Review of Memoir 1: The Speckled People

 Two Memoirs by Hugo Hamilton.

The Speckled People (Harper Perennial, 2004) The Sailor in the Wardrobe

I reviewed And when did you last see your Father? in the previous post, a memoir in search of father, that most Freudian of archetypes.  This week, I wish to pursue the same theme in two memoirs by Hugo Hamilton (b. 1953), an Irish writer of plays, short stories, novels and memoirs.  Because two books are involved, I will spread my commentary over two posts.

Perusing both memoirs by Hugo Hamilton is interesting from the point of view of the character of his father, John Hamilton.  In short, one could say on the evidence that he was very much a conflicted individual with many complexes.  Which of us is not indeed?  This post is an attempt to explore the quest for father as delineated in the first of these two impactful and moving memoirs.

What makes Hugo Hamilton's memoirs so powerful is that he manages a wonderful feat, that is, he can reconstruct or re-imagine in succession his childhood from a toddler's viewpoint, then from the viewpoint of a growing boy and finally in the second book from the point of view of an adolescent and young man.  Hugo is an excellent psychologist and a wonderful sketcher of real people.  His characters are all substantial and come alive under his descriptions of them. Here is what Hugo, through the eyes of the young boy he was at six years of age, knows about his father, John Hamilton:

I know that my father comes from Cork and works as an engineer in Dublin and signs his name in Irish.  When he was small, Ireland was still under the British.  His father's family were all fishermen.  His father fell on deck one day and lost his memory and died not long after that in a hospital in Cork city.  But we never talk about that. (The Speckled People, p. 11)

John was a fanatical Gaeilgeoir - that is, he was a man who refused to speak English because it was the language of the "oppressor"; he also insisted that only Gaeilge or German (the mother tongue of his wife) be spoken at home.  He was so extreme in his views that the young Hugo was christened Johannes Ó hUrmoltaigh, a hybrid appellation of German and Gaeilge.   I have long been interested in the motivations of people who seek out causes and become fanatical in following them.  John refused to allow his children to play or make friends with other children who only spoke English.  Indeed, Hugo was well into his late teens when he first heard his father speak English.  The boy wants to speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. It is the language they use when they hunt him down in the streets and call him Eichmann. They bring him to trial and sentence him to death at a mock seaside court. Out of this fear and guilt and the complexities of life at home, he tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and turn the twisted logic of what he is told into some kind of truth. This first memoir charts that journey which ends in a sort of liberation when he uncovers the long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents' wardrobe.   

Early in this memoir, he records of his father that:

He didn't emigrate or drink whiskey or start making up stories either.  Instead, he changed his name and decided never to be homesick again.  He put on a pioneer pin and changed his name from Jack to Seán and studied engineering and spoke Irish as if his hometown didn't exist, as if his own father didn't exist, as if all those who emigrated didn't exist.  (p. 37)

In psychological language, we call all this denial.  Then the sentence "But we never talk about that" in the first quotation is an ominous one because it means that a secret or some truth is being denied or unrecognised or suppressed or repressed even.  We learn that Hugo’s father was somehow ashamed of his own father.  We are never really told why - rather we are left to make our own inferences.  Seán had hidden away the photograph of Hugo's grandfather at the back of his wardrobe as well as all his service medals.  On the one hand, there is great denial and repression here, but there is also an unwillingness to destroy the picture on the other.  So, there is an internal conflict going on in John Hamilton’s psyche.

As youngsters, Hugo and his siblings once went playing in the wardrobe where these things were hidden.  Unfortunately, it fell over and they were trapped within it.  When Seán (John) came home, it was only he who was strong enough to lift the wardrobe and let the children out.  He rebuked his children thus, in Irish of course:

'Who gave you the right to look at my things?' he said because he didn't want any of us to know that he had a father in the navy who could not speak Irish and once stood with the British in a war against the Germans when his own country was still not free. (p.  14-15)

As a child, Seán had been taunted by the local lads about his father taking the "English shilling", about his dying on a British navy ship during the First World War and his mother still being in receipt of a British pension.  Hugo talks about how any youngster in any family will inherit not just a forehead or a smile or a certain type of hair from their father but also "other things like sadness and hunger and hurt." (p. 37) This is what we call “generational trauma” today.

