The Sailor in the Wardrobe

My mother refused to undress. She had not always obeyed Hitler either. The officer soon came over and began to shout at her. He had a red face and maybe he was too hot inside his uniform, because he began tapping his clipboard against his leg until one of the women told her not to make so much of a fuss or she would get them all into trouble.

I don’t like hearing this story because it gives me the hurt mind. My mother undressed to the waist like the others, but as soon as the officer turned away, she pulled her dress back up again. The officer was angry that she would not surrender like everyone else. He marched straight over and pulled her dress down with his hand. The soldiers on the trucks waiting to leave the compound let out a big cheer. She could not see them against the sunlight, but she could smell their cigarette smoke. When the officer moved on again, she pulled her dress up to stop them staring and making remarks about German women. But he returned and ripped her dress down once more, shouting into her face in English, with the men on the trucks giving another big cheer. She had to give in finally because the women beside her told her it wasn’t worth it, the Germans had lost the war and the British had won.

‘Just let them see how beautiful we are,’ one of the women remarked.

Then my mother starts laughing. She says it was a German joke, because the woman who said it was very old, with wrinkled skin and not much for men to look at. She remembers how they all started laughing, even though most of them were ashamed and hungry and weak from walking, worried about what would happen next. They were worried about getting home, worried about what was left after the bombing and who was still alive, and even though they laughed quietly with their shoulders as if they had nothing more to lose, the real joke was on the German women now, standing half-naked in the sun with the whistles echoing in their ears as the trucks came and went. They had to suffer the humiliation of being defeated women, standing for ages in the burning heat with their hands down by their sides until some of the women began to faint and they all got a very nice sunburn before being let go, she says.

My father stands up and goes over to put his arm around her shoulder. I can hear his voice shaking as he speaks.

‘They shamed her,’ he says.

My mother is smiling now, trying to say that she’s lucky to be alive and it could have been much worse, like what happened to women in the east who were killed by the Germans, women who had all their dignity taken away from them, women who went to their death along with their children. Women who sang songs to their children at the last minute to make them less worried before they died in the concentration camps.

‘The Germans shamed themselves,’ she says. ‘Don’t forget that.’

But my father will not let it go. He is angry and sad at the same time. I can see his chin quivering. He speaks as if my mother has become part of Irish history now. He admires her for refusing to undress for the British and says she has the rebel heart. He wishes he could have been there to defend her, but it’s too late and too long ago and there’s nothing he can do about it any more except not to allow anything British under his roof. All he can do is stop English words coming into our house and drive everything British out of Ireland. He is still trying to protect her from this humiliation and wants me to remember that my mother’s family had been against the Nazis all along. Her uncle lost his job as Lord Mayor for not joining the party. Her sister Marianne turned her guest house in Salzburg into a safe haven during the war, hiding a Jewish woman who went around dressed as a Catholic nun. My mother disobeyed orders so that she could bring food to Salzburg and was arrested as a deserter, then sent to the east in a locked train carriage with a young boy soldier who was chained to the seat.

‘The British have no right to pass judgment on anyone,’ he says. There are other things to remember as well, things to do with Irish history, things that are still going on in Northern Ireland. He takes my mother’s hand. He has tears in his eyes and he can hardly speak any more.

‘They should look into their own hearts,’ he says.

My mother smiles and says it’s time to walk away from the hurt. It’s the time of forgiveness and peace. It’s time to imagine the dead people back to life again in our memory. It’s time to grow up and become innocent.

‘We just want to give you a conscience,’ she says finally.

After that the room is silent for a long time. My father takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes with the upper part of his wrist. It’s hard to look at them, sitting together side by side, unable to get away from the past. Maybe that’s why people have to pass things on to their children, so they can be freed from it themselves. I feel the weight of all this information in my chest because it’s the story of my mother being shamed. It’s like a blinding solstice entering into my head. I am the boy who was born with his head turned back and I can’t stop thinking of my mother, standing in the glare of the sunlight after the war, with nothing to say. I am the son of a German woman who was shamed in front of the world, and the son of an Irishman who is refusing to surrender to the British.

These are things I need to forget, things I don’t want to think about any more. I want to have no past behind me, no conscience and no memory. I want to get away from my home and my family and my history.

