The Sailor in the Wardrobe (30 page)

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Are you the gentleman who plays the flute so beautifully?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I smiled, ready to talk about Ireland. But then the friendliness in her eyes disappeared. She looked me up and down, then came forward towards the banisters.

‘Listen here. If I ever hear that dreadful noise again, I’ll call the police.’

Later that evening, the Germans living in the apartment with me began to discuss the whole incident in a cloud of smoke. It was like a political meeting, with an ashtray and a candle at the centre of the round table. Some of them wanted to go straight down and teach her a lesson in tolerance. They planned a demonstration on the doorstep and suggested that I should perform something right under the old woman’s nose. Maybe I subconsciously thought about what she might have gone through during the war, the noise of the bombing every night, so I left it. I didn’t want music to be an aggression.

In the meantime, things have begun to move on. Packer is going back to Dublin to study law and I have
been thinking about going to university in Berlin. I like the idea of studying German literature, which would be impossible in Dublin, because I can never live at home again. Somebody in the apartment suggested that I could take up German citizenship. With a German-born mother, it would be no problem. I could make life easy for myself.

There was another big discussion in the apartment after that. Please don’t become German, somebody started saying, with praying hands. You’ll have to think like a German, sleep like a German, even breathe like a German. Others thought it would make no real difference what passport you held, because your real identity would break through sooner or later. Everybody around the table was talking about how they would like to be Irish. Some of them had already been there and they spoke about the empty landscape, the standing stones, the smell of turf smoke. They asked me for tin whistle lessons. One of the girls said she would love to learn Irish. There was silence in the room as she disclosed her most secret wish, to belong to a people who had never harmed anyone. She wanted to belong to a minority, a people who were still oppressed and had not yet achieved their independence.

Then there were lots of letters for me. The old woman hanging around the post-boxes must have been jealous. She gave me a dirty look each time I opened my box, as if I had taken up correspondence with all kinds of people just to steal her post-luck away. All she got was the usual advertising leaflets which she then redistributed into the other post-boxes. Could it be, I wondered, that she was still waiting for letters that would never arrive, from the war? In the basement of the building I once found all these numbers written up in chalk on the wall, all the
times she and other inhabitants spent sheltering from the bombing.

At first my mother was puzzled and wanted to know why I suddenly needed a German passport. It was like going into exile, she said, a step that she had taken when she moved to Ireland, the same step that I made as a child, every time I went out the front door into a foreign country outside on the street where they spoke English. My father warned me about losing my nationhood, but he had nothing against the plan, because I think he had always secretly wished he was more German, whereas my mother always wished she was more Irish.

My mother sent everything – birth certificates, old passports, school reports, even an old savings book. It was obvious that she didn’t want to look too closely at these things in case it would remind her of the decisions she had made in her life. She would have to think about it all over again, whether it was a mistake to move countries and leave all her family of sisters behind. It was like a leap into the unknown. All those integration problems, the moments of self-doubt. She must have put everything into an envelope very hastily to avoid remembering all of that. A number of documents arrived that were of no relevance whatsoever. Her denazification papers. Her first provisional passport, stamped by the four Allies after the war, allowing her to leave Germany. She even sent her first Irish work permit, issued in Athlone. ‘This alien has permission to take up employment.’ I looked at her photograph on the work permit. It was from a time before I was born. I could see by her face, even in black and white, that it was taken in summer. She wore a suit and a white blouse opened out over the collar of her jacket. She had dark curly hair and her name was Irmgard Kaiser.

I put the necessary documents into an envelope and sent it off to the relevant authorities, but then I got a letter back saying they could not proceed with my application because my mother did not hold a current German passport. So I sent her back the documents and told her that I was going to stay the way I was, speckled. How could I ask her to turn the weathervane back to Germany? Had she not made her escape to Ireland? Had she not had enough trouble changing over to my father’s Irish surname: O’hUrmoltaigh, a name the shopkeepers still can’t pronounce and which they have started getting around by just calling her ‘Mutti’. Over the years, her German humour has mixed in with Irish humour, and she has found a place in Ireland that she can call her home.

