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

There was fog everywhere outside that day. I looked out the window of my mother and father’s bedroom and I thought it was like net curtains hanging down. The fog was waving a little. I could hardly see the houses across the street. I was listening to my mother and I didn’t know what country I was in any more. She was feeding the new baby on the bed, my small brother, Ciarán. When there was nothing more to say and she was finished telling about the bomb for Germany, we just listened to the foghorn for a long time and said nothing. Ciarán was smiling and shaking his head from side to side, trying to make himself dizzy and drunk. Ita and Bríd were playing with him and sometimes copying the voice of the foghorn until Ciarán laughed. Mrs Robinson pulled back her net curtains and looked out across the street at me and I waved, but she couldn’t see through the fog. She lets us watch the television in her house sometimes and I know what her house smells like. Everybody’s house has a different smell and some smells make you feel lonely and other smells make you feel like you’re at home. Miss Tarleton’s house smells like a greenhouse and boiling cabbage, and Miss Hosford’s house smells like a chemist. Mrs McSweeney’s house smells like toffee and shoe polish. The Miss Doyles’ flat upstairs always smells of beans on toast. The Miss Ryans’ house smells like washing and ironing and a bit of liquorice mixed in, and Miss Brown’s house smells like the mixture of soap and cigarette smoke and the smell you get at the back of the radio when it’s been on for a while. I don’t know what makes the smell of each house so different, but our house smells of being happy and afraid. Our friend Noel’s house smells like nobody ever gets angry because his father is a doctor and his mother never raises her voice and they have a dog. Tante Roseleen’s house smells of red lemonade and the place where Onkel Ted lives smells like a different country, like the house with the yellow door and the custard, the place where you always feel homesick.

My mother said we would go down to find the foghorn when she was ready. We waited outside and you could not see the end of the street, only up to number six. She cleaned all the crumbs and bits of mushy biscuits out from the bottom of the pram and when she came out Ciarán was sitting up with a serious face and a hat on over his ears that has a big furry bobble on top. We walked down to the sea with Ita and Bríd holding on to the pram as if they were driving it. The cars and the buses had their lights on, even though it was daytime, and sometimes you could only see the yellow lights like a ghost coming through the fog. Everybody was travelling so slowly that you thought they were afraid of where they were going and what they might find in the fog.

It was like a new fog country where everybody was quiet and saying nothing. There were no more far away countries like Germany or England or America, because you could not even look out across the sea. There were no waves at all and the ceiling was very low. It was like a small room with net curtains. Like a bathroom with the bath filling up and seagulls floating on top and the mirror steamed up and funny voices echoing around you. When we looked back we could not even see the road or the cars or any houses either. Nothing was moving. Not even a piece of paper. The trees were pretending to be dead and the foghorn kept saying the same word all the time.

‘Rooooooom …’ You could hear the word very clearly now. The same word all the time, as if it had only one word to say.

‘Rooooooom,’ we shouted back. ‘Room the rooooooom.’

I ran across the green park in front of the sea until my mother and all my brothers and sisters disappeared behind me. I heard them calling and I walked back slowly, like a ghost walking out of the fog. My mother looked different. I thought it was somebody else and I had come back to a different place. She had her back turned, looking out towards the sea, like somebody from a different country that I didn’t know the name of and couldn’t talk to. There was a ship coming in very slowly with the lights on. There was no wind and no language, and the only word left was the word ‘room’. She stood at the blue railings with the brown rust, like an ordinary German woman.

We walked on towards the harbour and the foghorn kept getting louder and louder. We saw the lighthouse coming closer, too, and the light coming around every few seconds to point the finger at us through the fog. My mother said it was like a man carrying a yellow lantern. Bríd was afraid to go any further, so my mother changed her mind and said it was just the lighthouse winking at us. We counted the time in between each word from the foghorn and in between each wink from the lighthouse. We came to the place where you can shout into a hole in the wall and hear the echo. ‘Jaysus, what the Jaysus,’ Franz shouted and everybody else had to do it after him in a line, except my mother. ‘Room the room and Jaysus what the Jaysus and down you bully belly,’ we shouted. We walked all the way out along the pier and my mother said we had to be careful not to walk straight off the end into the sea.

We came to the place where there was a granite monument for the lifeboat men who were drowned while trying to rescue people from a ship, not very far away from the land. My mother said it was very sad to think of them getting up on a stormy night and leaving the house and saying they would be back soon. We stood looking at the names of the men written up and thought of them going down into the dark water so close to home without saying goodbye to anyone. When we came to the place with the wind gauge on top, the cups were stuck and not even moving at all, just waiting for the wind to come back so it could start spinning again. Any of the boats we could see in the harbour were not moving very much either and the foghorn was talking so loud that we could not say a word any more. Bríd and Ita had their hands over their ears and we could not go any closer because Ciarán started crying. We sat down on a blue bench and my mother took out a bar of chocolate. There was nobody else on the pier. We were like the last family in Ireland, listening to the silver paper and waiting for the chocolate to be shared out.

If Hitler had been killed, then everybody would have said it was a good bomb, a bomb for Germany. Instead, they said the people who planned the puppet show against the Nazis were liars and betrayers. They were bad Germans who were not very good at hating people. It was a bad bomb, they said, a bomb against Germany and they might as well not have bothered, because nobody would even remember it. Sometimes a good bomb can be a bad bomb and sometimes a bad bomb can be a good bomb. But this was a useless bomb and everybody had to wait until all the good bombs started falling on Germany. Then the trains were on fire and the streets were full of people running. That was near the end of the black and white film that my mother was in. She had to work for the German army like her sister Marianne. Her other sisters didn’t have to, my mother says, because they already had children and Hitler didn’t want mothers fighting in the war. That was the time when all the good bombs were falling on the cities and people were burned alive in their sleep, to make sure they learned how to hate the Nazis.

After the bomb that didn’t even hurt Hitler, Marianne thought somebody was following her all the time. She was afraid that what she said in the opera house put her in trouble and that everybody knew she was against the Nazis. When she walked through the streets of Salzburg she sometimes had to look around and check to make sure that nobody was behind her. Sometimes they’re after you because they think you’re a Nazi and you feel guilty and you can’t trust yourself any more. And then one day on her way home from work, she found out who was after her. It was the woman who stood up in the opera house and stopped her from killing herself.