When I’m finally allowed to leave, I walk out the front door into the sunshine. I take my bike and feel the breeze coming in from the sea on my way down to the harbour. I pass by men in overalls painting the blue railings along the seafront. I hear them talking to each other, banging and scraping off the rust. I smell the paint and the cigarettes they smoke, like a new colour in the air. At the harbour, my friend Packer has got me a job working with an old fisherman. Nobody asks where I come from. It’s just me and Packer and the other lads working for Dan Turley, sitting on the trellis outside his shed on the pier, listening to the faraway sound of the radio and laughing at our own jokes. Dan Turley lying on his bunk inside the shed with his white cap right down over his eyes and us sitting outside in the sun with the painted signs behind us. Big white lettering on a blue background saying: fresh mackerel, lobster for sale, boats for hire, trips around the island.

People come from all over the place to buy fish and lobster. Some people hire out the boats to go fishing and others go for the pleasure trip. When they come back in, we have to tie up the boat, calculate how many hours they’ve been out, take the money and enter it into the book with the stub of a pencil on a string. All the boats have different names, like Sarah Jane and Printemps. Sometimes we have to go up on the rocks at the back of the shed with the binoculars, to make sure none of the boats are in difficulty. Sometimes we have to go out to rescue them when the engine fails. Couples going out to the island to lie around on the grass. Groups of them going out thinking it’s warm and only realizing when they get out there how breezy it can be. Then you see one of the women coming back shivering, wrapped up in a man’s jacket, maybe even pale and seasick because they’re not used to being out on the water. Sometimes it’s the opposite, when they go out in raincoats and come back all pink and sunburned down one side with half a red face. Sometimes you look out and it’s raining in one part of the bay while the sun is still shining straight down in another part, like a desk-lamp on the water. Sometimes the sea is rough and nobody can go out at all because the red flag is up. And sometimes people only come to look, men walking their dogs, women wearing sunglasses on top of their heads, nurses from the nursing home overlooking the harbour bringing the old people down in their wheelchairs to stare at the boats.

It’s the harbour of forgetting and never looking back.

This summer I’m going to escape and earn my own innocence. It’s goodbye to the past and goodbye to war and resentment. It’s goodbye to the killing news on the radio, goodbye to funerals and goodbye to crying. It’s goodbye to flags and countries. Goodbye to the shame and goodbye to the blame and goodbye to the hurt mind.

Two (#ulink_7ceb9b63-7ee0-526a-ad2f-b45e95abb5a6)

It looked as if everything had stopped moving. You could feel the boat drifting and hear the water making all kinds of swallowing noises underneath. Everything was rocking, but it looked like we were stuck in the same spot all the time, because the sun was shining again, like a thousand liquid mirrors flashing across the water. Everything was white and blank and you could not even see the land any more, as if the country we came from had disappeared and we now had no country to go back to. You knew where it was, right in front of you. You could imagine the shape of it in your head – the hill, the harbour and the church spires. You could hear lots of familiar sounds coming from the shore – a motorbike, a train going into the city. There were men drilling on roadworks somewhere, except that it didn’t sound like drilling at all to us, more like somebody ringing a small bell. Everything was far away and it was just me and Dan, drifting and jigging the fishing lines up and down, not saying very much to each other, as if there was some sort of fisherman’s law of silence in the boat. Sooner or later we could see that we were not standing still at all and that the tide had already taken us close to the island. Dan muttered something and we pulled in the lines. The boat bounced across the waves and the spray came over the bow, wetting my bare arms, until we came level with the harbour again and he cut the engine. We threw out the lines and drifted once more, listening to the water giggling underneath, until we hit a shoal of mackerel and the boat was suddenly full of flapping.

Then I heard a shout coming from the shore.

‘Turley.’

His name, nothing more. I looked to see if he had heard it too. Along the top of the rocks there was somebody standing with the advantage of the sun behind him, but we could see nothing and the shout could have come from any of the caves along the coast that looked like open mouths. It could have come from the small stone ruin or from any of the dark windows of a derelict house on the cliff. It was just the one shout, no more. Somebody who knew him. A hostile call that hung in the air over the water and would not go away, as if somebody wanted him to know that he was being watched and that they had not forgotten, that’s all.

I know there is no place to hide from your memory and no place to hide from your own name. It will come after you, following you down the street, on the bus, even out in the boat. Your own name following you like a curse. Packer told me that Dan Turley comes from Derry and that he’s got enemies, but we don’t know much more than that because he never talks about himself. He’s the man who never looks back, the man who wants to forget his own name and where he came from, like me.

My father and mother taught us how to forget and how to remember. My father still makes speeches at the breakfast table and my mother still cuts out pictures and articles from the newspapers to put into her diary when she has time. She wants to make sure that we remember how we grew up and don’t repeat what happened to her in Germany. She wants everything to be fixed and glued into her book. Our history and the history of the world all mixed together. There is a lock of blond hair on one page and a picture of Martin Luther King on the next. School reports and pictures of tanks on the streets of Prague facing each other.