Maybe you have to live under cover for a while before you can find your true character. Now I want to belong to the same country as Bob Dylan and Dostoevsky and Fassbinder. I want to be in the same wardrobe as John Lennon and John Hamilton, the sailors with the soft eyes. I have taken on my grandfather’s identity. I have given him back his name and his life, and I walk back towards Neukölln as if the city has become a harbour. It’s Berlin harbour and I can hear the sound of the sea on Sonnenallee. I can hear the sway of the tide slapping underneath the boats. I can hear the sound of oars falling into place along the seats. I can feel the touch of solid ground under my feet.

From the reviews of
The Sailor in the Wardrobe:

‘Exceptional: beautifully written and full of a quiet, enlightening wisdom’

ANNE CHISHOLM,
Sunday Telegraph

‘Finely crafted and beautifully observed … lyrical and moving’

CHRISTINA PATTERSON,
Independent

‘A skilful, novelistic recollection: a successful attempt to capture deeper truths in a burnished moment’

Sunday Times

‘[A] richly compelling work … The boy’s mother … is written with a remarkable luminosity and grace. Parents in memoirs can seem lifeless and remote, but this one has that strange quality of a character in great fiction: you find yourself thinking about her when you’ve finished reading, imagining what she would say about this or that … Hugo Hamilton is to be congratulated for once again shaping the bleak material of youth into beautiful and powerfully memorable storytelling’

JOSEPH O’CONNOR,
Sunday Independent

‘Hamilton’s power of evocative, sensory description accounts for the
frisson
the reader feels, as throughout the book he strings potent moments of lyrical grace among the barbs of painful scenes … It captures the hurts and confusions of adolescence with pinpoint skill. The inner world of its narrator is rendered bare, zig-zagging in flashes back and forth across the years. Every scene, every character, reverberates with the smack of truth … Down to earth yet often dreamlike, here is a tale that spins grimness to a gleam’

TOM ADAIR,
Scotland on Sunday

‘A [memoir] with the balanced shapeliness and emotional intensity of a very good novel … Hamilton is a connoisseur of tensions and grievances, and the possibility of relief from them. He writes with wonderfully unsentimental sensitivity’

PATRICK SKENE CATLING,
Spectator

‘Lucid and vibrant … The narrative reverberations encompass enormities of the twentieth century and beyond, though the style of the book stays effectively unpretentious … A striking appraisal of a troublesome Irish upbringing’

PATRICIA CRAIG,
TLS

‘A compelling sequel to
The Speckled People
. To write a book as good as that would have been extraordinary, but Hamilton has surpassed himself. This is an amazing read: at once funny, sad, heartbreaking and uplifting … The writing is consistently impressive and assured, often poetic but always fast-moving. This is a vivid and thoughtful account of a battle of wills between a father and a son, and a son’s tribute to his extraordinary mother. It must surely establish Hugo Hamilton as a major writer of the very first order’

ALANNAH HOPKIN,
Sunday Tribune

‘Hamilton once again demonstrates a stirring ability to flesh out childhood incidents and to bring his parents’ emotional memories to fully realised life … Hamilton can interpret his very personal and unique family memories in a way that strikes a universal chord’

SOPHIE GORMAN,
Irish Independent

‘An already complex portrait of his father has become richer, deeper and sadder than in the previous book … and that is quite an achievement’

CARLO GÉBLER,
Irish Times

‘You can take all the adjectives that mean good, and all the adverbs, too, and you can apply them to this man’s writing and you still wouldn’t do it justice. A superb book from start to finish’

PETER SHERIDAN,
Ireland on Sunday

‘Enthralling reading’

VINCENT BANVILLE,
Irish Examiner

‘This new memoir is more than just a return of
The Speckled People
. It is an enchanting piece of work … the Northern Irish troubles, Vietnam and Martin Luther King are beautifully interwoven with Hugo’s part-poignant, part-farcical rebellion against his own local tyrants’

TERRY EAGLETON,
Guardian

‘Hamilton patterns the institutions and structures of family life, with his father’s rules, curfews, punishments and terrifying rages, against the larger tyrannies of history. Simultaneously he handles the conflicts, threats and aggressions of life outside the house, much of which has to be kept secret, words of piercing clarity and immediacy convey his sense of guilt, in a world where terrible events continually hang above his head like the clouds drifting in from the sea … Hamilton’s Irish-German-English voice remains unique’

ROY FOSTER,
The Times

The Speckled People
Surrogate City
The Last Shot
The Love Test
Headbanger
Sad Bastard