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

One morning my father woke me up early and showed me the newspaper. He still had shaving cream on his face and he was breathing fast from running up the stairs. He opened the paper wide and pointed at a picture of Dublin after a bomb. It was a bomb for Ireland, he said. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the picture, but I didn’t know what was happening until he read it out to me. It said that Nelson’s Pillar had been blown up during the night. I remembered going up to the top of Nelson’s Pillar once with Eileen and now it was gone and nobody would ever go up again. My father slapped the paper with the back of his hand and said the empire was crumbling. At last all the things the British left behind are disappearing, he said. At last we’re living in our own country and telling our own stories and speaking our own language. When I went to school I saw hundreds of people standing around looking at the remains of Nelson’s Pillar. There were no buses going up and down the street any more because there was rubble all over the place. The windows were broken and there was glass everywhere. People couldn’t go shopping that day or pass by to get into the GPO either. I saw a shoe shop with glass all over the new shoes. I looked up and saw the stump of Nelson’s Pillar like somebody’s arm cut off. Nelson’s head was on the ground and the dust of the empire was all around.

I keep thinking this didn’t happen.

One day I had to collect Bríd from school because she was homesick. The wind was howling in her chest so I had to go into the girls’ school and bring her home. I had to go up the stairs past the glass cage with the stuffed birds and knock on the girls’ classroom. They opened the door and I saw Bríd sitting down with three girls and the teacher around her. Her face was white and she was breathing with her mouth open. Her hair was wet from sweating and they were wiping her face with a towel, but she was happy and she smiled because I was there to take her home. I picked up her schoolbag and took her by the hand and we walked down the stairs very slowly. She was holding on to the banisters and sitting down sometimes to take a rest with her head down and her hair in her face as if nothing mattered any more.

When we got outside I had to carry her because she couldn’t walk. She was leaning forward and stopping all the time to hold on to the railings, so then I hung the schoolbag around my neck and gave her a piggyback up to the bus stop. On the bus I got her to lie down on the seat like a bed with the schoolbag as a pillow, but she got up again, because she was coughing and crying for air with her arm around me. I knew she wouldn’t be able to walk home from the bus, so I asked the conductor if he could get the bus to bring her home. He was clicking the money in his hand and said he wasn’t allowed to do that, but then I told him that my sister was going to get sick and he talked to the driver. So the bus turned up at the Eagle House and all the people were lost because they had never been up that street before on a bus. The conductor explained that the bus was an ambulance now. He was still clicking the money in his hand to see if anyone hadn’t paid their fare, but then he sat down like a passenger himself, until the bus got to our street with the red houses and the driver stopped because it was impossible to go any further. I told him it was all right because we lived in number two and that wasn’t too far. Then the bus conductor carried Bríd as far as the front door and afterwards everybody was talking about the lost bus, because it took so long before it turned around and drove back down to catch up with the main road again.

The doctor had to come and we went down for the red medicine and twisted glucose sticks. Bríd took only one spoon because she wasn’t able to swallow and the second spoon dribbled down her chin, down the outside of her neck instead of inside. My mother tried to make her go to sleep with a song about a donkey who said he was better at making noise than the cuckoo, but she kept sitting up in bed and trying to run away. So then we carried the bed down to the kitchen to make sure that she wouldn’t be lonely upstairs. She fell asleep for a while and we walked around the house very quietly as if there was a cake in the oven. When my father came home he knew what to do. He sat on the bed and stroked her head. He got her to swallow another spoon of medicine inside her neck, and even when we were going to bed, he was still sitting there with her, trying to make her smile and asking her puzzles like the one about the man who came to a fork in the road and had only one question to ask. He gave her lots of clues, but she still didn’t know the answer and he had to tell her in the end. We could hear her breathing up and down all through the house, and sometimes she was crying and putting her arm around my father to beg him to help her breathe.

‘It’s all right, Tutti ,’ I can hear them saying all the time. ‘It’s all right, mein Schätzchen , it’s all right.’

The man named Gearóid still comes to our house sometimes on Saturdays and he says the only thing that would help Bríd is goat’s milk. He comes in his Volkswagen and says we’re a true Irish fireside and we should be drinking goat’s milk anyway. He wants my father to start making speeches again and to write for the newspaper Aiséirí , like he did long ago. Everybody knows that the Aiséirí office is on Harcourt Street because you can see the blue Volkswagen outside every day with all the newspapers on the back seat, and sometimes you can see a goat tied to the railings as well to show the people of Dublin that the Irish are not afraid to be different. Gearóid keeps a goat in the city and we keep bees in the city, to remind people not to be so afraid of the country. My mother thought the goat was coming out to our house in the back of the Volkswagen but Gearóid said it would only eat up all the copies of Aiséirí , so the next time he came out he brought a canteen full of goat’s milk instead and my father gave him a jar of honey in exchange.

The goat’s milk didn’t help Bríd. She spat it out all over the bed clothes because it looked grey and tasted like pee-pee. Some people said Bríd should not be drinking milk at all. Some said she should be living in the mountains in Switzerland, not by the sea in Ireland, because it’s damp and sometimes you can’t even look out the window. Miss Tarleton said Bríd would grow out of it because she had a really bad chest herself when she was a little girl, and look at her now, she’s 78 years old and she can’t remember the last time she had a cold or even a cough. But Bríd doesn’t want to be like Miss Tarleton when she grows up with two different shoes on. The Miss Ryans said Bríd should go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes or Fatima but you have to be in a wheelchair for that. A German woman, who was not allowed to come to our house because she was divorced, gave my mother eucalyptus oil. And Mr Furlong told my mother it was good to have asthma, because then you would never get malaria. But Bríd is still sick all the time and getting thin because she doesn’t want to eat anything any more, not even glucose sticks or cakes that my mother makes.

In the middle of the night the doctor had to come back again because she was trying to open the window and get air from outside. I woke up and heard her crying, begging my father for air, and my mother still saying ‘it’s all right, mein Schatzchen , it’s all right. Come back to bed now.’ Everybody was afraid because nobody in our house ever cried that much before. I got up and saw Bríd reaching forward with her mouth open. My mother and father were holding her arms on each side. I asked if I could help but my father told me to get back to bed. Franz and Maria were standing on the landing as well, and they ran back into bed as soon as they heard his voice. My mother came and told us to pray hard, so I listened to Bríd in the dark and prayed that the bad chest would come back to me instead. Then I heard Dr Sheehan’s voice downstairs in the hall. He said Bríd was an angel and a saint and he gave her an injection to make her go to sleep. The next morning she was still going up and down all the time, but she was smiling again and my mother got her to eat some toast with jam.