Tag Archives: schooldays

Shine, Jesus, Shine.

Posted on by
9

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it became cool to join the Christian Union at school. All I know is that one day people were carefully tearing away the threads that bound their little blue hymn books together and the next you were being shoved out of the way for a go at the Prayer Wall.

Testimonials became all the rage. Powerful, popular student speakers would address school assembly and describe their conversion at pop concerts. The Christian Union band became a staple feature of morning gatherings and suddenly everybody was belting out Shine, Jesus Shine as if their lives depended on it.

My best friend and I set out on a surveillance Mission. One Friday after school, we walked in on an Open Mic prayer session. The cream of the crop were gathered in a circle, waiting patiently for their turn with the mic. A tall brunette girl with ringlets finally got her go. She clutched the microphone, shut her eyes tightly and said “Dear God, please help me not do something I regret on Junior Certs results night.”

I was amazed, because I was doing all I could to prevent divine intervention on Junior Cert Results night.

The Junior Cert is a set of exams that Irish school children take when they are 15. They sit in sports halls with no windows and answer questions about Romeo and Juliet, Pythagoras’ theorem and volcanoes. During the exams, the sun comes out and shines all over the country. Flowers blossom and birds sing. When the adjudicator says “Pens down” after the final exam, it begins to rain.

Anyway, “results night” is when under-age teenagers sneak their way into night clubs around Dublin. The girls are usually naked and the boys wear oversized shirts with their collars pulled up. If things go to plan, the next morning the streets will be lined with neat little pools of vomit.

I had done hideously well in the Junior Cert. So well, that cool boys in the corridor cried my result at me whenever I passed. I thought the way they yelled “12 As” every time I went by was flirtatious, until somebody suggested that I was being bullied, which seemed more plausible.sh

Anyway, as I was ironing my hair that night, I decided it was high time I started drinking alcohol. Contemporaries had been doing it for months, and I felt I was missing out on a developmental stage. I thought the prospects that night were good. I had an invitation to a party at a boy’s house.

I made sure my hair was flat and lifeless before I headed out. When I got to the party, it was still bright and everyone was in the garden, bouncing on a trampoline. I joined them, certain that the illicit activity would begin after dark.

As dusk was settling, I spotted some boys retreating behind the bushes. One of them caught my eye. This was very promising. We exchanged a dangerous glance. I slipped off the trampoline and into the cover of a suburban hedge. An Evian bottle was being passed around. It was dirty and there was murky liquid inside. “It’s a mix,” one of the boys told me.

I thought for just a moment about cold sores, and about how once you got the Herpes virus, you have it for life. But then I remembered that alcohol was a prime ingredient in many household cleaning products, and my spirits lifted again.

I took a swig. I put great effort into appearing underwhelmed. The bottle got passed around. Before I knew it, it was empty and ready for the recycle bin.

I wondered whether it was possible to be so drunk as to not notice any effect at all. I tried hard to identify the symptoms of intoxication. I wondered whether I might be unsteady on my feet, but my legs stubbornly obeyed my commands. I thought it might be an idea to display irrational behaviour, but I was painfully uninspired.

I’ve always been confused by behaviour that occurs while drinking alcohol. You see, you just never know if the behaviour and the alcohol have anything to do with each other. The very last thing you want to do is to mix up causation with correlation. At least, that’s what the Psychology lecturers at college used to say.

Not so long ago, years after I left my school-days behind me, I found myself drifting on the fringes of a dance-floor. I spotted a cool boy I had been to school with. I tapped him on the shoulder.

“Kate!” he said. “SO good to see you!”

“And you,” I said, beaming.

“You know what,” he continued. “You’re just dead on. You are just such a good person. You know, I just have so much respect for you and the path you have taken.”

I was unemployed at the time.

He looked wistfully beyond me, his gaze otherworldly.

“Is that your boyfriend?” he asked suddenly.

I dragged LSB under the disco ball.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re some lucky fucker,” he said, “you really are.”

We exchanged phone numbers. “Let’s seriously, definitely, actually meet for coffee,” the boy said.

I was delighted. I imagined the conversation would continue exactly where it had left off. I would gaze modestly into my latte, stirring the foam with my little finger and say, “Stop, no really… Did you honestly..? … you really always thought that of me? And all that time I thought you were cool and I wasn’t?! Gas.. No look stop now, you’re embarrassing me..”

In the days and weeks that followed, I thought about bringing my phone for a routine check-up, just in case there were some calls not getting through or something. But as the weeks turned into months, I began to wonder if the boy had been under the Influence.

Are schooldays the best days of your life?

Posted on by
9

I wrote this piece 10 months ago, when I was still unemployed and feeling rather nostalgic about the time I spent at school. Luckily I’m now working fulltime and the prospect of writing “The Toilet Wall” for a living is that little bit closer than ever before.


The Fruits of Literature

“Imagine that you have found the most delicious-looking plums on your kitchen table”, Niall Mac Monagle began, in media res on the occasion of my very first English class. “You gobbled them up” he continued, “and now you must write a note to the rest of your family apologising for what you have done”. Luminous sheets of card fluttered onto our desks and twenty -six young fountain pens began to scrawl lines of contrition. “Time up”, yelled MacMonagle. “What have you, Ms Flaherty?” A scoff. “Erm.. Sorry I ate the plums”. MacMonagle beamed. “Excellent!” Then silence, then a poem. I have been hooked on language ever since, and were it not for the brilliance of this man, I would have neither studied English literature at university nor considered writing for life. I am imagining his humble cheeks turn rose petal pink upon reading this, and it gives me pleasure.

