Hugo Hamilton - The Sailor in the Wardrobe

Packer is always meeting new people wherever he goes and he’s made friends with somebody who is a genius on the guitar and can sing ‘Talkin' World War III Blues’. He has begun to gather people around him who love music and has the idea of starting a band, even though none of us can play anything. They’ve been trying to teach me how to play the guitar, but I have no rhythm and don’t trust myself to be listened to. I believe that if you sing or play an instrument, you become like a piece of glass and people can look right into your head and see everything, all your thoughts and all your memories, everything you’ve been trying to keep hidden all along. Once you open your mouth, you let everybody into your house to look around. I need to learn how to breathe first and then I’ll be able to sing. I still breathe as if the air doesn’t belong to me, and maybe it’s always like that for outsiders, that you only borrow the air around you instead of owning it like everyone else. So they’re going to teach me how to sing and breathe as if the air is my own.

At home, my father doesn’t enforce the curfew any more. He doesn’t ask what I do and what time I come home, because he is preoccupied with other things, with his bees, with translating books and writing more articles for the papers. He’s been planning a business trip to Germany for the ESB, to buy a new shipment of high-voltage cables. He’s been translating technical manuals for them and right now he’s been given a big problem to solve for Ireland that does not involve any fighting or dying. It’s a problem that none of the leading experts in the ESB have been able to crack, because it’s about Britain and Germany.

The ESB generating station at Ard na Crusha was built by the Germans just after Irish independence, by a company called Siemens. It was well known that the Germans were the best at engineering, so they were brought in by the new Irish Free State government so they would build a generating station at the Shannon that would light up the whole country. As they were building a power station on the Shannon estuary at Ard na Crusha, the Germans began to have trouble getting the Irish workers on the scheme to work, and the German foreman once got a gun and went down to the barracks where the men slept and woke them up early with the gun pointing at their heads, saying that if they didn’t come to work on time in future he would shoot every one of them with his pistol. He was so furious and had such a serious look in his eyes that they believed him and didn’t think it was just a German playing a joke. So the generating station was finally built, even though everyone was saying it was a white elephant and the farmers all over the country didn’t want ESB poles on their land. But now there was a new problem. The station had been in operation for years, and to complete the rural electrification scheme, it had to expand. In addition to the German transformer, the ESB bought a British-built transformer which was a little easier to bring into Ireland. There was no reason why a new British-built machine would not work with the German one. But when it was finally delivered and installed, the engineers at Ard na Crusha could not get them to work together. The two big machines were designed to work in series, next to one another, my father says, so that there would be a huge saving in power which would double the capacity provided for the national grid. It had taken months for the new machine to be imported and built up, but when the machines were asked to work together, they refused.

Senior engineers were sent down from head office in Dublin to carry out tests. They studied the manuals and went back to the beginning each time, to see if they had missed any vital steps. They could not understand how a machine could be so stubborn and they began to think it was something psychological, something to do with the war that made even the machines reluctant to make it up and put the past behind them, some basic incompatibility between the German and the British models. The Irish understood that very well, my father says, how a machine would resent the newcomer. Of course the engineers didn’t put that down in the reports, but they did finally pass the problem back to head office saying they were baffled and could only conclude that it was a non-technical malfunction.

Experts were sent to Britain and to Germany to consult the manufacturers, but they came back no wiser. The British machine which had been bought at great expense was lying idle and only the German model was being used for the moment. It remained a mystery. All the leading engineers scratched their heads and passed the problem on, blaming the person who had made the decision to try and match two different makes like this in the first place. It was at this point that somebody remembered that my father spoke German and that there might be no harm in him having a go at it.

So he’s been sitting at home every night, going over all the different reports, studying the tests that were carried out in Ard na Crusha as well as all the reports from abroad. Night after night, poring over the same documents and manuals, measuring and calculating everything mathematically. He doesn’t believe that a problem can’t be solved and doesn’t believe that machines have a mind of their own or that nationality plays a part in electrical science.

‘It’s the ghost in the machine,’ my mother says at the dinner table, and they both start laughing. My father says it’s only Irish people who still believe in the supernatural and they will never solve anything if they remain in this pre-technical state. He says they still look at every problem from an emotional point of view, as if everything is personal. They have deluded themselves into believing that machines are possessed with nationalist features which make them unreasonable and uncooperative.

‘The machine is a servant,’ he says. He speaks as if he has discovered something about himself and us at the same time, as if it’s suddenly become clear to him that he turned us, his own children, into machines when we were small.

‘Under the right conditions, with no obstacles in the way, a machine will do as it is told in any language. This idea that a machine is like a donkey or a human with temperament is nonsense.’

Then for the first time in our lives around the table, we realize that he is speaking to us in English. The most basic rule to keep everything British outside the front door has been broken by himself.

‘The Irish must step into the technical age or they will not survive,’ he says, and we are shocked to hear these words coming from him in English. It should be a moment of freedom, but we feel rigid, almost wishing that he would keep to the rules no matter how absurd they have become. Franz is worried that my father might ask him a technical question and he won’t know what language to answer in. We’re still afraid to speak, so we would rather be silent and listen.

We are astonished at how natural he is in this forbidden language. He’s a different man, more relaxed, more like other men in Ireland. Even though we are still afraid to join in, we admire the way he speaks with a soft Cork accent. For the first time in my life, I hear him speaking to us in his own language, putting everything in his own words, breathing in English. Up to now he’s always been speaking to us in a foreign language, either in German or in Irish, languages that were never his own. Now he’s speaking to us in his native tongue, the language of his childhood, the language of his memory, the language of his own mother. It’s the language he went to sleep in when he was a boy, the language of stories and songs that he heard when he was growing up. Now I can understand what he really means to say, as if he’s got his voice back after years of exile.