Looking Under Stones

by Joe O'Toole

  The rest of the day was great. We toured all the relations, showing off our finery and being congratulated and praised, right, left and centre. I received a ‘lorry wheel’ from my grandfather, Seán the Grove. A lorry wheel was a half-crown coin, worth two shillings and sixpence in old money, nowadays about 15 cent, but in those times it was a significant amount. The half-crowns were beautiful silver coins, impressive, with a mighty horse on one face. Seán the Grove held them in high regard and they were very much his system of calibration and calculation of worth and progress in an unending variety of situations.

  ‘I was down in Daneen the Barber’s for a shave and haircut on Saturday night, and he collected a lorry wheel each from nine of us in the hour I was there.’ This would be said in a tone of regret that this money was not being attracted in the direction of one of his own businesses.

  ‘I have two lorry wheels put aside for every Honour you get in your Intermediate examination,’ he told me. Given such practical encouragement, study took on a new focus and relevance. I think I collected twenty-six lorry wheels over two Intercerts. Maybe that was why I repeated. Certainly it was an early experience of creating a bond between school and commerce.

  On my return from school each day there would be close questioning by my grandparents as to what I had learned. Granduncle Jim, who was blind, lived with my grandparents. In my early days at primary school, Jim would listen to me recite my addition and multiplication tables and he would give me a little spelling test each day, usually managing to catch me out with a tricky one. The last word he ever asked me to spell was ‘enough’. When I got it right, he said, ‘I think you know enough about spelling now.’ Jim was full of little cautionary rhymes and advice.

  ‘April and May keep away from the say (sea),

  June and July swim ’til you die.’

  The only thing that ever upset or worried him in his dark world was a gusting, gale force wind, which, no doubt, left him feeling helpless as it shrieked and whistled through the house. But he had the advantage of us regarding lightning; he did not see it and did not worry about it. He took the time once to allay my fears about thunder and lightning. ‘Count slowly from 100 to 104,’ he advised. ‘That’s how long it takes sound to travel one mile. If you start counting from the time you see the lightning, up to the first sound of thunder, you can tell how far away the lightning is. The thunder is only the sound of the lightning you saw a while ago; it might rumble and shake the house, but it can’t hurt you.’ I never forgot that lesson, and even now my mind automatically begins to count at the first lightning flash.

  Having finished my stint with the nuns, I made the big move to the Christian Brothers’ school. After three years of climbing up to the convent each morning with Pat Neligan, it was a major change to just walk out the door, cross the street and up the Barrack Height to the Brothers, arriving at school within two minutes. That first day seemed so strange. We were allocated the classroom just inside the door and we sat there nervously and tentatively, unsure what to expect. It was our first time in an all-male class; Celeste O’Keeffe, Geraldine Smith, Ursula Walsh, Rosemary Ryle and the other girls were left behind at the convent. To tell the truth, we were a bit lost and quiet without them. Two sides of the room were composed of partitions – the bottom half wood and the top glass – which separated us from the other classrooms, but could be pulled back to make one big room for some important school event like a concert or a religious ceremony. I was fascinated by the collection of stuffed birds on the window ledges of a third wall; it included a cuckoo and a lapwing. I had never seen a cuckoo previously, nor, despite hearing its distinctive call many times, have I seen one since.

  The schoolyard was an unrelieved concrete affair surrounded by high walls. The Brothers maintained strict supervision at breaktimes, patrolling the yard at an almost military pace, keeping step and swinging their arms. The only area that fell outside their visual range was at the far end of the yard, which housed the toilets and the bicycle shed. This was a gathering place for the older lads. Inevitably, any disputes were sorted out there. The fights tended to be quick; by the time three or four blows had been exchanged, the roars of the crowd would have alerted the Brothers. The combatants would be hauled off each other and could expect a few whacks of the leathar for their pains. Beside the bike shed was where the tough men smoked their Woodbines; I’m told that on one memorable day, someone produced a copy of the Daily Sketch containing a picture of a bare-breasted woman. Unfortunately, us young lads never even got a whiff of it. Not fair!

