Back where it all began

EXPLORING English, the well-thumbed short story collection for several generations of Irish students, has just been re-published.

We asked four celebrities, some the victims of unfortunate fashion trends, to cast their minds back to those days in secondary school — to preconceptions, of the jump from the sanctuary of primary school, and their highs and lows.

Sr Stanislaus Kennedy (born 1940)

“I went to secondary school at the Presentation Convent in Dingle. I wasn’t expecting all these books, of poetry, of Shakespeare, that you had to study. This was new to me. In primary school it was all done orally, in story form.

“Having nuns also was different. I had not met nuns before. They were removed from the community. They didn’t come out to the town or anything. It just shows you how long ago it is — there were no lay people teaching at the school at that time.

“We paid fees. I’ve no idea how much they were. Some families paid them more slowly because it was hard times in the 1950s. There was one nun in charge of getting the fees. She used to make people stand up if they hadn’t paid the fees. I thought it had a terrible effect on those children. We didn’t know that their parents were in touch with their teachers and were maybe going to pay it later or over time. I just thought there was something wrong with this.

“My happiest memory of those days was carrying on around town, having fun at lunchtime and in the evening with guys who went to the Brothers. We used to hang around Dingle. Sure there was nothing happening. There were only a few sweet shops.

“And cycling in and out to school with other friends was great fun. The school was two and a half miles from our farm. We’d be cycling into each other and knocking each other off the bikes.

“It wasn’t funny in another way because I was always in trouble with the bike, cycling into ditches and what-have-you. There was a man who had a bicycle shop, Ó Cleirigh, who I used to take the bike into. He used to eat the head off of me. He’d say to me that I was very irresponsible and that I didn’t think about my mother, and she trying to pay all this for the bike. Every time he fixed it I was back in the next day having ruptured it again.”

The Road Home: My Journey by Sr Stan is published by Transworld.

Mary Lou McDonald (born 1969)

“I went to Notre Dame in Churchtown, Co Dublin. It was a convent. The primary school is part of it so there wasn’t a big move. Making our confirmation had been a big deal. You knew you were on the threshold of a new world.

“I don’t remember the first day of secondary school specifically but I do remember the sense of the whole change over, the sensation of being in with the older girls, of no longer being the big girls amongst the small ones, but of being a small fry again.

“I remember having huge admiration for the older girls. They were impossibly sophisticated. We were such greenhorns in comparison. Make-up was forbidden, but the really daring ones would flaunt the rules of course, by having a hint of lipstick on or some eyeliner. If they caught you, the nuns would march you into the toilet to scrub it off.

“I’m still in touch with a number of my old classmates. Sadly, the only time that virtually everyone from the class met up together was for a memorial service to mark 9/11 in the parish church. A friend, Joanne, died in the Twin Towers. She was working there and was due to come home that Christmas.

“In the grounds of the school, there are some cherry blossom trees. To this day, when I pass a cherry blossom tree that is in bloom it transports me back to my time there — it was always a sign that the heat was on for exam time, that you needed to be swotting up!”

William Wall (born 1955)

“I started school at the CBS in Midleton, Co Cork, about 1968. I got into a fight on my first day. The fellah later became my best friend — Kevin Walsh. I imagine there was some sort of insult. We got into a fight but neither of us were much good at fighting. We were kind of rolling around the ground when one of the brothers came in and stood at the top of the class and glared in silence. Everybody looked at us. We realised that something had happened so we stopped fighting and got back into our desks. He didn’t say another word. I’d say he was just thinking, ‘first years’.

“I was a bit too shy earlier. I came into my own in fifth and sixth year. We had a really good Irish and English teacher, a guy called Gerry Motherway, still to the good. He comes to my book launches. He was an inspiring teacher. He treated the class like a set of adults who were discussing poetry or Shakespeare. You couldn’t say anything to shock him. He wouldn’t avoid the dirty jokes in Shakespeare. No matter what theory you came up with, he’d run with it and see who far it would go.

“I really had a feeling that when you got to secondary school you’d be doing Latin so you’d be reading Latin poetry so everybody would be half-talking in Latin, that it would be all intellectual conversations. I also thought I would be able to hold my own in them. That was another mistake.”

Paul Howard (born 1971)

“I went to St Laurence’s College in Loughlinstown, Co Dublin. It was run by Marianist Brothers. They were American.

“They were very young — I say that looking back. They just seemed really cool. We had American cousins but I’d never really known Americans before, apart from television.

“I started there in 1983. At the time, there was a teddy boy revival. It seemed the most pointless nostalgia ever.

Everybody in Ballybrack over the age of 15 was wearing crepes or brothel creepers, as they used to call them, and pink, yellow or green florescent socks, really tight drainpipe trousers and jackets that looked like somebody from Hi-de-Hi! !And lash-back haircuts. Everyone was into Shakin’ Stevens and Stray Cats.

“I remember going to Laurence’s for the first time and seeing all these teddy boys walking around the place and thinking that I’d gone back in time to 1950s America.

“I was really nervous on the first day. When you’re 12 anybody over the age of 15 seems like a grown-up. One of my first classes was cancelled so I had a library period. I’d nothing to study so I was just staring into space.

“I remember feeling this person come up behind me and in a really deep voice he whispers in my ear: ‘Three times now I’ve seen you look up. I want you to write out some lines for me.’

“I was terrified. I was too scared to even look behind me. At the time, I was really scrawny and I used to wear black National Health glasses. I looked like Buddy Holly.

“This guy said to me, ‘I want you to write out a hundred times, ‘If you knew Peggy Sue, Then you’d know why I feel blue’.”

“I’d never heard the song Peggy Sue. I didn’t know who Buddy Holly was. I spent the whole library period copying out this line.”

“Of course, it was one of the sixth years. I’d no idea. When I was walking out of the library all of the sixth years were rolling around laughing.”

NAMA Mia! by Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is published by Penguin.

Exploring English 1, edited by Augustine Martin, is published by Gill & Macmillan at €14.99