Disguise. Hugo Hamilton
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a town being bombed and houses collapsing right behind him. He is always in the company of his mother in these situations, though he cannot be sure if it is the same woman in each scene, only the feeling of holding hands and being taken care of. He has no idea of chronology and finds it difficult to place these recollections in any single line, to verify them or separate them from what he has read or received since then. These memories fit the pattern of flight from the East. They are all associated with being in a hurry, with people running, with great fear all around him.
He remembers waiting in a room. Maybe it was not just one room, but several rooms, one after the other. Long hours sitting on a bench with his mother constantly looking up to see who was coming in the door. He must have read everything in her face, looked at her eyes to try and understand what was going on.
And that one solid memory remains of standing in the street with soldiers all around. Unable to understand what anyone was saying to him, he refused to take anything from them, didn’t want the black stone they put into his hand and only later understood that that this must have been chocolate. The soldier smiled and bit off a bit and chewed it in his mouth. But he still didn’t want a piece of this black thing, only the sweets which the fat man on the truck gave him. The soldiers and the people in the street were waiting for somebody, and then the sick man was brought out on the stretcher with blood around his eyes and nose. But then he was not allowed to see any more.
These memories were never fully explained by his mother and when he eventually ran away from home, he was in a state of confusion. He had made his own attempts to figure out the mystery of his origins and felt there was something being kept from him. He was only a young boy, not even eighteen, full of doubt and anger and fear. He had not yet found a way of explaining himself or telling his own story.
He never even waited to do his final exam in school. Just packed his bag with the minimum of clothes one day after a terrible argument at home. He got his guitar, rolled up his sleeping bag and took his passport from the glass cabinet. Went to the post office to withdraw all the money he had saved up. He sent his mother a note later on, giving a list of reasons for leaving. He said he could no longer sleep in a house full of antlers and dead creatures. His whole life had been a preparation for catastrophe, being able to live on nothing, surviving on roots and eating ants. He gave his parents no right to reply. It had all gone beyond that point of no return. He knew what they would be saying as they stood in the living room, reading the note over and over again. ‘Let him see what it’s like’ or ‘See how long he survives out there in the big world, paying his own bills.’ He knew that his mother would be worried about him and maybe he wanted to prove to himself that she had nothing more to worry about.
And then he was off. Right from the start he had a clear idea where he was going. Scotland. There was something he had read about the place. He had seen a film about the Battle of Culloden and had an old Scottish tune in his head. In his mind, the Scottish people were like himself, people who had things done to them. When he arrived in Glasgow he didn’t understand a word. His English had all come from the American radio stations, phrases such as ‘give ‘em hell’ which sounded funny to people in Scotland. They thought he was a German comedian. He moved on up through the Highlands and slept in barns to save money. He was hoping to stretch his savings out so that he could stay away forever. The survival instincts that his father instilled in him were coming in handy now.
As the light began to fade every evening, he would walk the road searching for a barn or a shed situated away from dwelling houses, away from people. Once or twice he had trouble with dogs, but he was able to get around them. He would bed down and make a mattress for himself on the hay. He was amazed how warm it was to lie on straw. He was sleeping rough and proud of it. Sometimes he was scared of the dark and stayed awake, listening to the sounds, imagining people creeping up towards him, but then he would fall asleep, and by morning, he would find himself laughing at his own fear. One night he heard a terrible scream nearby, almost human. He scrambled further back along the hay. He had no knife with him for protection. His father had once ceremoniously given him a hunting knife with a handle made from a deer’s foot. But he wanted none of those things to come on this journey. He wanted to be able to trust the world. In the morning, when he moved on, he found out the reason for the scream in the night. A dead deer, caught in a wire fence, hanging from his hind leg.
He wanted to get out of the museum of the dead and travelled as far as he could, all the way up to Inverness. He had no trouble getting into pubs because even though he was only seventeen, he was quite tall. The only trouble he had was getting through the narrow doors with his rucksack and his guitar. In Inverness he ran into a group of young people who invited him to stay. He thought they were out to rob him. When they found that he could play the guitar, they insisted on taking him home to one of their small council houses.
‘You big lanky fucking German bastard,’ they kept calling him. They slapped him on the back affectionately and forced him to have another whisky. He sang his heart out and they sang along. They told him he could stay as long as he liked, though he could hardly make out what they were saying because of the Scottish accent. He found himself saying ‘yes’ very frequently when he was asked a question. They asked him if he had any sisters. They said he didn’t sound like a German when he sang. They told jokes that he didn’t understand, so he laughed, pretending that he got it. And next morning over breakfast, he did get one of their jokes. A fly landed on somebody’s cornflakes. The boy chased the fly away with his hand and then examined his cornflakes for a long time before he said: ‘I do-nae think he ate any of it.’ The others grunted, but Gregor laughed out loud. He kept on repeating it like somebody with learning difficulties.
‘I do nae think he ate any of it,’ he said slowly. They stared at him as he learned the joke off by heart.
He had trained himself to live on nothing. His father would have been proud of him. When he started running out of money, he lived on tea and toast, and jam. He did not allow himself to phone home or ask them to send money. He was determined not to fall into that trap, so he made his way down to London to try and get a job.
He found London dreary. He could not afford accommodation, so he slept in Victoria Station. He started looking for work, knowing that he could go back to Germany any time to work there. But he wanted to live in a foreign place, without support. It was a mission of survival, sleeping in one of the alcoves of the station every night, and in the morning, putting his stuff in a locker to continue looking for work. He managed to get a job on a building site, but he got fired at the end of the day because he was so thirsty and kept going away to the tap for water. He was not really a worker like that. If only he could play music, but nobody wanted to hear his songs.
He saw a rat once or twice, but that didn’t bother him. He slept in his clothes with his empty wallet and his passport in his trousers where he would feel it most if somebody touched him while he was asleep. He trained himself to detect the proximity of another human being, even in sleep. If somebody stared at him for a moment too long, he would open his eyes. The presence of a person nearby would wake him up. If there was no danger, he would go back to sleep again in an instant. He lived the way that his father had imagined for him, ready for the worst. And one night, curled up in his sleeping bag on the floor, monitoring the sound of trains echoing in his head and the sound of London voices drifting past, he woke up with a man standing right next to him. A well-dressed man, carrying a briefcase.
‘You seem like a respectable lad,’ the man said. ‘Why are you sleeping rough like this?’
Gregor told him that he was looking for work. The man smiled and asked more questions. Where was he from? Why were his parents not helping him out? Gregor told him that he was on his own now and had no parents. So the man offered to help him get on his feet in London. He said he could give him a place to stay until he got settled.
‘Look, I’ve got two sons of my own, travelling off somewhere in Australia at the moment. I’d hate to think of them lying around in railway stations.’
Gregor told him he was fine. But then he took up the offer when the man insisted. He had a politeness in his voice which Gregor felt he could trust. So he got into the man’s car, a Jaguar, Gregor remembers, and they drove to the suburbs where he lived in a large detached house, with well-kept gardens and Alsatian dogs