About the author
Hugo Hamilton was born in Dublin in 1953, and grew up in a “speckled”, half-German, half-Irish family. He is the author of a collection of short stories and five novels, including Headbanger and Sad Bastard, featuring the “Irish Dirty Harry”, the Dublin policeman Pat Coyne. The sequel to The Speckled People is The Sailor in the Wardrobe, published in February.
About the book
In one of the finest memoirs to have emerged from Ireland in many years, the acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton brings alive his childhood in 1950s Dublin. This is not the usual tale of a rough-and-tumble Irish childhood: instead there is a surprising mixture of Hamilton’s Irish nationalist father and his immigrant mother with her Nazi past. More than just a comment on postwar Ireland and Germany, this is a highly intimate and personal memoir, telling of a youthful journey of self-discovery.
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Extract
“One day the boiler burst. It started hissing and clicking because of all the bad things that had been thrown into it. It got so hot that you could hear it cracking inside. Then there was a bang and it burst open with hot brown water gushing out all over the kitchen floor like tea with milk. My mother told my father to call the fire brigade. He frowned and sucked in air through his teeth. But then he put out the fire by himself. He carried the red coal out on a shovel and rolled up his sleeves to sweep the tea out the back door.
Then it’s winter and our house starts filling up with mice. The pipes are cold and there are mice in every room because they get in under the back door. More and more of them are coming in every day until all the mice from the whole city are living in our house, my mother says. They’re in the hall and on the stairs, everywhere you go. Any time you open the door and go into a room you see them running away. But mostly they’re under the stairs where things are kept, like jam jars and pots and old shoes. There are so many of them that you have to watch where you walk, because one day when Franz was running down the three steps from the hallway into the kitchen, a baby mouse ran out from under the stairs and got squashed. We all crouched down to examine the flattened corpse until my mother told us not to be so interested in blood and took it away on the shovel.
It’s so cold, we stay in one room by the fire where it’s nice and warm, but if you go from that room up to the bedroom, it’s like going out on the street and you need your coat on. My mother shows me her coat and says she will never be warm again.”