Hugo Hamilton, his brothers and sister, his German mother and fiercely republican father are the speckled people. This brilliant memoir, overturning the conventional accounts of Irish childhood, depicts the confusions of the 1950s and a family's struggle to find a common history.
But first they must find a common language. Hugo's father, a sometimes brutal Irish nationalist, insists his children speak only Gaelic and denies his own father's past; his mother, Irmgard, a softly spoken German emigrant who escaped Nazi Germany at the end of the 1930s, encourages them to speak German by telling them wistful stories of the Germany of her childhood that no longer exists.
All Hugo and his brother and sister want to do is speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt down Hugo (or 'Eichmann' as they dub him) in the streets of Dublin, and English is what they use when they bring him, a small boy dressed in an Aran sweater and lederhosen, to trial and execute him at a mock seaside court.
Out of this fear and confusion Hugo tries to build a balanced view of the world, to comprehend its twisted logic, and to find the truth of his own place in it. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before this little boy has uncovered the dark and long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents' wardrobe.