Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

My mother says she had never been so afraid in her life, seeing him smile from behind his newspaper. But there comes a moment, she says, when you have been so afraid for such a long time, that you don’t care any more. Suddenly you become light-headed with courage. The train was full with people going into Krefeld and Düsseldorf, so she just suddenly spoke up to the whole carriage.

‘I want you to leave me in peace,’ she said in a raised voice. Everybody in the carriage looked around and stared at Willenberger sitting opposite her, until he eventually had to move away.

Sometimes my mother still thinks he will come after her in Dublin, that he will suddenly knock on the door. For years she had nightmares about men outside the house, sitting in a car, waiting for her to come out with her children. She had escaped to Ireland without losing her conscience. And then she laughs and says she would have made a terrible lawyer.

When she first arrived in Ireland, she felt so free. She vowed to go on her pilgrimage to Lough Derg. She had a job as a governess and was collected in Shannon by Mister and Missis Bradley who owned a public house and a shop on the main street in Ballymahon, in the middle of Ireland. They had three boys. She remembers the welcome that Mister Bradley gave her at the airport, clasping her hand with both of his, then taking her suitcase from her. They brought her to the car and made her sit in the front seat, so that she would see as much as possible along the journey. My mother thought they would go straight to Ballymahon and she was anxious to start working right away, but that was not how the Irish did things, she says, and the Bradleys first brought her to Ennis, where they stayed in a hotel and had a party. Mister Bradley knew lots of people in Ennis and invited them all to come for a drink. She says she could not understand why the Irish wanted to celebrate before she had even done any work. It was a poor country, a country that had not been bombed during the war but looked much more destroyed and starving than Germany. The party lasted until late in the evening with people toasting her and singing songs and a priest explaining the rules of hurling to her, even though she didn’t understand how you could play with sticks and not hurt each other, so the priest told her that hurling was a substitute for war, like all sport and singing.

In Ballymahon, everybody in the town was talking about her and coming up to have a look for themselves as if they had never seen clothes like hers before, only in the films. Groups of children came to the public house to see her coming out and when she smiled at them, they were shy and held on to each other. She felt like a famous visitor. She was invited to dinner every evening, unlike the other people working in the pub and around the house. The Bradleys had made a lot of money during the war when Mister Bradley stored gallons of whiskey and boxes of tea which had become scarce. He had made so much profit selling these during the rationing, that even the Bank of Ireland came to borrow money from him because they were broke. But it wasn’t long before my mother learned what Ireland was really like and why there was so much poverty that could not be explained by bombs.

Next door there was a small cottage where the door was always open. The little Bradley boys would run past and shout ‘Dirty, Dirty.’ She told them to stop, but they would not listen to her. It made no difference, they kept on shouting ‘Dirty, Dirty.’

My mother went to the door of the cottage and looked inside. It was dark and smoky because of the small windows. It was true that the place was dirty. She couldn’t believe that humans could live like this. There was not a single piece of furniture in the house, not even a chair, and the man sat on the earth floor beside the fire with his wife. My mother says his naked legs could be seen coming out under his ragged trousers like a skeleton. They never seemed to come out of the house. They must have been ashamed to be seen in the town and never moved from the spot where they were sitting.

My mother spoke to the Bradleys and told them what was happening. Mister Bradley laughed. Missis Bradley said the tailor and his wife were dirty people, living in squalor. My mother was not able to persuade them to control the boys, so she tried something else. The next time they shouted ‘dirty’ in the door, she decided to go in and apologize for them. She stepped inside the cottage and got the smell of poverty coming up from the two old people. She apologized for the children’s behaviour and said she hoped they were not offended. The old people looked up and said nothing, because they didn’t understand English. They could only speak Irish and the Bradley boys started laughing. Even Mister and Missis Bradley found it funny and my mother says the whole town was laughing at the idea of a German woman trying to apologize to the poor tailor and his wife when they only spoke Irish.

My mother then learned her first words so that she could go into the house and greet them in their own language. She found out their names as they were known to other Irish speakers around the town. Páraic Mháirtín and Sinéad gan cainte . The tailor even got up from the ground to come to the door and shake her hand. She says it felt like a thin black leather glove. It was soft and bony, with no weight at all left in it, and hardly any warmth. She can never forget shaking hands with somebody so poor and so destitute, but still so much alive.

She started taking some spare food from the house and bringing it to the cottage and the tailor thanked her in Irish. Missis Bradley didn’t like the food going out of the house, but she didn’t say anything except that she wanted her children to grow up clean. Everybody was afraid of being like the tailor and she wanted my mother to give the boys a few words of German instead of Irish.

She continued to bring food to the cottage from time to time under her coat, like she did in Germany. But unlike the Americans in Wiesbaden, the Bradleys got annoyed because my mother went too far. One day she asked if she could give away an old coat belonging to Mister Bradley. They were throwing it out onto the rubbish tip to be burned, an old brown torn coat which she cleaned up. She sewed on new buttons and fixed the sleeves, then brought it over to the tailor. After a few days, Mister Bradley came into the house in a rage, saying that he could not understand the Germans any more, because he walked along the street and saw the dirty, filthy Gaelic tailor standing at the door of his little cottage wearing his old coat. He was shocked to see what he would look like if he hadn’t made all that money selling whiskey and tea. Missis Bradley said it was an outrage and that people in the town would mistake the tailor for her husband. After that, my mother decided it was best to leave her work with that family and moved to Dublin, where she met my father. But even when Missis Bradley brought her to the bus to say goodbye, my mother noticed that maybe she had begun to change a tiny bit, because she said my mother had done something that nobody else in the town was able to get away with. She wished her good luck and said she would be missed.

My father puts his arm around my mother and praises the way she stood up for the Irish language, for the people dying out and going into extinction. He says the Irish people began to pretend they didn’t belong to the same country as the tailor and his wife. They made a foreign language out of their own tongue and that allowed them to become racist against their own people. He smiles and says my mother shook hands with a dead language and brought it back to life again.

I know I will be judged by what the Irish did.