Following the success of his first memoir, The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has written a second one, with the balanced shapeliness and emotional intensity of a very good novel. The Sailor in the Wardrobe is the story of his rite of passage from restricted late boyhood in Dublin to independent young manhood adrift abroad. The sailor of the enigmatic title was his paternal grandfather, who ran away from Ireland to join the Royal Navy and was killed at sea. His portrait in uniform was kept in the family wardrobe, a symbol of the confinement from which Hugo also yearned to escape.
Hugo’s mother was a conciliatory German with Allied military government denazification credentials who migrated to Ireland after the second world war. His father was an Irishman, dogmatically Irish, dictatorially Irish, who allowed no English-speaking in his house. He believed that if all Irishmen would speak only their ancestral language the island could be unified and free from British influence.
There are echoes of Larkin’s famous poem about what parents do to their children, as Hugo’s father tries to impose his nationalistic ideals on his two sons.
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