But the book is never clich d, thanks largely to Hamilton's frankly poetic language and masterful portrait of childhood. Despite these efforts, Hamilton knows, "we'll never be Irish enough." There is much in this Irish memoir that's familiar to the genre: the dark, overwhelming father the tragic mother the odd mix of patriotism and self-loathing ("the hunger strike and Irish coffee" are the country's greatest inventions, Hamilton's father says). His father never allows him to speak English and insists the family use the Gaelic form of their last name ( hUrmoltaigh), which many of their neighbors can't even pronounce. Yet Hamilton is in many ways more Irish than they. Other children call him "Kraut" and "Nazi" and taunt him with "Sieg Heil!" salutes. With an Irish father and a German mother, Hamilton comes to Ireland as a boy in the 1950s and finds a homeland that will never fully accept him. Hamilton's father says they are speckled, breacin Gaelic: spotted like a trout. "I know what it's like to lose, because I'm Irish and I'm German," explains Hamilton in this beautiful memoir of a mixed childhood in the years after WWII. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before the long-buried secrets at the back of the parents' wardrobe have been laid bare. Surrounded by fear, guilt, and frequently comic cultural entanglements, Hugo tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and to turn the strange logic of what he is told into truth. Above all he must free himself from history and from the terrible secrets of his mother and father before he can find a place where he belongs. The boy must free himself from his father and from bullies on the street who persecute him with taunts of Nazism. Irish on top and German below."Īn idealistic Irish father enforces his cultural crusade by forbidding his son to speak English while his German mother tries to rescue him with her warm-hearted humour and uplifting industry. Set in 1950s Ireland, this is a gripping, poignant, and at times very funny family drama of homesickness, control and identity.Īs a young boy, Hugo Hamilton struggles with what it means to be speckled, "half and half. Adapted for the stage from the best-selling memoir, The Speckled People tells a profoundly moving story of a young boy trapped in a language war.
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