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

Gearóid came again the next Saturday with the new Aiséirí . He’s always dressed in a brown tweed suit. His knees are bent even when he’s standing up, and, one time, me and Franz laughed because his trousers looked like they wanted to stay sitting down. He has bits of hair growing on his cheeks, too, where he stopped shaving, and a big smile when we answer him in Irish. He says Bríd is a páistín fionn , a blonde child, and really Irish underneath. She’s a fighter, he says. Then they go into the front room to talk for a long time about all the things that are not finished yet in Ireland, like still only one pop song in Irish about a goat that went mad and had to be stopped by the priest, and lots of other things like street names still in English and no parking fines in Irish. What if somebody wanted to break the law in Irish? Gearóid said they were going to put him in jail for not paying motor tax on the Volkswagen in English. They were going to put my father in jail, too, because he was waiting to pay a fine in Irish. My mother brings in the tea and we can hear Gearóid’s voice coming out under the door. He says he can’t keep writing all the articles in Aiséirí on his own, and he wants my father to write something big instead of just writing letters to the papers.

One day my father wrote a strong letter to the papers to prove that what they were saying about Cardinal Stepinac was wrong, that he wasn’t a Nazi at all and that he didn’t even hate any Jewish people, even though he was a Catholic. It was a big mistake to believe Radio Éireann, he wrote, because they only repeated the rubbish that the Communists in Yugoslavia were saying. They locked Cardinal Stepinac up in his house and put him on trial because they felt guilty themselves. People who feel guilty point the finger, my father says, and they’re just putting the blame on Cardinal Stepinac for everything that happened in the concentration camps. There were lots more letters in the paper after that and a Protestant man named Hubert Butler from Kilkenny once insulted the Papal Nuncio, saying that Cardinal Stepinac was guilty because the Catholic priests in Yugoslavia baptised children before they were killed in concentration camps. Nobody in Ireland could ever believe that priests helped the Nazis to kill children and save their souls. Nobody could ever believe Catholic priests helped a big SS man named Artukovic to escape to Ireland after the war and live in Dublin for two years before he emigrated to Paraguay. My father says Cardinal Stepinac should be made into a saint, and Gearóid said it was a pity my father didn’t take up writing again because he was so good at making speeches and lighting matches and going around the country on his motorbike.

‘His speeches had passion,’ Gearóid said to my mother. ‘He had them throwing their hats up.’

It’s good to hear people saying that. It’s good to think about my father standing up on a platform with crowds of people around him in the street throwing their hats up and not caring if they ever came back down again. It’s good to like your own father otherwise you won’t like yourself very much either. You want to believe that everything your own father says is always right.

‘ Aiséirí ,’ Gearóid said. ‘Resurrection. What about the daily uprising?’

My father smiled and said he was still waking up for Ireland every morning, but he was very busy with other things, too, at the moment, like beekeeping and making German oak furniture and reading about how to cure asthma without listening to doctors. He was starting to translate a German book as well that Onkel Ted gave my mother about training children without sticks. He was also trying to write more letters about Cardinal Stepinac not helping the Nazis to kill children, as well as trying to write an article about Guernica to say that the painting of screaming cows and legs in the air by Picasso might be a masterpiece, but maybe it wasn’t the Germans who did it. Gearóid says the Irish spent a long time building stone walls and saying the opposite and pretending the British were not there, and my father is a real Irishman with a gift for being against. He holds his fist up in the air and says my father could make anyone believe that day is night. He turns to my mother and winks at her because she is the audience and she says it’s good that people in Ireland can’t be kept quiet.

‘Remember the article they tried to ban,’ Gearóid said.

‘What article?’ my mother asked.

Gearóid punched his fist down on the side of the armchair and told her that my father once wrote a great article about the Jewish people in Ireland. He said they tried to stop them from printing it. They threatened to close down the office in Harcourt Street. The police came and took away lots of documents, but they were not afraid of going to prison and they went to confession and printed the article on the front page, because Aiséirí is the Irish for not sitting down.

‘Did you never read it?’ he said. ‘It was very well written. Very balanced and fair-minded. Maybe it didn’t even go far enough.’

After that my mother was very upset and she didn’t even do the washing-up. She was using the silent negative all the time. She told Bríd she was going back to Germany. She said she was going to pack her bags and take Bríd with her to a place where she would be able to breathe.

There were lots of doors slamming in our house after that. Bríd jumps in bed when the door of the front room bangs shut. Sometimes we get a fright as well when there’s a draught and the back door bangs shut in anger of its own accord. I know where my father is by the sound of the last door banging. One day I started slamming doors as well, but he said that wasn’t allowed and it’s not too late for him to get the stick and take me upstairs and close all the doors so that nobody will hear. My mother reminds him that he’s translating a book about punishing children without sticks, so then he puts on his coat and slams the front door, and everybody thinks he’s gone away and never coming back. Everything in the house rattles and then stays quiet for a long time. Then one day I told everybody I was leaving and slammed the front door from inside. It was a joke just to annoy them. I hid behind the oak trunk in the hall so that everybody thought I was gone for ever, but then Bríd started crying and my mother said she would start banging the doors, too, one day, then we would see how funny it was. And one night she did it. It was very late but she did it really and truly. My father came back and slammed the door of the front room without eating his dinner. He sat there staring at all the patterns in the carpet. My mother didn’t want him to feel sorry for himself, so she went in to sit beside him and put her arm around him like a friend for life. She wanted him to say that he made a mistake, but he just pushed her away. Then she stood in the hall and put her coat on slowly. She went out and closed the front door very, very quietly, as if she was leaving us and going back to Germany for ever.

‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ I said. Nobody ever heard a door closing so much before in their whole lives. It was so quiet that you could hardly even hear the click of the lock, and this time we were really afraid that she would never come back. This time the silence was bigger than after the loudest bang. I ran to the window upstairs and looked out, but she had already gone around the corner out of sight. I thought I should run after her. But then I waited. The whole house waited for her to come back. And when she came at last, everybody was happy, even my father. He said he would never slam doors again as long as he lived.

My mother says it’s the hardest thing in the world to say that you’re wrong. She wants us not to be afraid to make mistakes, and, when we do our homework, never to use a rubber or tear a page out of the copy book. She wants everybody to honest and Onkel Ted comes out to the house specially because he’s a priest and he’s heard all the mistakes that have ever been made in Ireland. He always brings a book in German for my mother and you wouldn’t think he’s read it because it looks new. This time he brought a book about Eichmann and a book about a priest named Bonhöffer. They sat around the table in the breakfast room and didn’t come out because they had so much to talk about. We went into the front room instead to listen to the radio and there was a song we liked called ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’. We listened to the radio with one ear and listened out for my father with the other, to hear if he was coming with one soft foot and one hard.