  At one stage the Brothers decided to introduce some form of Physical Education into the school. They invited a local army man to take us in hand. He put us through a regime of squats and press-ups and running on the spot, with a bit of marching thrown in for good measure. He wasn’t very strict, and as soon as we felt too tired for any more exertion, we were allowed drop out. The last man standing became the hero of the day, and then it was all over. We thought the whole thing was hilarious. The arrangement didn’t last long and we happily went back to chasing and kicking ball.

  Needless to say, our religious education was not neglected. Apart from the ritual prayers at the opening and closing of each school day, there wasn’t a month in the year in which we did not observe some saint’s feast day, holy day or other significant religious event. The class crib was taken down after the Feast of the Epiphany on 6 January; on 1 February we sang out the praises of Saint Brigid, and shortly afterwards we were reminded of our mortality as the Brother intoned ‘Dust thou art and into dust thou shalt return’ while making the Sign of the Cross on our foreheads with the ashes from last year’s blessed palms. Saint Patrick was the main man in March, but vacated his position for the solemn celebration of the ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter. May was the month of Mary and every classroom had a little altar where her statue would be laid on blue satin and surrounded by vases of bluebells. We sang the popular anthem to the Queen of the May every morning before class, ‘Oh Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today …’ and were encouraged to attend Benediction in the evening. The blue of Mary gave way to the red of the Sacred Heart in June, but somehow it wasn’t as popular. Before we were let off for our holidays in July we were warned that although we were on holidays from school, we were not on holidays from our religion.

  ‘Make sure to get regular Confession and Communion. Don’t miss Mass, and avoid occasions of sin.’

  Occasions of sin? We should have been so lucky!

  November was the month of the Holy Souls, when we were in and out of the church like yo-yos, trying to gain as many indulgences as possible for the possibly-not-yet-redeemed souls of our dead relatives. Then it was time for Advent and Christmas again. We learned the lives of the saints off by heart – those who had come to particularly gruesome ends were the most popular. We were told how Saint Brigid’s cloak had miraculously stretched to cover half of Kildare, but oddly enough, the fact that Patrick, the man who had converted us all, was a Brit didn’t get much coverage. Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, was Pope at the time and there was a very positive spin put on him. No mention of his dubious record with regard to Fascism. Our Catholicism was confirmed and reinforced day in and day out.

  I soon found out that the Christian Brothers were a different kettle of fish altogether from the nuns in the convent school. It would be true to say that there was no stage during my primary schooldays when my relationship with them could be described as easy.

  That first year I shared a desk with a lad called Paudie. He was the nicest of young fellows, quiet, but friendly and popular; his mother had died when he was young. Paudie never caused or created trouble. At some stage during the first term the Brother accused him of spilling ink on the wooden floor. Paudie answered honestly that he had not. The Brother, we called him Blackie, was not having any of it and demanded that he admit the fact. Eventually, with Blackie shouting into his face and the leather being brought down like a thunderclap inches from his ear, he was frightened into sa
ying he did. Probably our first experience of intimidatory interrogation and the unreliability of confessions.

  Blackie was youngish, low-sized, well-built, and with tight, black, crew-cutted hair. A hard man, he went for a swim in Slaudeen every day of the year. He had a nasty streak in him and was in the habit of maintaining our attention by catching us by the short hairs just above the temple. In second class we were still in short trousers, and when sitting in the old, oak, two-seater school desks, our pale white skin showed from the tops of our stockings at the knee up to the reddened, wind-galled bit at the legs of our short trousers. As Blackie strolled up or down the room between the rows of desks he would suddenly dive and grab one of us by the bare skin of our thighs, pinching between his fingertips and the heel of his hand with all his strength, until the quavering ‘Please, sir’ from his eight-year-old victim won respite and he let go, convinced of his control and superiority and leaving the marks of his nails on the blood-drained flesh. We were afraid of him, and when he turned around to the rest of us and laughed at the rising tears of our classmate, we laughed as well, disloyal and cowardly as we were.