Whenever we had nightmares in our family, she would get up in the middle of the night to take out a piece of paper and coloured pencils. Here, draw the nightmare, she would say. Once you put it down on paper, you will never have to dream about it again. So we would sit up in bed with the light on, rubbing our eyes and drawing whatever it was that frightened us. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what the nightmare was. My fingers were so weak with sleep that I couldn’t even hold the pencil or push it down onto the paper. But she would wait patiently with her arm around me, until the bad thing was drawn and coloured in. Look, she would then say, it’s there in your drawing and we can put it away. Now we have un-remembered it and we can go back to sleep again.

Our family is a factory of remembering and forgetting. My mother’s diary is full of secrets and nightmares. There’s a drawing by my sister Maria of a wolf with green teeth preventing her from getting down to my mother at the bottom of the stairs. There’s a picture of my brother Franz in one window of the house and everybody else in separate windows of the same house, unable to speak to each other or hear each other calling, because each room has a different colour and a different language. There’s a picture of a river coming through the front door with lots of people that we don’t know on boats sailing along the hall, speaking English. There were nightmares in Irish and nightmares in German. Nightmares in English that could only be drawn without words. Family nightmares and world nightmares. I once drew the picture of a Jewish man who had his beard ripped off and his chin was all red, because my mother told me that story and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. There’s a drawing of Roger Casement being buried in Glasnevin. Another drawing of the Berlin wall and people trying to escape through the windows of their houses, throwing their suitcases and their children down first.

Sometimes we had to draw the nightmare and also the solution. Maria at the bottom of the stairs in my mother’s arms, and the wolf locked in the bathroom. My sister Bríd standing at the window getting lots of good blue air into her lungs instead of bad red air. Nightmares about my mother not being in the same country as us. At one time, my drawings were all full of pigs and chickens and farmers facing in one direction. All the smoke and all the flags were flying to the left until one night, when my mother discovered that she was the only person looking the other way, to the right. She told me to turn her around and then everything was fine, with all of us facing in the same direction, all in the same country again.

There were so many nightmares in our house that my mother must have been up all night sometimes. As soon as one bad thing was down on paper, something new would get into our heads. The more we drew our nightmares, the more we made up new ones. There are night drawings of skeletons, snakes, spiders, lions, walls with eyes, doors with teeth, stairs with massive earthquake cracks opening up on our way to bed. We used up every monster there was, my mother says, and there could hardly be any more nightmares left for us, but still we invented more. And downstairs at night, I know my father and mother were busy with their own nightmares. My father in the front room trying to write articles for the papers and thinking of new inventions that would make Ireland a better place. My mother in the kitchen at the back, putting her German secrets into her diary along with ours.

It was the nightmare factory. Other families were obsessed with sport, or music, or practising Irish dancing. We grew up dreaming about things that happened and things that had not happened yet and things we wished had never happened. By drawing everything down on paper, we developed a special talent for inventing fears and nightmares. We became the nightmare artists.

At some point we all started dreaming fire. A timber yard went up in flames in Dublin one night and you could see the firemen on ladders directing the water across the walls. An oil tanker on fire and the whole sea covered in flames. Trees on fire in Vietnam. Blazing cars in Northern Ireland. A man named Jan Palach set himself on fire on Wenceslas Square in Prague. My mother remembered seeing lots of things on fire with her own eyes in Germany during the war. She remembered the synagogue in Kempen on fire and no firemen helping to put it out. So then it was drawings of buildings on fire, prams on fire, a doll’s house on fire. Now it’s buses burning in Belfast and you think there’s almost no point in fixing anything down on paper any more, because it keeps coming back again and again on the TV every night, right in front of your eyes.

All over the world, there is trouble on the streets now and trouble inside the houses. Civil rights demonstrations. People marching with placards and throwing stones at the police. At dinner, my father slaps his hand on the table and says things are changing in Northern Ireland at last, things that were left unfinished for years. He points at the TV and says he can’t wait for the future when things will be just like they were in the old days before the British.

You can see them throwing stones and petrol bombs at the police. Everybody talking about a place called the Bogside in Derry where the police were firing tear gas at the people in the street and you saw the crowd of protesters, some of them like cowboys with handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, picking up the gas canisters and throwing them back. My father says it must be against the Geneva convention to use CS gas on people in the street, where there could be children and old people nearby with bad chests and lung conditions. At the battle of the Bogside, you saw them throwing petrol bombs down from the roof of the flats. The people of Derry were winning because the women start factories of petrol bombs and there was an endless supply that kept raining down onto the police. You saw a policeman on fire, screaming and kicking the flames away off his legs. Other policemen coming to help him, beating the fire off with their shields. Eventually the police lost the battle and the British army was called in. My father said the picture was complete now with the four allies from the Second World War still doing the same thing, as if they could not get out of the habit. It was French troops in Algeria, Russian troops in Prague, American troops in Vietnam, and now the British troops in Northern Ireland. We heard Jack Lynch saying that we could no longer stand idly by and watch Irish people getting hurt again. I even made a petrol bomb myself one day, because I was working in a garage at the time. But then I had nothing much to throw it at, so I just lit it and watched the earth on fire in the lane at the back.

