A Speckled View of Dublin Life

national | arts and media | other press Tuesday February 14, 2006 22:18 by Liam Mullen - Freelance journalist mullenl at eircom dot net 17 Cranford Court, Donnybrook, Dublin 4 086-1732700

As part of the 2003 Wexford Festival Opera, the Dublin writer Hugo Hamilton gave a talk about his new work – The speckled People. A tall thin man, dressed in black, Hugo stepped up to the podium in the children’s section of Wexford Library and began to speak softly about his latest work.

The librarian had described him as a talented writer, with five novels and a volume of short stories completed, who had begun his career as a journalist. She introduced Hugo with a quote: “In my writing until now I’ve been pushing away from my own story. I just wasn’t ready to deal with it. Writing this memoir felt like going back to the beginning and starting again and that’s given me a great sense of freedom”. (Books Ireland – March 2003).
Hugo began by expanding on his background. “My parents had a love of opera,” he said, appropriately enough. “The operatic sounds would reach up the stairs to where we children played.” Their parents’ love of music instilled itself into the children.
Growing up the children dressed to reflect two personalities – Irish and German. Packs of clothing would arrive for the youngsters, so that they wore Aran jumpers above and lederhosen below. Hugo’s mother had arrived in Ireland in 1948 from the ruins of a bombed out Germany. In her own words she’d arrived in ‘a country full of priests and donkeys’.
Growing up in 1950’s Dublin, such a style of dress invited inevitable ridicule and taunts from other children. The Hamiltons’ were subjected to racial abuse and cries of “Nazi…Nazi.” There was even a mock trial and sentence of execution, and Hugo was dubbed ‘Eichmann’ – a notorious Nazi killer eventually brought to justice by the Israelis.
In his first day at school, Hugo slapped his schoolteacher across the face. She had told him he was bold, and was not getting a sweet like the rest of the class, for their good behaviour. When he slapped her she said: “Dána, dána, dána…Bold, bold, bold.” On the way home, the bus conductor on hearing what he had done said to his mother: “That boy will go far.”
As children they were often sent to the Gaeltacht and Hugo enthuses about this experience: “Connemara was a great liberation.”
It was in Ireland that Hugo’s mother met an eccentric Corkman – Jack Hamilton - who was to become her husband. They met at a German-Irish night out.
Jack Hamilton was unusual in that he banned the use of the English language in the family home. He was so fanatical about this issue that he wouldn’t allow his children play on the Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park; he saw it as a symbol of British rule in Ireland.
A soft-spoken individual, Hugo’s eyes hid a troubled and victimised past. As he says: “My father was an idealist. A revolutionary. An Irish Fidel-Castro.”
His father was so reactionary that for years he rejected any attempt to bring English into the family home and he held a special disdain for both British and American culture. In part, this was a rebellion against Jack's own father who had enlisted in the Royal Navy, and whose picture always remained hidden in the back of the wardrobe in the Hamilton home. Hugo was fifteen before he learned about his grandfather, and even then it was his Uncle Gerd and Uncle Ted – the latter a Jesuit priest – who filled in the gaps.
Only his mother’s insatiable sense of humour helped deflect the dictatorial nature of Jack Hamilton. She suspected that Hugo would become a writer; she kept memoirs herself and encouraged her son to do likewise. “My mother made me aware of the ironies of life,” Hugo reminisced.
Asked whether his journalism had contributed positively to his writing development he replies: “Yes. Most definitely. That and my memoirs.”
Of his Amnesty experience, Hugo says that he gave a reading for Amnesty International in Belfast recently and that he’d like to do more work for them.
The Speckled People obviously marks a major turning point in the literary career of this Dublin writer; his previous novels include two police procedurals about a Dublin cop named Coyne. The novel is told through the eyes of a child, and Hugo says even some of his friends were taken aback by its contents.
He adds that his family back in Germany had always opposed Nazi oppression. Within the Hamilton family home, his parents mostly conversed in German. He learned English on the streets. At the age of twenty, Hugo went to Berlin, partly to get away from his reactionary father. He stayed there for ten years before returning home and starting his own family, an experience that has helped him understand his own parents more.
Jack Hamilton didn’t live to see his son’s success as a writer, only managing to see one short story before he died, but in later years mellowed and appeared to recognise the damage he had inflicted. In an irony of ironies, he even bought a television set and developed a special affinity for programmes like Kojak.

THE SPECKLED PEOPLE
BY HUGO HAMILTON
Fourth Estate E9.99 pp298