Carefree Childhood Years

Carefree Childhood Years

Growing up was fairly idyllic (in retrospect?). From the age of about 4 until 14 or 15 Bettystown in August, and tennis most summer days. I was also packed off to Collon, or to Limerick for two to three weeks at a time in the summer. I think these sojourns were probably related to the arrival of new siblings (May, July and August). Limerick was a favourite destination. There was a ruined Norman castle attached to the O'Connor cottage which was a great play area for Dermot and me. Believe it or not we used to take the milk to the creamery in the mornings in a horse and cart! I also found an 18th century flintlock pistol hidden in the castle which I took back to Dublin and buried in the back garden. Some years later I dug it up but only the metal barrel was left. The wood stock had disintegrated. Boo. The castle was called Clonshire Castle and I believe it can be googled. Another fun pursuit in Limerick was saving the hay. This involved people from around the vicinity coming to help to build the mown hay into haycocks.Then a horse-drawn contraption came into the field, lowered a platform, the haycock was hauled onto it, it was raised and the horse then set off, back to the farmyard.

My mother, a Primary school teacher,would have been amongst the earliest teachers produced by the new state after Ireland's independence was gained in 1922. Incidentally, she won first place in Ireland for a country-wide scholarship to higher education. In any event she decided I would be educated through Irish. Schools which taught all the subjects in Irish were rare.

For Primary school ('52-'58) I attended Scoil Colmcille in the center of Dublin city. For the first few years Daddy must have taken me by car. For the last few years I went solo,by bus. The only memory I have of the place was the daily fear of running afoul of a sadistic teacher (all lay males). A bamboo cane was used liberally on the outstretched hands of the kids for incomplete learning. I don't believe there was ever misbehaviour. None of the kids were my friends outside of school because none came from around the area where we lived. However, one of my classmates there, Michael Lillis, attracted some fame in later years when he was the brains behind the successful negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland.

Near us there was a boy, Cyril, in a house whose garden jutted on to ours. We interacted a bit but never really became friends. Also, three houses down from us there was a boy, John, slightly older. Same story. We interacted, but never became friends. I think this all had something to do with us being scholastically oriented which was evidently a little unusual for the time and place. Certainly we had homework every evening. Also, as my brothers came along we had enough of ourselves to play Cowboys and Indians in the back garden! But by 7 pm each evening we were washed and clustered around the radio in the dining room listening to a program called Dan Dare. He was a space captain and his effect on us was as realistic as though it was Orson Welles broadcasting The War of The Worlds. During my Primary School years we had no phone and no TV, so there was no awareness of the outside world. Our lives revolved around home and school.

One spinoff of my mother's training to be a teacher was that she had other women friends who had a similar education. The kids in these families were judged to be very smart and inevitably our progress tended to be discretely compared to theirs. One family had a string of boys who went to my high school. The one in my class always came first academically. He is an economist in the University of Chicago business school. Another family lived a few streets away from us. For a brief period I used to go play with them. For whatever reason, they were into making pipe bombs.....and very successful they were. Their daughter married one of those kids who subsequently became a senior ambassador in the Irish Foreign Service. The parents from this family were occasional Bridge players with my mom and dad in our house. The regular players tended to include a priest and another Irish speaker. The Bridge games were played once a week in the dining room, in front of the fire.

When I was about 9 or so a family bought a shop down the road one block from us. They had a son named Oliver and we did hang out more or less continuously. Again, Oliver wasn't school-minded, but he was good company and we probably remained friends until I went overseas. Curiously, I googled him for this piece, and I found a death notice for his older sister, a nun who passed in 2014. He was alive then and apparently the father of two kids and maybe a grandfather!

The end of Primary School years saw me, at my mother's arranging, sit an exam for a scholarship for a boarding high school down the country. There was no way I was going to be exiled, so I came a creditable third when there were just two scholarships! After that I sat an entrance exam to a Dublin High School and that's where I spent the next 5 years.