When the British soldiers first arrived in Belfast, the Catholic people thought it was a great liberation because at least they were no longer going to be ruled by their Protestant neighbours. We saw pictures of women on the streets, handing out cups of tea to the soldiers and saying they were welcome. But that didn’t last long and very soon, the British soldiers were despised even more than their neighbours. The same women who had given them tea were seen kneeling down in the streets, banging dustbin lids as the soldiers went by in Saracen jeeps. The army of occupation, they were called now, and you could hear the sound of dustbin lids echoing all over the city like a long shout, like the curse of history following them wherever they went through the streets. One day I came home and saw my mother banging the dustbin lid on the granite step in front of the house. I could hear it echo along the street and it looked like she was carrying out a solitary protest of her own. When I asked her if she was doing it against the British, she laughed out loud and kept repeating it all evening, because no such thing had ever even entered into her head and she was only banging the lid to try and knock the snails off.

And now the long shout was coming after Dan Turley. I heard it very clearly, as if it was right beside us, or above us. Just one shout, like an accusation that would not go away. Dan’s surname left hanging in the air all around us. I knew how threatening it was to hear your own name being shouted out like this by some invisible voice. Your own name like the worst insult in the world, following you down the street like a million banging dustbin lids.

We had struck a shoal and were pulling in the mackerel. Dozens of them, leaping into the boat as if they were surrendering. The boat was full of slapping as the fish jumped around inside the metal box. I once asked Dan what it was like for mackerel. Was it the same as drowning for us or was it more like getting drunk, suffocating with too much oxygen, like when you breathe in fast and get dizzy? But he said nothing. He never says much. He doesn’t even call me by name. He just mutters and sometimes you have to guess what he’s saying in his Northern accent. I know very little about him. I know he’s an old man, over seventy. But he doesn’t want conversations about where you’re from and what age you are and how a mackerel feels when he’s dying on the bottom of the boat, staring at people’s shoes up close. All he told me once was that mackerel never stop moving. They can’t stay still. They’re on the run all the time, travelling at thirty miles an hour underwater without stopping.

Dan ignored the shout and pretended it wasn’t his name. Maybe he had heard this kind of phantom shout many times before, but then he must have lost his concentration, because the line suddenly slipped out of his hand and ran out across the gunwale. He tried to catch it, but a hook buried itself deep, right in between thumb and forefinger.

‘Hook,’ he said through his teeth and I saw the blood in his hand.

Ever since I started working at the harbour, I have been dreaming about hooks in jaws. Hooks in eyes, hooks in every part of your body. Hook torture and hook crucifixion. Maybe I should have got up one night and drawn it down on paper so that it would go away, because now it was happening in front of my eyes.

He was helpless for a moment, staring down at his hand, gripping it with the other hand, trying to squeeze out the pain with his thumb and forefinger, as if it was the sound of his own name that hurt so much. The blood was already leaking into his palm, mixing in with the blood of mackerel and fish scales. Outside the boat, the mackerel were tugging at the line, swimming around in circles, trying to get away and digging the hook deeper. I knew what to do. I pulled in my line and threw it across the floor of the boat with the fish still on their hooks. There was no time to do the same with his, so I got the filleting knife and cut it. The remaining mackerel were released and swirled away on their hooks, shackled to each other for ever by this piece of lost line, swimming down and sideways as if they couldn’t agree where to go at all.

He examined his hand and started swivelling the hook around, forcing more blood out and making everything worse. Then he held his hand towards me. I didn’t trust myself and felt his hand shaking as I tried moving the hook around slowly like a surgeon to see if I could reverse it out without doing any more damage.

‘Pull the fucken’ thing,’ he growled.

