When it was done you clasped your hands under your armpits and went back to your seat. It was impossible to write after that. I remember that there were always a few minutes of strange quiet after a beating. Everybody felt the shame and the shock of that sudden eruption of violence. We were beaten for not doing our homework. We were beaten for mitching. We were beaten for making a nuisance in the class (i.e. talking or trying to attract attention).
Yet the Brother was a moderate. His violence was never gratuitous and never tinged with sadism. He genuinely liked us and did his best for every kid in the class. In beating us he was simply exerting control in a manner that was widely accepted by society, and sanctioned by the state.
On that first day in school I was introduced to a daily ritual. The Brother instructed us to walk quietly across the corridor to a tiny room. ‘No messing or there’ll be hell to pay,’ he warned. I asked the boy sitting next to me what was happening. ‘We’re gettin’ soup,’ he said. After a few minutes the Brother returned with a huge steaming vat and several loaves of bread. The smell of soup filled the little room. Boys pushed against each other, elbowing to get to the front of the line. Plastic cups were handed around, and then one by one we dipped them into the vat of soup. An older boy handed out a chunk of bread. In my previous school, boys were packed off by their parents with nice lunches. There was a tuck shop that sold buns and soft drinks. There was none of that at St Joseph’s. I suspect that for quite a few boys in that room the Brother’s soup was the only guaranteed hot meal of the day. It was devoured rapidly, and the leftovers mopped up from the pot with bread.
The class was fairly evenly split between those who were studying to go on to secondary school and those counting the days to when they could escape and get work. Of the latter nearly all came from poor families with no history of educational achievement. The bright kids would pass the entrance exams for secondary and probably go on to university. Those who were designated as ‘thick’, or who could not be bothered working, would either leave for a factory job, or idle away another few years in a technical college, where you could learn a trade or at least convince your parents you were learning a trade.
After a few more hidings from the likes of Lonergan I began to develop my own way of dealing with bullies. I wouldn’t run away. Since I couldn’t beat them I would talk my way out of trouble. Make a joke; use my brain, relishing it when they were trapped in their English comprehension and came to me for help. It worked for the most part. To most of those boys I must have seemed very strange. I was scared of them. I kept myself apart from them. I did not seek to make friends. At break times I asked permission to stay inside and read. When forced to go outside I would wander around the edge of the schoolyard, ignoring the scrum of football-playing, fighting boys, and dream of escape. After a while the bullies ignored me. I made my own world. I kept filling my head with stories and lived there among the characters. In these stories I was always a hero.
I joined Cork children’s library and read book after book about history. There were books on my old hero Napoleon, but also Bismarck, Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. My mind ranged back over centuries, following Alexander over the wind-blasted plains of the Oxus, crossing into Gaul with Caesar’s legions, turning back the invaders at the gates of Rome, dying gloriously at Waterloo. Around this time, my twelfth birthday, my mother gave me a copy of a book about South Africa. She knew I still dreamed of Africa as my place of escape. But Cork library had only a limited selection of books about explorers. This new book was different. It wasn’t about the white men bringing civilisation to the natives. It was about the natives themselves. It would help to set me on a path to Africa.
The book was Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton. It told the story of a rural preacher from a place called Zululand and his quest for his son in the distant city of Johannesburg. The preacher was a different kind of hero to those I had wanted to emulate before. He was a humble man and confronted violent injustice in a peaceful way. The book introduced me to a concept called ‘apartheid’ where people were separated from each other on the basis of their skin colour. We did not see many black or coloured people in Cork. Perhaps one or two in the entire course of my childhood. Through Alan Paton I learned about the cruelties of segregation and the struggle of those who were voiceless. There were lines towards the end of the book which I read and re-read, lines I would commit to memory and cherish: But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.
On the last day at St Joseph’s, the Brother let us out early. It was June 1974, and the sky was a rare, perfect blue. We galloped cheering down the wrought-iron stairs to the playground. The Brother told me to take care of myself and to stop in and see him any time I wanted. He was a decent man and had done his best for me but the experience at St Joseph’s had felt like a long grey winter. The experience did, however, make me streetwise. I had gone there as a timorous middle-class boy and emerged with enough cunning to negotiate my way around the bullies. In later life, in distant places I would use the skills I’d developed in the playground to deal with characters far more threatening than Lonergan. I learned the important rules: talk them down. Outwit them. But don’t ever run away from them.
On my last day I could relish the fact that I had survived. And I had three months of the summer ahead before starting secondary school at Presentation College, a hundred yards or so away on the other side of the street. ‘Pres’ drew its pupils from a different social world to that of St Joseph’s. Only a handful of boys in my year at St Joseph’s would cross the road to Pres. It was a private school and most of the parents could never have afforded the fees. Besides, there was a first-class academic education on offer in other schools around the city. What Pres or its rival, Christians, offered was social cachet, the promise that boys would be turned out as young gentlemen ready to take their place among the city’s business elite. In the old days Pres had taken a less voluble line than other schools on the national question. This probably reflected the class origins of many of the pupils whose parents formed the Cork establishment and who would have shivered nervously had the teachers in Pres begun to denounce imperial Britain, though this didn’t stop the writer Sean O’Faolain from leaving school and joining the ranks of the IRA.
There was also a strong hereditary element to Pres. Like many of the other boys who entered Pres that year, I had had uncles and cousins who went to the school. Although my grandfather, Paddy Hassett, had been a revolutionary gunman, he sent his sons to a school that was modelled in many respects on the elitism of the English public school. Unlike in most of the other Cork schools, in Pres they played rugby and cricket. The Gaelic games of hurling and football, which my grandfather loved, were banned. Paddy wanted to give his boys every advantage and his decision to send them to Pres reflected the prestige of the school among the newly emergent Irish middle classes. Heading for a job interview on the South Mall, home to the main banks and insurance companies, there was always the likelihood that the candidate would be facing an old Pres boy on the other side of the desk. If the candidate happened to have played rugby for the Pres first XV his path was virtually assured. And to those who won a Munster Schools Senior Cup medal there was no end of employment possibilities. In this way some less than bright sparks found their passage eased into bountiful jobs.
In the rest of Ireland, Cork city had a reputation for being cliquey and snobbish, a place where your family background and the jobs your parents held were critical markers of social status. Those wearing the Pres school uniform occasionally attracted hostility because of its reputation as a bastion of privilege. One man fought to change that.
The following September I started at Pres and met a man who would change my life. Brother Jerome Kelly terrified the life out of me the first time I saw him. He was stout, balding and wore severe dark-rimmed glasses, of a kind that had gone out of fashion in the late 1960s, but which was still de rigueur among the Irish religious orders. Jerome looked a great deal more frightening than the Brother at St Joseph’s; his black robes flapped as he strode across the playground past the waiting lines of boys, like an immense bird of prey marshalling its victims.
Brother Jerome had grown up on a small farm in the bleak fastnesses of the Beara Peninsula, one of the poorest areas of the country, and he had joined the Brothers immediately after leaving school. The