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

The next day, when my father was at work and we were at school, my mother went upstairs very quietly to her bedroom with lots of clean laundry. Bríd was still breathing up and down, so my mother sat her up in the big bed where she could look out and tell her everything that was happening outside on the street like a newsreader, who was going east and who was going west. She put the light on because it looked like it was getting dark outside and the red houses on the far side of the street said it was going to rain. Bríd said there was a man from the corporation slicing the weeds off the path with a shovel. Miss Tarleton came out and threw some more weeds out on to the path while the man wasn’t looking. And a dog came walking into our garden because the gate was open, but he just scratched the grass and went out again.

My mother opened up my father’s wardrobe and put away lots of clean shirts and rolled-up socks. She left the doors open and started looking at all the things that belonged to him before they got married. She found the picture of the sailor with his soft eyes looking away that my father never wanted anyone in our house to see again. She found other pictures of my grandfather when he worked on ships that belonged to the British navy. She found the last postcard he sent home to his wife saying: ‘More homesick than seasick.’ There were rosary beads belonging to my grandmother Mary Frances and a box full of letters and lots of medals she got from the navy after he died on his own in a Cork hospital. There were more boxes of letters from people in America and South Africa who couldn’t come home again. There were letters that Mary Frances wrote to my father when he was going to university in Dublin so that he would never have to leave Ireland and get seasick or have to work in America. Letters that my father wrote home to Leap to say that he got the money and a list of all the things he had to spend the money on, like the rent and razor blades and a penny for Mass on Sunday. Letters from his mother asking him to send home his clothes to Leap to be washed. Letters to ask him if he had heard anything from his brother Ted.

Bríd said it was raining and the man from the corporation left the shovel leaning against our wall. She said he was standing under the tree across the road taking shelter and smoking a cigarette. She said Mrs Robinson opened the door to hold her hand out and see if it was really raining, because there’s a clock in her hallway that tells the weather, but it’s not always right and you have to tap it with your finger. Bríd said it was raining hard now and there were big drops on the pavement and nobody on the street at all any more going east or west.

My mother sat on the floor and looked at photographs of my father before he was married. She found pictures of the time when Onkel Ted was becoming a priest and my father was becoming an engineer. She found German language lessons from Dr Becker and homework my father did. There were lots of things from the time during the war, when my father met Gearóid at university in Dublin and started the party called Aiséirí . There was a picture of my father walking down O’Connell Street at the head of a big march, holding a poster with the words: ‘For whom the bell tolls, Éire Aiséirí .’ There was another picture of my father and Gearóid in his tweed suit walking down Harcourt Street, smiling as if they were not afraid of the police.

There were boxes full of green leaflets to say what Aiséirí was going to do with Ireland if they were in control. They were going to stop people being greedy and getting rich on their own without sharing. People would not have to pay rent if they had to live with rats and not enough clothes or food for their children. Irish people would no longer have to go away and get seasick. They would get rid of all the things the British invented like county councils and slums and postboxes with the crown. They would take back all the things that belonged to the Irish, like the rivers and the big houses and the six counties in the north. It was time that the Irish took back the factories and the shops and put up the Irish word Amach on the doors in the cinemas instead of Exit. They were fed up with Irish people changing their minds all the time and not knowing how to start up a new country from the beginning. They said it was time for Irish people to stop sitting down and staring out the window as if they got an awful fright. What they needed was a big strong leader, not like Hitler or Stalin, but more like Salazar, because he was a good Catholic and Portugal was a small country like Ireland with stone walls and poor people living on their imagination.

My mother doesn’t understand very much about politics so she can’t tell the difference between the things that people say before elections. She knows they have nice hands and nice shoes and make lots of promises. She doesn’t understand what difference Aiséirí would have made if more people had thrown their hats up in the air for my father and not kept some of the things that the British left behind, like the trains and the courts and elections. She found notes for all the speeches on O’Connell Street, written in tiny handwriting on cards. But they made no sense. There were notes about laziness and blindness and immoral practices. Notes about greediness and money lending. Notes about bringing horses to the water and making them drink. About biting the hand that feeds you and rubbing salt into the wounds. There were notes about how silly it was to live in Ireland and not be Irish, notes about people still calling themselves British. People calling themselves Jewish, too. Notes about Jewish people giving Irish people carpets and making them pay for the rest of their lives. Leaflets about an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers. One of the cards quoted a man named Belloc, asking if anybody had ever heard of such a thing as an Irish Jew. And then my mother found the newspaper that Gearóid was talking about. It was so old it was gone yellow and almost brown. The headline on the front page said: ‘Ireland’s Jewish problem’. The date on the top was 1946. There was a note in handwriting, too, from Gearóid saying: ‘doesn’t go far enough’.

When you’re small you know nothing and when you grow up there are things you don’t want to know. I don’t want anyone to know that my father wanted Jewish people in Ireland to speak Irish and do Irish dancing like everyone else. I don’t want people to know that he was foaming at the mouth. That the Irish language might be a killer language, too, like English and German. That my father believes you can only kill or be killed. It’s the hardest thing to say that you’re wrong.

One day when I was coming home from school I saw my father in the street. He was on his way home, too, buying a newspaper on O’Connell Street. He looked like a different man when he was outside, more like an ordinary Irishman going home from work, with his cap on and his briefcase in his right hand. I was standing beside a newspaper stand looking at all the books and the magazines. There was a book with a gun and a dead bird on the cover and I wanted to know what the story was inside. All the time the man was shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’, with the newspapers under his arm. There was an echo coming from across the street where another man was doing the same thing, shouting ‘Herald-ah-Press’ back. When somebody asked for a paper, the man quickly took one out from the bundle under his arm and held his hand out flat so that people could give him the money. They could take the paper out of his fingers and walk away home quickly without wasting any time. The man’s hand was black from the papers and there were black marks on his face.

Then I heard my father speaking right beside me. I got a fright because I thought he was coming to get me, but he was just asking for the Evening Press . He didn’t know I was there at all. I looked up and saw him standing beside me, putting the money into the man’s hand. I knew it was my father’s soft Cork accent. It was my father’s briefcase and I even knew what was inside — his flask and his rain mac and his book on Stalingrad, with the train ticket halfway through to show how much he had left to read.