I had to extract it quickly. Pretend it was another mackerel. I pulled as fast as I could, but it tore a hole and left a bit of loose flesh dangling. He took in a deep breath and narrowed his eyes. I let go of his hand and saw blood on my fingers. Then I dropped the hook on the floor of the boat with the soggy, brown cigarette butts, because we were already very close to the island, almost on top of the rocks, and there was no time to lose. I could see the ribbons of black seaweed waving and the shape of the rocks, like large, luminous green creatures swimming underneath, waiting for us. He moved aside so that I could start the engine as fast as possible. He sat holding his clenched hands, as if he was praying, with the blood running into the sleeve of his jacket. I turned the boat around and the engine scraped across the back of one of the rocks beneath us. It made an underwater groan, but I managed to steer away from danger and head towards the harbour.

On our way back, the sun disappeared behind a cloud, so I could see everything very clearly without holding my hand up over my eyes. The land came back into view, but there was nobody to be seen on top of the rocks. I looked at the fish on the bottom of the boat. Most of them were rigid by now, but one or two of them were brought back to life again as the boat bounced across the water, wriggling fiercely one last time before going quiet again. Dan reached his hand out over the side of the boat and washed it. He stared across the water behind us, dreaming with his eyes open. He didn’t want to talk about it and I knew he didn’t want me to tell anyone. When we got back to the harbour, he left me to tie up the boat and carry everything in, while he got out and walked away with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He was not in a rush. He walked back across the pier and disappeared inside the shed as if nothing had happened.

The harbour is a place of nightmares, but it’s where I want to be. I love the sight of the wide open bay and the clouds, like big handwriting in the sky. I love the moon shining on the water at night, like a soft, powdery white light drifting across the world. I belong to the sea, like my grandfather, John Hamilton, the sailor with the soft eyes who got locked into the wardrobe by my father. I know he lost his life when he fell on board a British navy ship during the First World War. And after the Irish liberated their country from British rule, he disappeared, because my father wants Ireland to be fully Irish and thinks his own father betrayed his country. When we were small, we got trapped in the wardrobe along with the sailor once and had to be rescued. I am the same age now as my grandfather was when he joined the navy, so I’m stepping into his shoes. I work on the boats and go out fishing like his people did in Glandore, on the coast of West Cork. Sometimes I sneak upstairs to the wardrobe while my father is at work and look at the photograph of John Hamilton in his sailor’s tunic. I wonder if I look like him. I want to be a sailor and travel all over the world like he did before he died. I’m going to become my own grandfather. I’m going to take his name and help him to escape out of the wardrobe.

Three (#ulink_4c908125-57e0-5f66-a37d-c35c3eb8ca99)

On my way home from the harbour, I see people going swimming with towels rolled up under their arms. The tide is in and I see them changing, leaving their clothes in bundles on the blue benches. Girls doing the Houdini trick behind their big towels and coming out in their swimsuits. I stop for a moment to watch them jumping off the rocks, yelping and splashing as they go in. They swim around to the steps and come up all wet and skinny, then do the whole thing all over again. Girls ganging up on the boys and them all going in together. One of the boys on the diving board pretending to die with a guitar in his hands, singing ‘I’ve got that loving feeling’ as he falls backwards with a big splash. I know that as you go into the water like this, there is a moment when you stop moving altogether and just hang in the same spot underwater without breathing, surrounded by silence and air bubbles before you begin to move back up towards the surface. You feel no gravity. You become weightless.

After dinner every evening, my father is sawing and hammering. This time he’s building a big music centre. I’ve seen the plans, with separate sections for the turntable and the amplifier, and lots of compartments to store the records in. He discovered the whole thing in a German phonographic magazine which claims that you can have a live orchestra in your own front room any time you like. It’s taking a long time to build and even longer for all the parts to arrive in from Sweden and Germany. The speaker frame is already finished and standing in the front room – a giant, triangular-shaped wooden box about five feet high, taking over an entire corner to itself. It’s been constructed with cavity walls filled with sand to stop any distortion in the sound. He has been drying the sand out in small glass jars for weeks, placing them in the oven for an hour at a time and then pouring them into the wall around the speaker. There’s even a small shutter at the bottom to let in the air.

Now he’s begun to work on the cabinet itself. He’s got a pencil stub balancing on the top of his ear as he explains to us how each panel has to be dovetailed and fitted together, how each compartment has to have its own door on piano hinges with its own little lock and key. All the wires connecting up the turntable and the amplifier at the back will be hidden. Very soon, the system will be up and running, and my mother says we’ll be able to hear them turning the pages in the orchestra. But then he’s looking at the plans again, turning the sheets upside down and wondering why one part of the unit refuses to fit. He says he should have marked every section with a little arrow or a number. My mother reads over the instructions once more and he holds pieces of wood in his hands, sticking his tongue out the side of his mouth. Everybody in the house has to be quiet and not make things worse, but then it comes, at the worst possible moment, a word in the English language, the foreign language, the forbidden language.