The Sailor in the Wardrobe

by Hugo Hamilton

  Maybe it’s a kind of father-and-son trap. No matter how much I try to be the opposite, I will still end up like my father. It’s how evolution works, with every son slipping into his father’s shoes, no matter how different your clothes are or how long your hair is or how different the music is you’re listening to. All my friends will go like their fathers even if they don’t go bald or wear glasses, because fathers and sons are not a line of separate individuals, as far as I can see. It’s more like a chain of unfinished people, with each son improving things or making things even worse. A long line of fathers and sons heading into the future, all the way into infinity. Sons going backwards and sons going forwards and sons that are no better and no worse than their own fathers. I know we will be held accountable, not for what we do ourselves, but for what happened in the time of our parents, because it takes that long before people can look back to see what really went on and turn it into history. We are the ones who go on trial for what the people before us did.

  One day, my father and his friends invaded Northern Ireland. Before he was married, he was politically active and belonged to a party which decided to invade the six counties which were still under British Rule. The leader of the party was Gearóid, a great friend who must have been like Packer for me, somebody who was able to make up a story for everyone around him, making speeches and inventing the future. It was a cultural movement that would reawaken the Irish people. The Irish language would give the people back their strength and courage. The Irish language is what would stop people going hungry and emigrating to America.

  I sometimes think about the way my mother and father must have been on trains at the same time. I can’t help thinking of them before they ever met each other, on trains going in very different directions, in different countries. My father sitting on a train to Belfast with his friends and my mother sitting alone on a train to Mainz. Him going up to persuade the people of Northern Ireland who wanted to remain with Britain, that they were making a big mistake. Her on the way to a city that was destroyed by the bombing. Him going to the city where the bombs were now starting to go off and her going to a city where there was not much more left to be destroyed. It’s funny to think of them not knowing each other at all. Funny to think of a time when they would have walked past each other in the street and not even looked at each other, because they were both thinking only of the things they had to do for their country. Germany and Ireland were so far away from each other at that time. But they come together inside my head. They are not separate countries any more, because my father and mother got married and I have mixed up Irish history and German history so much that it’s all the same place now.

  When they invaded the North, my father was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt and tie. He wore a loose tweed cap that seemed a little too big for him and made him look like a boy. He had a tweed coat over the side of his arm and he was walking with a group of people, smiling and talking, following behind Gearóid. He was the head of the movement called Aiseirí and they were all getting on the train in Dublin, going to Belfast. You can see them in colour because there was a man travelling with them all the way who was making a film of the whole thing. They sometimes smile towards the camera, but mostly they walk with great determination and seriousness, because there’s no turning back and they know exactly what they’re doing, going to the North to tell people there what a beautiful country Ireland is going to be and you’d be mad not to be Irish.

  On the train, my father is looking out the window with his tweed cap still on. It looks like the journey doesn’t take very long, because they’re already getting off the train again, walking along a country road crossing the border with cows in the fields and people following them. They walk right into the North and nobody can stop them. They get to Newry where they make some speeches with a small crowd of people listening to them and two officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary watching with their hands behind their backs.

  Then they arrive in Belfast. My father and the other men and women with him take placards and banners from the boot of a car and erect them on a street of red-bricked houses. Gearóid, the leader, speaks through a megaphone at a group of bystanders, mostly children and dogs who have nothing better to do than to watch people coming to make noise. The bystanders look like they’re not really that interested and there’s no need for the megaphone. My father is walking around with his limp, trying to sell copies of the Aiseirí newspaper under his arm and handing out leaflets to anyone who is willing to take one. Leaflets with drawings of bomber planes throwing down green fliers with the words ‘Speak Irish’ written on them. It was the Germans bombing the British cities and the British bombing the German cities and the Irish bombing everywhere with leaflets for the Irish language.

  It was their crusade to Belfast. My father has told me many times before, that it doesn’t matter if they don’t listen, because sooner or later they will see the truth and join in. They’ll all be with us one of these days. They told the people of Belfast that your language was your homeland. That’s why the Loyalists in the North were so lost and confused, because they had no homeland of their own, only keeping with Britain across the water. They were afraid to be Irish, but once they realized that Ireland was a country with its own language, just like France or Germany or Israel, then they would be delighted with the idea. They would soon be rushing to join us and the whole country would be united again. All the Loyalists would be speaking Irish. Nothing was more certain. It was all about persuasion rather than force. Even though it was funny to invite people into the republic of Ireland who hated the place, things would change soon when they saw how happy we were in the south. One of these days the Loyalists would no longer be afraid of admitting that they were Irish underneath.

