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

Everything is happening again. My mother cuts out a picture from the newspapers of a man who set himself on fire because he couldn’t live in the wrong country. She puts it into her diary, as well as pictures of Russian tanks on the streets of Prague. She remembers Prague with German troops. A new war started in Vietnam and my mother was cutting out pictures of a new kind of bomb there. She also has a picture of a black man named Martin Luther King who was assassinated in America. Now they want civil rights in Northern Ireland, too, and she cuts out pictures of people with placards and blood running down their faces. Some people even had to leave their houses because they were in the wrong country and had no names and no faces any more. So now the diary is full of pictures of Russian troops in Czechoslovakia and British troops in Northern Ireland and American troops in Vietnam. My mother says it’s hard to believe how anyone thinks they can keep people quiet that way. Homesick people carry anger with them in their suitcases. And that’s the most dangerous thing in the world, suitcases full of helpless, homesick anger.

In school, some of the boys made an effigy of Nelson’s Pillar out of cardboard and blew it up on O’Connell Street with sodium chlorate and sugar. They made a little speech called ‘Up the Republic’. The fuse was coming out the door where you used to go up the winding stairs to look out over the city. They lit it and there was an explosion that knocked the toy soldier with the sword off the top and set the whole thing on fire. Everybody going home from work in Dublin thought things were happening again. On the radio you can hear a song about people with the foggy dew in their eyes and another song called ‘Up went Nelson’. On TV you can see a man in Northern Ireland foaming at the mouth about a spider inviting the fly into the parlour. You can see people marching with big drums that make so much noise none of the other puppets can speak. A boy at school told me that his mother came from Derry and she had her Holy Communion dress torn when she was a girl and never forgot it.

Up in the north the Catholics are called Fenians and the Protestants are called Prods. The Fenians are afraid to be British and the Prods are afraid to be Irish because they can’t breathe very well in Ireland. People call each other names because they want to kill each other. People learn how to hate each other because they’re afraid of dying out. In school they call you a Jew if you don’t have any chewing gum to share. The British are called Brits and the Irish are called Paddies and the Germans are called Krauts and that’s worse than being either British or Irish, or both together. They still call us bloody Krauts even though we’re bloody Paddies. Sometimes they tell us to fuck off back to where we came from, but that doesn’t make any sense because we come from Ireland. One day they called Franz a fuckin’ Jew Nazi and held him against the railings of the Garden of Remembrance. He had no chewing gum, so they banged his head until it started bleeding. Brother Kinsella punished them all for it, including Franz who did nothing, and everybody was laughing about that for a long time, punishing the guilty and the innocent together. Brother Kinsella said it was the only way to stop things happening again, to hit the victims and the perpetrators equally.

My friend at school has stopped being my friend. I like him. I like the way he looks and the way he talks. And sometimes I want to be him instead of myself. He never called me names, but one day he stopped talking to me. He just walks past me in school without a word. Maybe he’s punishing the innocent and the guilty, too, because he tells everybody that the Nazis turned people into soap and you can’t deny that. He won’t be my friend for life any more because he thinks I’m going to make chairs out of people’s bones and I can’t deny that either, even though I haven’t done it yet. I know I can’t have friends for life. It’s better to be on my own from now on, because they’ll find out sooner or later what I’ve done.

At home my mother wants to stop things happening again. She says we’re not the fist people, so one day she took all the sticks from the greenhouse and broke them over her knee in the kitchen until they were all in bits and my father had nothing to hit us with any more. He was still able to smack the rubber gloves into your face and give you the foggy dew. And he was able to throw pots, too, because he always did the washing up. But he was not able to take me up the stairs and pray that he was doing the right thing for Ireland, so then I started arguing with him at the table until he was blinking and I could see myself twice in his glasses. I like giving the wrong answers. One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are? My mother says I was driving him mad with wrong answers. He knew there were no sticks left, but there was a bowl of Apfelkompot on the table instead. He looked at it for a minute. Then he picked it up and threw it over my head. It was still warm. I felt it running down my face into the collar of my shirt. But I was smiling, because I knew that my father was losing the language war. My mother cleared everything up and tried not to laugh. She said you had to have an imagination to throw Apfelkompot over somebody’s head and maybe she should make it more often if we liked it so much. But later on she told me never push people into a corner. She says there’s too much fighting in our house and how can Ireland ever be at peace if we go on like this.

One day I ran away from home with another boy from school called Evil. We stayed out all night until it started raining and the only place we could find to shelter in the whole city was in the cab of a truck. It was so cold in the truck that we were shivering. In the morning we went into a church to get warm, and I knew that I never wanted to be homeless again. Homeless people are always hunched up with the cold and warm people stand up straight. I knew there was a boy living rough under the Top Hat. There’s a dance hall called the Top Hat Ballroom that we pass on our way to school. It had a huge black top hat on the roof until it was blown off in a storm one night and the hat fell down into the laneway beside the dance hall. Now there’s a homeless boy living under it and I don’t want to be like him, hunched up with no language to go home to.

Instead, I went home and told my father that I would kill him. I said I would not speak any dying language any more, only killer languages, and then I asked him how would he like to be killed by his own son. He took off his glasses and told me to go ahead. But then I did nothing. I just said what they say in school when they’re afraid. I said it wasn’t worth wasting my energy. In any case, my mother said I would have nowhere to go home to if I did something like that. Once you kill somebody, you can never go back. So now she tries to keep us away from each other in different parts of the house with at least one or two doors slammed between us. She helps me to run away. Sometimes she lets me stay out of school and go to the cinema where it’s dark and nobody knows who I am. Then I talk to myself in English. I pretend that I’m not German or Irish at all. But one night my father found out and he came up to my room when I was already asleep. He started punching me in my sleep and I woke up with him foaming at the mouth and my mother pulling him back by the elbow and Franz standing at the door calling peace. My father had lost the language war and everybody knew it. My mother says the people who lose become ugly and helpless with anger. Nobody wants to be a loser. Nobody wants to be left in the train station with a suitcase full of helpless anger.