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

When I was going back to Dublin again, the woman of the house went out and caught a chicken for me to take back with me on the train. She put it into a bag and tied it with a ribbon so that the chicken was looking out at one end and some feathers were coming out the other. I knew that the man at the window was still talking about me long after I was gone. There’s Dublin Jack on the train now with the chicken beside him looking out the window at the stone walls going by. There’s Dublin Jack going home more Irish than anyone in Connemara, talking to the chicken in Irish and giving it a bit of his sandwich.

After that we started going to a new all-Irish school in Dublin with the Christian Brothers. Every day we had to get a train into the city and walk past Nelson’s Pillar and Cafollas and the Gresham Hotel. Everything at the new school was done through Irish — Latin, algebra, hurling and even English. The Christian Brothers wore black with a white collar and white chalk marks around their shoulders. One of them had brown fingers and smoked a piece of chalk all day in class, until his lips were white from talking. He asked me to read out a piece in a book and the whole class had to listen. He said it was a miracle how a Dublin boy could become so Irish. He escaped out of the classroom and took me by the hand, flying down the stairs three at a time and leaving all the other boys behind fencing with rulers. He said I had to go around and read in front of the whole school. I had to go to every classroom and show them what a native speaker was like, and the principal said I should be on television as an example of how history could be turned back.

Everybody was proud of me and I liked being Irish. But I knew all the boys in the school were laughing at me. Nobody really wanted to be that Irish. If you wanted to have friends you had to start speaking to yourself in English, so that nobody would call you a mahogany gaspipe or a sad fucking sap or think that you were from Connemara long ago. You’d never get into the Waverley Billiard Hall speaking Irish. You had to pretend that you had no friends who lived long ago like Peig Sayers. You had to laugh at Peig Sayers so that nobody would suspect you were really Irish underneath. You had to pretend that Irish music and Irish dancing were stupid, and Irish words smelled like onion sandwiches. You had to pretend that you were not afraid of the famine coming back, that you didn’t eat sandwiches made by your own mother and that you had an English song in your head at all times. You had to walk down O’Connell Street and pretend that you were not even in Ireland.

There were celebrations everywhere in Dublin for the Easter Rising. It happened fifty years ago and my father said it should happen again because Ireland would never be free until we had more of our own inventions. He said the Irish people were forced to repeat their history because of all the things the British left behind. And one day we saw the Easter Rising happening again in front of our own eyes. They were making a film of it and I saw Patrick Pearse coming out and surrendering with a white flag before he was executed by the British. There were pictures of Patrick Pearse in the windows of shoe shops and sweet shops. The shops had Irish flags, too, and copies of the proclamation which we all learned off by heart. We sold Easter lilies and there was hardly a single person in the city who wasn’t wearing one. In school a man came from the Abbey Theatre to put on a pageant and we got parts as croppy boys or redcoats and died every night. On the buses there were little torches and swords and all the lamp-posts in the city had flags so that everybody would remember how great it was that the Irish were free to walk down any street in the world, including their own. Nobody was telling the Irish when to get off the bus. Some people still thought it was the British empire coming back every time a bus conductor asked them for their fare. And some people thought it was the Nazis coming back every time an inspector came on to ask for their ticket. But the flags and the special stamps and the pictures in all the shops were there to remind everybody that the Irish were not the saddest people in the world any more, they were laughing now and nobody could stop them.

One day the whole school was brought out to see a film called Mise Éire which is the Irish for ’I am Ireland’. Some of the boys in the class were asking was Sean Connery in it and was there a woman smoking and blinking and wearing nothing under her dressing gown. But it wasn’t that kind of film. There were no horses either rising up and whinnying. It was mostly about the Easter Rising, with black and white pictures of windows smashed and bullet holes in the walls. There was lots of big music that sounded like big country music from the end of a Western film and made everybody feel strong in their stomach. There were two boys standing guard and protecting the grave of O’Donovan Rossa with hurling sticks. There were people marching through the streets with hurling sticks on their shoulders and a deep voice saying ‘Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.’ It didn’t matter that James Bond wasn’t in it because Patrick Pearse was in it instead, and even though he got killed in the end, he put up a good fight.

I had new friends in school and one of them had a brother who worked in a gardening shop. One day he brought a bag of green dye into school that was used to mix with fertiliser, so that everybody would know it was not to be eaten. At lunchtime, we were not let into the Waverley Billiard Hall yet, so we brought the bag of fertiliser over to the new garden of remembrance across the road from the school. Then I had the idea to throw the dye into the fountain for Ireland. It turned green before we even got a chance to get back out of the garden again and the guards were sent for. The problem was that anyone who touched the dye had green hands and green faces, so it was easy to tell who did it. I tried to wash my face in the public toilets near the GPO but every time I put water on my face it turned even more green. There was a lot of trouble at school because I walked into the class late with my face all green, and I thought I would be expelled, but nothing happened because they said it was the right colour at least.

On the train home everybody thought it was part of the Easter commemorations and that every boy in Ireland was turning green. I wanted to be as Irish as possible so that I would never have to be German again. I wanted to belong to the saddest people and not the people who killed the saddest people. At home I tried to speak Irish to my mother again but she didn’t understand a word, so then I sat at the window while she was working, and I pretended that I was the newsreader, like the man at the window in Béal an Daingin. I waited for my father to come home from the station and told her all the people going by.

There’s Miss Ryan going east now to get minced meat for herself and her sister. There’s Miss Hosford going east, too, on her bicycle and nobody knows where she’s off to at this time of the day with a rucksack on her back. They say that Mrs MacSweeney’s niece is getting married soon in Dublin. They say that one of the Miss Doyles nearly got married to a stranger once, but she’s happier now living with her sister till death do us part, and reading to each other every evening after dinner from an indecent book by James Joyce. Here are the Miss Lanes coming out and looking up at the Irish flag hanging from the front window of our house, and they think they’re in the wrong country altogether. They look around the garden to make sure that nobody has kicked a football into their country and say that it’s a shame more Irish people didn’t die fighting the Nazis. They say the Irish were cowards because they didn’t fight against the Nazis, but they forget that the Irish fought against the British. There’s Miss Tarleton coming out now picking up bits of paper in her front garden and wondering why my mother didn’t die fighting against the Nazis. But she doesn’t know that my mother lived against the Nazis instead. They say that Miss Tarleton hates the bees more than the Irish language, except that they’re good for the loganberry harvest. They say that Miss Tarleton went into the butcher’s shop one day and asked Mr Furlong what the picture of Patrick Pearse was doing in the window beside all the meat. He said it was time to die for Ireland and she said that meant it was time to kill for Ireland, but my father says they’re both wrong because it’s time to live for Ireland and be Irish. They say that Mrs Creagh once went over to England for horse racing at Cheltenham and somebody asked her if the Irish still kept pigs under the bed, and she said it wasn’t half as bad as having the pigs in the bed like they do in England. Here’s Mr Clancy going down to the Eagle House and he once had a big argument with my father in the street. My father told him we were trying to be as Irish as possible. Mr Clancy said he was just as Irish as us and didn’t speak a word of Irish. He said Irish was the ‘aboriginal’ language and no bloody use to anyone any more. So then my father told Mr Clancy he would soon be outnumbered and Mr Clancy said my father better have a lot more children. Here’s my father coming around the corner saying that nobody is going to stop us speaking Irish or make us take down the Irish flag from the window until we feel like it. My father and Mr Clancy are going towards each other on the pavement and you think there’s going to be a big fight and blood on the ground, but my father is not one of the fist people and neither is Mr Clancy, and they both nod to each other politely as they pass by.