  But then the RUC policemen had enough of Gearóid and his followers on the streets of Belfast, making speeches about the Queen of England and passing around leaflets of Irish bomber planes and giving out free stamps of the red hand of Ulster crossed out with a big black X. So they arrested Gearóid, the leader, and put him in Crumlin Road jail for a while to think things over. When he was released and expelled at the border, long after my father and the others had gone home, they told him never to come back, even though he was born in Belfast and grew up there.

  After that, Gearóid was so angry at being kicked out of his own country, that he vowed that the next time he would go back, it would be with a hundred thousand armed men behind him. He went around telling people that they were still a cultural organization, but very soon they would be mobilizing an army.

  When the Second World War started and my mother was still trapped in Germany, the papers were saying that the Germans would invade Britain and Ireland as well. De Valera, who was the Taoiseach at the time, kept Ireland neutral and made sure that the Irish people would not be dragged into the war on the side of the British or the Germans, for the Allies of the Nazis. The Irish had just liberated themselves from the British and they didn’t want to get into another war. It was somebody else’s fight, and we should keep out of it.

  There were some people like Gearóid who wanted the Germans to invade Ireland. He was going around the country, telling soldiers in the Irish army that when the Germans arrived, they should not resist but join in with them. Of course, they didn’t want to be invaded again so soon after getting rid of the British, but if the Nazis were to come to Ireland, they would actually do us a lot of favours. According to Gearóid and his followers in Aiseirí, the Nazis would unite Ireland. They would sort out the problem of Northern Ireland and put an end to British imperialism for good. It would be replaced by Nazi imperialism, but we would have a United Ireland and it would be the Irish language and the German language which would dominate all around the country. It was clear that they might have to hand over the Jews that were living in Ireland at the time. Some of the members of the movement were making speeches against the Jews. As long as the Northern question was sorted out and there would be no more bigotry and apartheid
rule by Protestant Loyalists, they didn’t care what happened to the Jews. It seemed like a simple solution, a moral compromise.

  Back then, my father learned German and maybe that’s why Gearóid liked him and gave him a job as treasurer of the party, as his right-hand man. My father loved German culture and dreamed of Ireland being a strong and vibrant nation once again. Like others in the party, they believed that Ireland needed a strong leader who would set aside all the self-doubt that riddled the country and still made it half-British. When it became clear that Hitler already had too much to deal with elsewhere and that Ireland was the last thing he needed to add to his problems, Gearóid and others in the party began to despair and think the Northern Ireland question would never be solved. The golden moment was gone. Because they had to do it alone without any help from outside, Gearóid then went around saying to people in private that he was going to move towards an armed revolution. He canvassed for new members, saying officially that it was exclusively a cultural movement, but quietly he was telling them the opposite, that he would be arming the movement very soon, while Britain was still at war and the last thing Churchill would need is another sideshow with the Irish.

  Gearóid wanted to show that his party was the one to be feared most in the future. His party was responsible for damaging the Gough monument in Phoenix Park and also for a riot outside the Metropole cinema on O’Connell Street in which there was a baton charge by the Gardai. The Aiseirí newspaper talked about war preparations in Ireland and Gearóid was making speeches about going back up to Belfast very soon with force of numbers, armed to the teeth. But the first weapons they actually got in their fight to liberate Northern Ireland were not rifles but hobnail boots. Hobnail boots and rebel songs. It was said that young members of Aiseirí had begun to act like the Brown Shirts, going around disrupting other peaceful party gatherings by kicking onlookers in the shins and ankles. There was quite a bit of kicking going on at the time and it was said that De Valera’s party, Fianna Fail, had introduced the hobnail boot into Irish politics. They had their own gangs going around the country making an awful racket as they went through the streets. Some people said it was all just schoolboy stuff and that Ireland was never likely to imitate Germany. They said that Aiseirí was insignificant, but maybe they were missing the point because Ireland was lucky that Aiseirí never came to power, that Gearóid never got his hundred thousand pairs of hobnail boots together, unlike the Nazi party in Germany.

  My father says it’s unfair to accuse the Irish of things that never happened. But when it was clear that the Nazis were not coming to Ireland to solve the Northern problem, Gearóid began to talk about mobilizing. In desperation, he began moving the party towards the physical force ideology. And at that moment, there was a crisis in the movement. My father and some of the other senior members of the party organized a putsch. Gearóid’s leadership was brought into question, because they didn’t want to go along with an armed struggle. They still believed in a peaceful, non-violent, cultural movement, based on persuasion and openness. They became uneasy when they heard the reports of hobnail wars.

  It was mostly the people from Cork who initiated this putsch, calling for a meeting in which they would announce that they had lost confidence in Gearóid as a leader. Was it a party of physical force or cultural persuasion, they demanded to know. They could not be both. It was either hobnail boots or poetry, violence or creativity. The Cork faction knew how creative violence and resentment could be, but they didn’t want it.

