Free The Sailor in the Wardrobe by Hugo Hamilton Page B

person who seems to enjoy it is my mother, until my father gives her a sharp look and she has to stop tapping her foot. She remembers why the meeting was set up and that there is a serious side to all this. My father takes the record off because it’s just too much for him and he thinks the whole system is overheating.
    I’m glad when it’s over. I’m waiting for him to give his speech about how bad music is like bad food, like chewing gum rotting your teeth, like alcoholism, like taking drugs. I know he feels betrayed, because there’s no defence against music. Music is free to travel anywhere across the sea and you can’t stop it coming into Ireland and going out again of its own free will. He says I am allowing myself to be corrupted and he wants to remind me of all the good things which we have been concentrating on in our family. He says you have to be careful with music and who I allow myself to be influenced by. My mother says the music is quite nice, but she’s heard about how the Beatles have created mass hysteria in young people. We’ve all seen it on TV, girls screaming and fainting when the Beatles arrived in Dublin. My mother says it reminds her of the way girls were screaming and faintingfor Hitler, and she doesn’t want me to become brainwashed like that.
    ‘We don’t want you to become a
Mitläufer
, a run-along,’ she says.
    She says it’s the worst thing that can happen to you, because it makes you powerless in your legs and you can only run in the same direction as everyone else. It’s what happened to the Germans and she remembers how they all became
Mitläufer
under Hitler, with the same thoughts in their heads and the same look in their eyes. My father says it’s what happened to the Irish as well, when they started speaking English and were forced to run along after the British. Now we’ve all just become run-alongs after America, with the same dreams and the same music, and my mother says if you become a run-along, then you don’t have much choice. My father and mother both know how hard it is to go in the opposite direction and there are many things in this world they will never run along with. That’s why they got married and had an Irish-German family with lederhosen and Aran sweaters, so that we would not be afraid of being different.
    When John F. Kennedy arrived on a visit in Ireland, I didn’t want to be brainwashed or become a run-along, so I was the only person who didn’t go up to the corner house to watch him on TV. I didn’t want to be like everyone else, blindly following the leader like they did in Germany under the Nazis. Even though John F. Kennedy was Irish and Catholic and my mother and father liked him for standing up to the Communists who had no religion, I didn’t want to be one of John F. Kennedy’s followers with American flags and green flags waving at him. When he was assassinated in Dallas one day, I was shocked like everyone else to see the pictures on the frontof all the newspapers. I watched my mother pasting those pictures of the motorcade into her diary, but I knew I was not one of his followers because she had already taught me how to be different to everyone else. According to my mother and father, it’s alright to be a run-along after John F. Kennedy, or the Pope, or God, or any of the saints, but not somebody like John Lennon.
    I don’t want to be a follower of John Lennon either, I like his music, that’s all. My mother says I have to be careful that I don’t get the weakness and lose control of my emotions. Onkel Ted says it’s hard to imagine music doing any harm or killing anyone and John Lennon is not mobilizing any armies. My father says John Lennon is an invader and it’s more like a cultural war. I wonder what he has planned for the record in the end, whether he’s going to break it in his hands in front of me or take it out one day and place it on the garden fire where it will melt down over the top of the weeds a bit like one of