  Blackie was not satisfied with the regulation ‘leather’ issued to the rest of the Brothers, he had one made to his own specifications by a cobbler. It had a criss-cross design indented into the leather, which resulted in raised surfaces and left a curious pattern on our palms after he belted us. Sometimes he would stand in front of the class and practice how quickly he could draw the leather from his tunic, like a gunslinger of the Wild West. At other times he would swish and swathe it through the air like a Samurai with his sword. There was always order in Blackie’s class, but he was not much of a teacher. All my memories of him are negative.

  Brother Gannon, who had charge of the fifth and sixth classes, was another man for beating it into us. He used a cylindrical piece of solid wood, about the same length but double the thickness of a drumstick. Making a fist of his hand, but with the second joint of his middle finger sticking out, he would crack people on the back of the skull with the hinged bone. It was excruciatingly painful. Luckily I managed to avoid coming under his scrutiny and, in general, escaped his worst excesses. Gannon was different from Blackie, however, in that he did have a wider and more progressive view of education and he did make a genuine attempt to broaden our horizons. He maintained a class library of ‘Boys’ Classics’ books, which held me spellbound. It was there I read White Fang, The Swiss Family Robinson and Coral Island. I never wanted them to come to an end and would have liked each to be another thousand pages long.

  From the time I first learned to make out the words on a printed page, books held a fascination for me. In my grandmother’s house there was an old ragged book entitled Strange as it Seems. It was full of remarkable facts and strange trivia, some of which continue to take up space in my memory bank. For instance, do you know the one and only word in the English language with three consecutive sets of double letters? Well, I do! My grandmother also had an old – a very old – Pears Encyclopaedia, which was well used by several generations. It was A5 in size, with the most compressed print imaginable, and illustrated mostly by line drawings. One showed Watts’ steam engine in exploded detail. The few photographs included a distant shot of the Pyramids. It entirely captured my imagination.

  The first real storybook that I bought, read and that was mine alone was Black Beauty. It was a hardback, with a beautiful beige dust cover, decorated with a drawing of a horse. I treasured that book. Beauty, Merrylegs, Ginger and the rest galloped through its 208 pages, the same number as the medium wave frequency of Radio Luxembourg, a coincidence that I discovered when I was a grown-up ten-year-old.

  By the time I was eight years old my godmother, Aunty Phyl, had had enough of being bossed around by her mother, Bridgy Fitz. When the family thought she was in Dublin, spending a few days with her sister, Ita, she had actually decamped to London, from where she sent them a letter, telling them of the fait accompli and that she would be staying there. Phyl’s only other trip abroad had been on a pilgrimage to Lourdes the previous year.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you, Bridge,’ said Seán the Grove, ‘there’d be no stop to her gallop after you sent her to that Lourdy place last year.’

  Phyl put her years of training behind the counter in Dingle to good effect by picking up a job in Harrods. That year, 1955, she sent me a letter to say that she had posted my Christmas present, but that it was a surprise so she wouldn’t spoil it by telling me what it was. I had never received a letter addressed to me before, and the notion of receiving a present in the post was almost too much. Every day I went to meet the postman, without any luck. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he’d say reassuringly. But tomorrow came and went. Christmas was getting closer. Then it was Christmas Eve and my parcel had still not arrived. Myko tried to console me.

  ‘Christmas is the busiest time in the Post Office. Everyone is sending cards, letters and presents, Aunty Phyl’s present probably got caught up in all of that. It will arrive after Christmas. Don’t be too disappointed.’

  But I was. By that time the present had taken on an importance even greater than Santa Claus himself. A few days after Christmas, Mr Kevane, the postman, delivered the package to my grandmother’s for me. With all the packaging and wrapping, it seemed huge. It was as big as his letterbag and it was heavy. I tore off the paper, fought my way through the cardboard and finally pulled out … a book. My grandmother was dismissive, and delighted to be able to have a go at Aunty Phyl who had, as she saw it, treacherously deserted her for London.