  When Gearóid got news of the impending putsch, he didn’t wait for them to call a general meeting and expelled all the doubters from the party before they got a chance to speak. He went around to all the people who had planned the putsch and individually accused them of betrayal. He struck them off the register and said they were non-members. They had gone soft, he announced in a speech to an assembly from which they were now barred. The betrayers had become like all the other Irish people, unable to see the vision, unable to obey. But that only made matters worse and eventually the entire Cork membership resigned from the party and stopped paying their contributions.

  I know what it was like for my father to lose his best friend. Gearóid would not speak to him any more. It must have been like the time that Packer froze me out, a time of great emptiness. He must have felt like he was drowning, or suffocating, walking around Dublin with his briefcase like an invisible man and his best friend walking past him in the street.

  After that, the Aiseirí movement fell apart. Things had moved on and De Valera was saying all the things about Northern Ireland that the Irish wanted to hear. There was no need for Aiseirí any more and people drifted away into other parties. My father still had lots of energy left for Ireland. He still wanted Ireland to have lots of new inventions. So one day he went to see Gearóid and asked him to be friends again. It was like the moment when I went into hospital to see Packer after his motorcycle accident and we put the silence behind us. My father could not bear to be outside in the cold any longer and when he was assured that Gearóid would put aside any physical force, he was happy to rejoin the party.

  So that’s how the party came to an end, with the two of them, Gearóid and my father, as the last remaining members. Gearóid still went on publishing his paper and my father wrote for him. They kept having meetings in empty, unheated rooms on Harcourt Street and my father took down the minutes, even though it was only the two of them left under the naked light bulb. They continued to make speeches, but they had become an insignificant movement.

  My second name is Gearóid, which means that I was called after the leader of the Aiseirí Party. Maybe it was lucky for Ireland that they never came to power. But as the party fizzled out, my father and Gearóid both decided to take the struggle inside, into their homes. What they could not achieve politically, they would achieve inside the family instead, where they could create the perfect republic with strong leadership. Gearóid got married and had lots of children. When my mother came over to Ireland from Germany and met my father, he got married too, and started the German-Irish family. The language war went indoors. Gearóid and my father did their best to outdo each other. They taught their children how to make sacrifices for Ireland. My father started with his eldest son, Franz, and broke his nose one day for bringing English into the home. Gearóid did the same with his eldest son, who once had an abscess in one of his teeth, but because the dentist could not speak Irish, he took him home again and left him in pain.

  My mother began to change my father and he no longer believes a lot of the things he believed in then. Sometimes he speaks to me and says he made mistakes. He wants me to forgive him and not to make the same mistakes. He wants to make sure I don’t go up to the North of Ireland and join the IRA, because that would mean that our family had learned nothing, either from Irish history or from German history. He wants me to remember that he was against physical force, and even though he lost his temper sometimes out of frustration and idealism, everything he did was for us and for his country. He embraces me and I feel suffocated by the feeling he has for me. He says I’m going to correct all his mistakes. Because that’s what fathers are for, so that sons can start again and make different mistakes.

  I find it hard to talk to him, and it’s hard to be friends with him, but when he smiles and goes back down the stairs into the front room, I can only think about all the things he made for us, the wooden toys, the trips he made with us, down to Connemara and over to Germany. I think of all the walks we went on and the camera he once bought for me on my birthday. It wasn’t a real camera, but I kept taking photographs when we went down to the seafront. I clicked my camera and the photographs stayed in my head, photographs of my mother smiling and pointing out at the washing line of yachts in the bay, of my father with his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun, of the sea and the dog that barks at the waves, of people walking along with ice cream cones. We came across the ice cream van parked by the side of the road with the name Mister Softie. M
y mother bought us all an ice cream cone with a drop of red jam in it and I took a photograph of Mister Softie inside his van. The engine was running all the time to keep the refrigerator going, so we could smell the ice cream and the seaweed and the puff of diesel fumes, all at the same time. It was a hot day and everybody was wearing summer clothes and trying to keep themselves cool. We even saw a Garda patrol car parked nearby with the windows open and two uniformed Gardai inside with their hats off, eating ice cream cones as well. They smiled when I took a photograph of them. Then my mother and father were laughing at the sea again, and I will never lose those photographs because they were made with a toy camera.

  Seventeen

  There is still no news from Stefan. No postcards, no message, no sighting in public. Tante Käthe has arrived in our house with shadows around her eyes, as if she’s been crying all the way over from Germany. She has come to see the country where her son has gone missing. My mother talks to her in the front room, trying to convince her that Ireland is not such a fierce place as you might think, that the mountains are soft and the people are soft and that Stefan is so overwhelmed by the landscape that he’s just forgotten to write home. But Tante Käthe looks at the rocks, the waves, the wide blue bay and the mountains behind the city, and to her they are all things that prevent Stefan from coming back home.