Bernard O'Shea: Back to school memories of missed buses and smelly lockers
Bernard O'Shea Pic. Brian Arthur
All I can remember about my first day of school was mother giving me a little blue flask and thinking there was diluted orange in it only to be dismayed by it being water. I cried my heart out in front of everyone. Not the best way to start first year in secondary school.
I consistently lost the keys to the padlock of my locker in secondary school. Way too many times I looked on as the caretaker cut through a brand-new shiny lock with a bolt cutter. If you had shares in Tri-circle, Stanley or ABUS in the 90’s I probably sent your kids to college. But what I remember most vividly about my locker was using it as storage for my PE gear. Needless to say, it got smelly. A teenager’s gym bag is not a pleasant entity at the best of times but throw in a few double PE classes and a laissez-faire attitude to the consumption of Lynx Africa and it can register as a “major incident” on the adolescent Geiger scale.
There is a hidden secret in every school gym in Ireland. Look at the lines on the ground. It’s a complex maze of red, blue, grey, black and green lines. Some faded some still new not touched by a runner, or God forbid, a shoe (I’m pretty sure your still only allowed wear shoes on the gym floor if it’s the graduation mass). The spaghetti junction of lines laid out basketball, badminton, volleyball, netball and even Olympic handball courts but that hope was flushed away as all anyone wanted to play was indoor soccer mostly with a volleyball.
This could be the best part of the day or the worst depending on announcements or personal circumstances. An announcement like “Mr. Blogs is out today so there will be a study period” basically meant two of greatest words 15-year-old Bernard could hear: “FREE CLASS”. It was the perfect opportunity to do anything but pay attention and learn. The worst part could be a random uniform check and not having the requisite shoes resulting in you wearing those odd black slippers for the day.
Science has proven that smell can evoke stronger memories than all our other senses. I for one love the smell of new textbook and embarrassingly had a particular close nasal relationship with my Inter Cert History book. The aroma of a new pencil case especially the nasty plastic ones that have a foam sheet inside of them is enough to send me tripping and why no-one has invented an aftershave that smells of a new eraser is beyond me. A quick confession, I’ve “borrowed” one of my daughter’s fruit scented unicorn rubbers and it is A-MAZING. However, all good smells come to an end specifically in secondary school. I had an old agricultural science book that was marinated in a Yop overnight. It got nasty very, very nasty. It was quite ironic when it came to the dairy production chapter as the pages had already produced a pungent cottage cheese. Quite literally learning came to life.
I have a theory that whatever colour your uniform was in school you will go on to buy that colour for the rest of your life. Or is that just me? Mine was a teal jumper, grey shirt with a red and blue striped tie and I swear to you I have basically gone out on a Saturday night years later night wearing it. However, there’s a comical and logistical nightmare regarding the size of uniforms that have been the bane of parent’s purchases since the dawn of pinafores and dull grey slacks. Every year guardians all across the land try and guess if their growing child will fit into a uniform that’s too big for them or if their current garb will see them out another year. I like to call it the “Polyester Dance of Time”. It normally has two results. The first is the scattering of first year students being thrust into the dull Irish sky due to their jumpers having a similar amount of spare material as a hot air balloon and the second is a plethora of 15-year-old boys returning home from school looking like Bruce Banner aka The Hulk as for some unfathomable reason they grew an extra two foot and put on 3 stone of muscle overnight.
We laughed, we cried. Even though the bus stop was only up the road from me in Laois my mother drove me up to it every morning partly due to my tardiness and mostly due to my laziness. We missed it a least once a week. We would drive after it in hot pursuit flashing the lights and praying it stopped. I was so bad at getting up, my mother tried everything from drenching me with water to actually pushing me out of the bed. I eventually bought a sleeping bag so I could sleep on the floor.
I can assuredly say that this is where my love of procrastination began. I would do anything apart from homework. There is something perverse about staring at hours of meaningless telly knowing that you are going to be in a catatonic state the next morning in Maths class because the 13 hours you had away from the classroom wasn’t sufficient time for you to complete your homework. I would arrive in school an hour and a half before it began and did supervised study from 4 to 7pm when school finished, and I still managed not to do the blasted thing. I have dreams now in my forties where I’m in the science labs watching the teacher going around to check it.
The good old Leaving Cert. Categorically lambasted as a defective and blunt apparatus for assessing the youth of the county yet it’s still there years later like that fella who won’t leave the party in your house and seems to have an abundant supply of cans. Deep down I know that if I could go back in time and do it all again, I probably still wouldn’t study for it and for the second time I’d have to listen to my mother say, “will you put down that guitar and open a book.”
Are you one of those kids who got everyone to sign your shirt on the last day of school? It's almost a rite of passage. I remember getting mine done on the last day of my Leaving Cert and returning home to my father who took one look at it and said in his big Kerry accent, “What if you have to repeat?” Classic Irish parenting.
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