SOMETIMES, in dreams, I’m back at my old primary school. It is 50 years ago, but I can still smell the sting of the disinfectant for mopping the floors. The corridor runs on forever with the gold line down the middle of the floor and we tightrope walked along it, in single file, fingers on lips.
The classrooms had high windows and, in summer, the sun blazed through. The milk sat at the door in little glass bottles with foil tops waiting for break time. In winter it was ice cold to the fingers and in summer, sickly warm on the tongue.
And the nuns swished the corridors in black habits to the floor, their heads hidden beneath high veils, their waists circled with clunky rosary beads. I still remember the shock of the day when they came in showing their ankles.
It was a strange world, bounded by rules and instructions and catechism and learning off by heart. Feel your heart flutter in the panic of the quick fire mental arithmetic; sweat over the weekly spelling tests.
But I’m happy in dreams to go back there – it is usually summer and you can smell the fresh sweet just cut grass. Our teacher has told us to put our heads down on the desk as she reads us a story.
Those were the sweet moments, the restful moments – the dreams within dreams.
We really did make daisy chains in the big field at the side. We had a nature table with a papery foil of an old wasp’s nest, we caught jam jars of frog spawn and watched it turn into frogs. We learned because education was what mattered – it was how you got on, it was what you must do.
And then fast forward a few years to big school and the learning got more serious. Our teacher read us Seamus Heaney in the very early 1970s, long before he was famous Seamus. We learned Latin and Irish and French and German – oh yes and maths and physics and chemistry.
Sex education had rather too much to do with the biological make-up of the rabbit. And then there were instructions. I thought everybody had “instructions”, but it appears this was not the case.
This was a class a week when the headmistress taught us how to behave. It involved classes about how to sit properly – knees and ankles together and hands, palm upwards on the lap. Palm upwards was very important as you don’t want to sweat.
We learned how to walk into a room and how to exit without turning your back on anyone in the room you were vacating – it is a rare skill. We learned how to eat properly – how the salt must never be sprinkled all over the food – but kept in a discrete mound at the side of the plate, so that one can apply a little with the knife.
And now, the rebel in me likes to go at the bag of chips with a brute of a salt cellar and sprinkle widely, like I’m sowing a big broad Monaghan field.
There was reason and rhyme to it, really. My friends laugh at the thought of the classes in behaviour and decorum, but they served me through work dinners and major interviews.
Gliding gracefully in reverse from a room, reaching behind my back to find the door handle and exiting is a Houdini-like feat that deserves a round of applause.
My sister did have to line up with the rest of her class and present her fingers for inspection to the head nun. I missed out on that particular ordeal.
And, at the same time as learning the finer skills – the man I married was growing up in an all-boys school, hiving with hormones, where the headmaster addressed the assembled masses in much more simple words: “Boys,” he would sigh, “Soap and water costs very little.”
And I think how the years flew and how my son’s school life seemed such fun, so sweet... only he was never really that keen himself.
“It’s like this mum, I just don’t want to be teached,” he announced, aged five.
“Son,” I might have said, “My son... Aren’t school days the happiest of your life?”
And somewhere in my head, I’ve forgotten the double ruler and the cane and I’m laying my head down on the old wooden desk with the inkwell and listening to a story as the sun beats down through high windows.