However, I also get the sense that Seán's motivation in hiding the picture of his father is not just the repression and denial of his past, but also out of fear of upsetting his German wife.  Hugo admits that his father possibly had this motivation, too:

There were things they didn't talk about.  She kept her secret and he buried his past as well.  He hid the picture of his own father in the wardrobe.  He didn't want to offend her, having photographs of a British sailor hanging in the house. But she had nothing against England.  (p. 41)

Perhaps this was a rationalisation he used as an excuse for his actions. It's also important to point out that Seán was born with a limp:

Onkel Ted told me once that my father had a limp when he was born.  So maybe his mother only made up the story about polio, because people were afraid of anyone who was deformed at birth and it was better to say you had a disease like anyone else.  Or maybe my father made it up himself because they were always laughing and limping after him on his way to school and saying that he had a father in the British Navy. (p. 164)

Hugo gives an account of how his father once hit his older brother Franz so hard on the back of the neck for walking on the wall in the garden that the boy fell and broke his nose.  The father was not being intentionally cruel.  This was probably the way he himself was brought up.  There are many instances of his good nature and generosity towards his wife and children in both books.  However, after each incident where he disciplines his children by corporal punishment Seán is full of remorse for what he has done. Hugo has a certain amount of respect for his father because he senses his father's guilt and remorse:

I looked out the window and watched my father fill the wheelbarrow and bring it to another part of the garden, empty it and bring it back and start again.  I watched him digging and digging until the mountain was gone.  I wanted to go down and tell him that my mother fixed Franz's nose with a story. (p. 31)

Seán Hamilton is an angry man who likes to slam doors from time to time.  Hugo reports that "he's the best at slamming doors because he makes the whole house shake." (p. 47) He also inspired fear in his children: “You have to be careful or else my father will get up and switch you off like a radio."  No other ideas bar the father's ideas are allowed in the house.  In today's cliché, Seán was a "control freak." He also liked to be the person who knew all the answers.  For example, he "didn't like my mother reading books that he didn't read first himself." (p. 200)

Hugo was a strong boy and he always liked pushing against his father:  "I like giving the wrong answer.  My father sits on the far side of the table in the breakfast room and says he's going to wait until I give the right answer, even if it takes all day." (p. 87).  This became a battle of wills as Hugo grew up.

However, Sean does have a sensitive side - one might even call this his feminine side.  Once when Hugo had a bad attack of asthma his father “came up and stuck a piece of folded paper in the window to stop the rattling.  He put on the light for a minute to prove that no man was coming through the wall, then he smiled and kissed the top of my head." (p. 91) Being a conflicted man, after punishing anyone of his children, he would say something like: "I love each one of you... You are like no other children in the world."  (p. 192)

Seán Hamilton was firstly a teacher, then an engineer in the ESB involved in the rural electrification of Ireland.  He was also a linguist who spoke three languages fluently: English, Irish and German.  He also authored many articles for papers and magazines in Irish.  A great reader of literature, he had a wonderful liking for music both classical and Irish.  In short, he was a highly cultured man. 

However, Seán's father John Hamilton had fallen heavily on HMS Vivid and had lost his memory.  The poor man was badly brain-damaged and had spent some time in hospital in Manchester.  Then when he was sent home he could barely remember his wife's name:

He remembered her face and her name, but then after a while, he started forgetting that much, so that he could do nothing at times, only hold his head in his hands and say he wanted to go home.  He was a stranger in his own home.  And then he lost his mind altogether one day because he took a knife in his hand.  My father was still a small child and he was crying so much that the noise went into the sailor's head like a nail into the wall, so he stood up and said he would kill him if he didn't stay quiet...He stood in front of his own picture in uniform, holding a kitchen knife in his hand and shouting, until Mary Frances had to stand in front of him, in front of the man she loved more than anyone else in the world and tell him to kill her first. (p. 170)

The young Seán was three or four years of age when this happened and we can understand why he'd want to have the photograph hidden away.  His father had gone "mad."  The poor man died very shortly after this sad event over which he had absolutely no control. One can understand how avoidance and denial had set in and how the older man ended up such a conflicted individual.  Hence we have Seán as a father saying to his son Hugo: "It's no good looking back...You should be looking forward.  You're like a blank piece of paper and you should only look forward." 

At the end of this first memoir, Seán has moments of regret and honesty and he admits to his son that he has made mistakes, and I will end these comments with that admission:

Sometimes he looks like he's tired of fighting and tired of making sacrifices all his life, and he is sad as he might as well not have bothered.  There is no point in keeping the waves back anymore.  He says he made mistakes.  It's not easy to say that you lost, but he came to me one day and shook hands and says he wished he could start all over again because he would make different mistakes this time... (p. 282)