The trolley train west

I don't know what it was about that year. It was long before my father got the bees. Long before I lost the sense of my father's infallibility. When I listened eagerly and thought he was right about everything as he spoke German to us in his soft Cork accent.

It was long before I had any idea how lonely my German mother sometimes was in Ireland. How lonely my father must have been too at times, in his own way. Before they knew it themselves even. It was the year that we first went to Connemara and stayed with Muintir De Paor, the postman's family in An Cheathru Rua: Carraroe, or more accurately - the red quarter.

We would spend two weeks in this reddish brown place, among the rocks and the ferns, walking down to the beach and on further along the road to na seandaoine: the old people. My mother in awe of the monochrome landscape. My father elated at the contact with the Irish language.

It was 1959. I was six. My older brother, Franz, was seven, up to his birthday in October that was, when he would suddenly become two years older than me for a few months until January and I would catch up again. There were four of us by then. My sister Maire was two years younger and Ita was in the pram.

My mother talked us through the plans. How we would have to get the bus. Then the train. Then the bus again from Galway. We would have to leave early in the morning. Seven in the morning. Her fascination seemed just as big as ours and we were always asking too many questions, things she didn't know yet herself. Did all the people speak Irish? Would there be anyone who could speak German, or English?

My father was always busy making things in those days. For weeks he had been secretly working on what was to become Die Waegelschen: the trolleys. Sawing and planing wood each evening after he came home from work, spending all his time on this project. He was good with wood and kept a workbench and tools in the playroom, the room in the house that most people would have called the dining-room but which we normally had to ourselves.

Maire once drew a picture of my mother on the wall in that room, with arms that went all the way around the four walls. We all thought she would get punished for it. But instead my father took a photograph of it. My mother liked it so much, she talked about it as a masterpiece. Arms going all the way around the walls and meeting up with fingers entwined. My mother embracing all who came into the playroom.

Early that summer, my father took over the Kinderzimmer as it was called. We watched him working at first. He answered our questions with unusual brevity. Sometimes when he was concentrating, he would grimace or stick the tip of his tongue out through his tightened lips.

At one point, I suppose, when we might have come too close to guessing what he was making, we found ourselves suddenly barred from the room. Happy just to hear the squeak of his manual drill as we passed by outside. The hammering and sanding. Finally we got the smell of paint, and then one day we were brought into the room to see the finished trolleys.

There were three of them - blue for my older brother, red for me, and a green one, lined with red and white gingham, for Maire to put her dolls in. Each little trolley was built in the shape of a low open box with four wheels, much the same size perhaps as a fruit box, but made of solid pine. At the front of each trolley there was a lip of wood with a long loop of thick rope for pulling. The side walls had transfers of boats, animals and flowers, I remember.

The evening before we left for Connemara, the trolleys were lined up in the hallway - blue, red and green. Each trolley had been packed carefully by my mother with plasticine or marla, crayons, new colouring books, sweets and a grey plastic rain mack. I can remember those rain macks giving off a toxic smell and getting torn and flapping in the breeze later on. Now they were brand new and folded neatly in each trolley. Behind the row of trolleys stood the pram: everything in line, from the oldest to the youngest; a train parked overnight in the hallway, waiting to go. The immensity of this journey became clear to us as we looked back down from the stairs.

In the morning, we set off early. My father carried each of the trollies down the granite steps at the front of the terraced house, followed by the pram. Then my mother stood with us on the pavement while my father went back inside to lock the hall door from the inside. We heard the big bolt sliding home and my mother explained that we had to wait while my father closed all the doors inside the house and made his way out the back door, across the garden wall and all the way around the lane to meet us again on the street.

In the time that it took him to rejoin us, I can remember hoping that we would get down to the bus quickly and that none of the neighbours would see us. It must have been about 7.30 a.m. when we set off down the road, this train of coloured trolleys, all squeaking and rattling along the pavement on a silent morning in July, headed by my father out front with a suitcase, wearing his tweed cap and his own grey plastic rain mack; an umbrella on his arm.

It must have taken a long time to get to the bus stop, because one of the wheels came off Maire's trolley and had to be fixed. Then the postman stopped to say hello and marvel at the sight of this new, half-Irish, half-German family on the move. He bent down to admire each of the trolleys.

Getting on the bus took time too, as the bus-conductor patiently stacked the trolleys one on top of each other under the stairs. But there was lots of patience at that time. That was long before the bees arrived in our house.

Hugo Hamilton's new novel, Sad Bastard, will be published by Secker & Warburg on September 3rd.

Next Monday: John Banville remembers May 1968 when he was in Berkeley, California, for that summer of revolutions.