out to the west.

There’s Tom Pháidin Tom going east now with his bicycle and his dog behind him, the man at the window said. Sometimes the woman of the house would ask questions, too, like what Tom Pháidin Tom was thinking about, and she was told that he was thinking he had spent long enough in his own company on the bog for one day, and he was going east up to Teach Uí Fhlatharta to buy pipe cleaners and tobacco for himself. The man at the window knew who was going by and who was not going by. He knew what everybody was saying in Connemara, and all the conversations that were going on in England and America even, as far away as Boston. I see the sagart , Father Ó Móráin has not gone up to see the Johnson family yet about their son in Birmingham. Páraic Jamesey must have gone up to Galway on the bus for the day, because they say he’s great with a nurse from Inishmore working in the Galway regional hospital. They say that Patricia Mhuirnín Leitir Mochú is getting married in the spring in America, to a stranger.

The man at the window could tell who was up at Teach Uí Fhlatharta and what stories they all had. He knew that Tom Pháidin Tom was buying more than pipe cleaners because his dog was coming back from the east already and that meant Máirtín Handsome was surely up there as well and Tom Pháidin Tom would not be going home until it was late, unless Peigín Dorcha went up after him with her dark hair. He knew what all the living people were saying and also what all the dead people were saying in the graveyard. He knew that Tom Pháidin Tom’s brother Páidin Óg was calling out from the grave, saying that his throat was like a dry stick and that if he was still alive and hadn’t drowned out of Ros a Mhíl one day, then he’d be up there in Teach Uí Fhlatharta and nobody, not even the priest or the Pope in the Vatican or Éamon de Valera himself would get him out until he had sung ‘ Barr na Sráide ’ and the ’Rocks a Bawn’.

One night I had to go up to Teach Uí Fhlatharta with a blue and white milk jug. The man of the house was not allowed to go up himself because the priest had told him never to go east or he would never come back west again if he did. So then I had to go east for him and he told me to be careful on the way back not to spill a single drop. It was dark and as I walked along the road towards the lights of Teach Uí Fhlatharta, I knew that the man at the window was telling the man of the house about me. There’s Dublin Jack going in the door now carrying the jug with the blue and white stripes and there’s Dublin Jack taking out the money and buying sweets instead, but that was only a joke.

Teach Uí Fhlatharta was a big shop with everything you could buy, like jam and sweets and things like cement and wood, too. There was lots of smoke and lots of tall men in wellington boots standing at the counter, all talking at the same time. They were telling all the stories in Connemara as far away as Boston. I saw Tom Pháidin Tom laughing and smoking a pipe that had a lid on it for the rain. I stood behind them waiting for a while and looking at the new brushes and buckets hanging from the ceiling, until one of the men turned around to take the jug from me. He told the man behind the counter to fill it up to the top because Dublin Jack was very thirsty. I put the money up on the counter and, when the jug was full, they passed it down to me and told me to hold it with both hands. There was cream on top to stop you from seeing what was inside the jug, but you could smell it. Then one of them came over to open the door, and I walked back slowly in the dark without turning the jug upside down or meeting any ghosts or falling down in the ditch or getting swallowed up by the ground and never seen again. I didn’t spill a single drop. But when I got back, the man of the house looked into the jug for a long time. He asked me did I drink half of it myself, but the woman of the house told him I didn’t. The man at the window wanted to know if I saw anyone with a tweed cap turned backwards and that was Máirtín Handsome. Then the man of the house drank from the side of the jug and started telling a ghost story that happened to himself one time when he was coming home from Teach Uí Fhlatharta in the dark.