Emancipation or “On Covering the Calves”

The fight for girls to wear trousers was won in the summer of 2001, when I was thirteen and about to enter my second year at Wesley College. Clutching the uniform list triumphantly, I dragged my mother to Rita’s uniform shop in the ‘old’ Dundrum shopping centre, and we purchased a pair of over-sized, shapeless navy slacks, which I am waiting patiently to grow into, ten years and several hundred cupcakes later. The design was so ghastly that I was the only girl in the year to condescend to wear the garment and even at that, my resolve faded with the advent of spring.

A Changing World

I have the young and kindly music teacher, Mr Gifford to thank for my introduction to google. One afternoon in the computer room in the library, while my friend and I were typing up our entirely fabricated research project on Simon and Garfunkel, he bent his head tentatively between us and whispered, “There is a great new way to find information. It is called Google”. A rather silly name, I thought. Hardly one that will catch on.

I remember returning to my locker at 4 o’clock on September 11, 2001 and coming across a geeky classmate in a state of excitement. He was pounding his fists together to describe the trajectory of a plane’s crash into a skyscraper. I thought he was talking about a computer-game. Later, on the 48A bus home a lady spoke into her mobile phone, “who knows what will happen now; that Bush is a maniac”. By the time I got home, the TV was on, and the blown-apart pieces came together.

Breaking news and breaking ground

The very best bit of my time at Wesley College was my involvement with the establishment of a school newspaper, Fullstop. The editorial team consisted of seven people: six of my very best friends and myself. (It’s all about who you know in this country!). Tonight I reminisced over a coffee with David Kearney, then-editor-in-chief about some of the gems that the publication produced. The second issue, released on 26 January, 2004 featured a six-page interview with Graham Norton under the promising headline The Full Norty.

No area of school life was passed over by Fullstop: the controversy about the new swipe card attendance system was neatly summarised by the headline Swipe Strife! and tensions between prefects and non-prefects were explored under the provocative question: Prefects or Defects? My baby was a column on page 3 called The Toilet Wall, which is so full of righteous indignation that it makes me cringe with nostalgia.

Seeing the Woods for the Trees

On Thursday 18 November 2004, Fullstop ran an exclusive interview with the one and only Christopher Woods, after he was announced as the new principal of the college. The headline read Out of the woods and boasted an exclusive “fifteen-minute intensive grilling about Wesley, Africa and the secret to a good education”. Mr Woods mused that “ if I can look back in fifty years time when I’m old and grey and can say that everyone enjoyed their time in school and learned a lot … I’d be a very happy man”. It was a privilege, in my final two years at Wesley College to have a principal so dedicated and so interested in his pupils as individuals. I am sure that Mr Woods, old and grey will be a very happy man.

Now and Then

I studied English literature and Psychology at Trinity College, Dublin and now I spend much of my time at home googling jobs but all I can find are telesales positions requiring proficiency in Dutch. I do a little bit of teaching on the side which I enjoy but if I’m honest, what I really want to do is get paid to write The Toilet Wall. Wesley College inspired me to dream of great things and life since graduation has coupled that entitlement with a dollop of humility. The class of 2006 may have considered themselves the crème de la crème, but many of us are still sorry we ate the plums.

Wesley Women Celebrate 100 years

Posted on by
Reply

I spent the period between 2000 and 2006 in secondary school at Wesley College, Dublin. Wesley is a Methodist school, which takes its name from John Wesley who – as we were taught in our first year – at the age of five survived a fire in a rectory and henceforth considered himself to be “a brand plucked from the burning” and therefore destined to serve God.

Wesley was founded on the first of October 1845 on St Stephen’s Green and on that morning “At 9 o’clock the whole company sat down to breakfast joined by three boarders and nine day pupils. The Revd. Robert Masaroon presided.” In the years since, the annual Founders’s Day Service has commerated this day and the story of the college’s inception is recounted to students gathered together in “Assembly”.

An enormous landmark in the college’s history came in 1911 when the decision was made to admit girls. The significance of the move can be understood when compared to some facts relating to the period: Cambridge University didn’t award full degrees to women until 1947 and women in Ireland weren’t allowed to vote until 1922.

This year, a group of dedciated students under the guardianship of their English teacher, set about to collect the memories and stories of the girls who had passed through Wesley’s doors since 1911. They sent letters and e-mails to all corners of the world and made inquiries online and over the phone.

One such e-mail arrived in my inbox around Christmas time last year. It asked me whether I would contribute to a special book to celebrate 100 years of co-education at the school. Of course I was delighted to do so. My only problem was that when faced with the task of recounting my schooldays I didn’t know where to start and I didn’t know where to end. I managed to string a few thoughts together however and sent them back to the editorial team.

Last week, I attended the book launch. It was held in the National Gallery and was a momentous occasion. I couldn’t believe how many people had come. The expansive entrance hall of the Gallery was packed to the brim and as I looked around I saw many, many faces I did not recognise, but dotted between them, the unchanged appearance of my old teachers, whose mannerisms and expressions have remained constant since my departure.

The book, “Wesley Women” is a remarkable achievement. In all, 87 past pupils contributed. It’s full of amusing stories like girls ‘sealing’ holes in their tights with nail polish and filling balloons with hot water in order to survive the cold boarding house dorms. The earliest contributor left Wesley in 1912 and and there are several contributions from the 1920s and 1930s too. These stories are particualrly valuable as documentation of social and cultural history: Wesley did not live isolated from the world wars, the advent of rock and roll and of course the fight for women’s rights.

I’ll post my contribution later but must add that many of my memories are of people with whom many of you won’t be familiar. Still, I’d love to know, if you had to summarise your school days in 500 words, what would you mention and why?