  ‘Is that all she sent, after all the talk?’

  I barely heard her. Odhams’s Children’s Encyclopaedia had all of my attention. It was the nicest book I had ever seen. Inside, on the flyleaf, there was an inscription: Christmas 1955, To Joseph from Aunty Phyl. The illustrations, the photographs, the colour – it was breathtaking. I started turning the pages, discovering sections on Nature, Discoverers, Inventors, Space, History and much more. I don’t think I took my head out of that book for a year. At least. It was there I saw flying foxes, met Alexander Fleming, found out how far away Pluto really was and learned of the fate of the wives of Henry the Eighth. The breadth of information in that one-volume encyclopaedia is probably the basis for an insatiable lifelong interest in everything around me.

  To his credit also, Brother Gannon gave me my first introduction to classical music. In an unprecedented initiative, he set aside three-quarters of an hour every Friday afternoon in winter to let us hear the great composers. It required dragging the overly large and old-fashioned music centre from the monastery out to the classroom. There it was lifted on to a table top so we could hear the sound. The first classical piece I can remember Gannon explaining and introducing was Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. He painted pictures from the music.

  ‘Close your eyes and let the music in,’ he instructed. ‘Can you see a bright moonlit night? Listen to the sounds of the night.’

  Those lessons were oases of calm in what was normally a frenzied theatre of terror. I have thought about it a lot since then, and cannot reconcile how a man could be so sensitive in matters of music and literature while at the same time being so sadistic in his dealings with his pupils.

  Though I could never come to terms with, nor forgive, the violence he perpetrated on the class, I do have one other very tender recollection of Gannon. Jimmy Rua was the son of a well-known family in the town. He was, in local parlance, ‘not the full shilling’. Jimmy was harmless and lovable and had a fixation with the local fife-and-drum bands. Learning to play the fife was clearly beyond his capacity, but he was forever plaguing people to give him a fife and to teach him. The townspeople looked out for him and minded him most admirably, but were generally impatient with him. One day he came and knocked on the classroom window, and knowing that Gannon was in charge of the school band, he asked him for a fife. We fully expected our irascible teacher to run Jimmy, but Gannon melted. To our amazement, he spoke to him for a while and then went
into the monastery, returning with a most ornate, silver-coloured concert flute, which he gave to Jimmy. Despite Gannon’s best efforts, Jimmy never did learn to play the instrument. But on that day, as he walked out of the monastery and down the Mall, he was a king. It was, to my mind, Gannon’s finest hour.

  As for Jimmy Rua, he died while in his thirties. He was always safe in the town, and it is a tribute to the people that he was accepted and integrated so well. Some time later, a play called Them was written by a man who had taught in Dingle, and some alleged that it was based on the character of Jimmy. The play was an exploration of the perception of the community in a small town through the eyes of a person of below-average intelligence and capability. It caused a certain upset to his family, though I thought it was written both sensitively and sympathetically. Not so long ago, I read a biopic of Van Morrison in the rock critic’s column of a national newspaper, in which he was quoted as saying that he chose the name of his first great band, Them, from the title of a play that he had seen and that had moved him. No doubt the outsider theme would have attracted Van, but I doubt if he would ever have known of the tenuous connection with a silver concert flute.

  While Brother Gannon was unnecessarily hard and violent, he was definitely committed to our education. But he could also be rude and insensitive. During my last year in primary school, Gannon met my mother, and when the conversation turned to me, no doubt she was unrestrained in her view of my potential. Gannon would not have liked that. He became, according to her, ‘quite nasty’.

  ‘How was that?’ I asked her when she told me about it, more than a year later.

  ‘Well, he said that I needn’t expect that you would be receiving the gold fountain pen that he awarded each year to the top pupil in the Primary Certificate class.’