Two Walls and a Roof (17 page)

His funeral had a great turnout on a te
rribly cold and dangerous night. F
riends of ours came from miles around to pay their last respects to a great musician and well loved friend.  He had thousands of faults and certainly was not the ideal role model for a father, but yet when he was good, he was very good and we all loved him in our own way.  Father was a very religious man, and I spent many a day arguing the existence of God with him
. N
ow that he’s gone, I am quite sure he got a warm welcome when he finally met up with his own version of his Deity. I’m equally certain that he is smiling at us all
right now, and probably saying, “
Jekus Boys tis a terrible summer, and O’Brien still has nowhere to go even in Heave
n. S
ure I
’
ll put on the ould kettle and make a drop of tea”. He sends me double rainbows when I think of him, and I have had the most awesome proof that he is still around, but that’s for another day.

I think I was about twelve when there was yet another row
between Nannie and the local Canon, the same one from our altar b
oy days. In some kind of protest she withdrew me and Kyrle from the Buttevant National School
,
which was run by the clergy. We were then sent off to the local secondary school known as the Sacred Heart College. It was run by a friend of Michael
’
s and at that time you had to pay a fee to
be taught in a secondary school;
the equivalent of an American High School today. I have no idea how Nannie planned to pay this fee for the two of us, but when her temper was high she never looked at the consequences of her actions. Almost overnight we began our second level schooling in the College at the bottom of the town. It was right across the road from the old British Army Barracks which had earlier been burned by the IRA
. I
n our time it had been converted into a local hurling field, and there we played hurling during our days in the Sacred Heart College.

The school had just two rooms
,
one
which
actually had bars on the windows and still does today. The main room had two classes in it for a time, with two teachers and two classes of boys sitting back to back without any partition between them. This meant that each teacher could hear what the other teacher did, and also notice how the boys were answering. In hindsight
,
this had to have been an impossible situation for both teachers and students. Later the headmaster
,
Pad Keely
,
a long time friend of Michael
’
s
,
had made another small classroom out of a room in his house, which connected to his kitchen.  His house was in effect the actual school, as he was using rooms that were part of his home as classrooms.  I know that it was an ingenious act on his p
art to allow for a fourth class
room to magically appear, by making yet another tiny room into a classroom for fifth year students. The only students in this ‘new’
classroom when I was there were
myself, his son Bria
n, and his daughter Molly. I
t was so cosy that I often felt like one of the family. I am sure now that
,
just like us all today, Pad too was only trying to make ends meet and being able to tell the Department of Education that he had four classes must have added to his grant from them, if he even got one.

There were swords on the wall of the main room, which we played with now and again, and a very long blackboard on the western wall. This room also had a ki
nd of podium next to the window
where Pad would stand and read the paper or keep notes. It was also where he kept his bamboo stick for punishment. Living today in a time of political correctness and public exposure to the sadistic treatment meted out to innocent victims, especially those run by religious orders, it’s very important for me to point out here and now that we the students were never victims of sadistic acts by Pad or his staff. Neither Pad Keely, nor any of the other teachers he had in his employment ever acted sadistically towards us
. I can say that in all truth, b
ut they were often at times incredibly cruel and violent
.
Pad especially believed in literally beating the knowledge into our heads by brute force if necessary. His wife
,
known to us as Ma
,
also taught there, and she too was well capable of meeting out strong punishment by the use of the same bamboo. This stick was about two foot long, shiny and with knots along its length. It hurt like hell when you had a strong man or woman behind it, and they were swinging
it down with full force. Today
I wonder what frame of mind one has to be in when you are choosing a bamboo stick for the specific purpose of inflicting pain on another human being, especially a young one. How do you find such a sti
ck, and what are you thinking? I
s it long enough, is it strong enou
gh, how many knots per inch etc?
  It’s no wonder that we have a fucked up society, and the only surprise to me now is that we are not even worse than we are.  I started in a school where the Catholic
nuns beat us; then
later on I went to a National School where we were also beaten by most, but not all of the teachers. One man I absolutely loved as a teacher in our National School was a man called Martin Kearney. In all of my days at that National School I never once saw Martin raise a hand to anyone, and what’s more important, he managed to teach me more than all the others combined
. Now
that has to say something.  So on reaching Pad Keely's college we were well used to being beaten, but not so hard and not so often.

In the Ireland of those days, our people were browbeaten and the parents were conditioned into believing that it was normal and expected that their children would get a few flakes at school, but not so my mother
. H
owever
,
she never knew about our beatings until years later when Kyrle ‘spilled the beans’ and refused to return to Pad
’
s school.

Ea
rly on, Pad laid down the rules
and we went from the odd flake to an almost daily ritual of beatings and insul
ts of all kinds. Pad taught me
math’s
, Irish,
Latin
,
and later on
s
cience. Those were my terror subjects
, especially a
lgebra and
(
God help me
)
c
alculus
:
the scariest of them all. He should never have been a teacher of students of my IQ, as we just were not good enough for him to t
each. I believe Pad understood
math’s
like I later understood electronics. In my opinion he instinctively grasped the concepts and simply could not understand why we couldn’t grasp them as well. The philosophy of fear kicked in and he tried to make us learn from fear of his stick, or his fist. Of course this had the opposite effect completely, and the more scared we became the less we could possibly
learn
. I remember being dragged up to the
blackboard one day
to explain Tan, Cosine, and Sine and getting beaten across the head for each one I got wrong, which was all three of them. In the end I resorted to playing the odds, and started guessing the answers
.
I guessed very wrong most of the time
,
with painful consequences. That beating gave me an everlasting terror of algebra and especially calculus. I get very angry now when I think of what happened t
o me that day because later on,
when I had to do my electronic engineering exams
,
I had to teach myself
math’s
all over again. Then I had to face down the fears of those memories and learn calculus all by myself. I discovered that it was a beautiful science, used in surveying, engineering astronomy and architecture
,
and that it was very old indeed. I discovered the most amazing thing, which was that I could measure the height of a tree without climbing it, and all I needed was a square of cardboard
,
a ruler and a basic knowledge of geometry. Had Pad been kind enough to give me that simple example, I know I would have loved that subject instead of having nightmares about it for years.

Pad
’
s school was an ‘all Irish’ school as well
. B
asically whatever subjects that could be taught through the medium of the Irish language were taught through it. This meant that I initially hated the Irish language but eventually lost my
fear of it, though having the g
rammar beaten into me didn’t help. Ma taught us
geography, h
istory and French, and I can’t remember what else.
I know that she loved to teach h
istory and was a real exp
ert on it, especially European h
istory
,
and she gave me a love for it that has remained with me today. To be fair to her, she was a far better teacher than her husband Pad, and you could tell she loved what she did
. T
he one time she did beat m
e, which sticks out in my memory,
was for the geography of Spain. I just could not get the names of the Spanish rivers right. The Guadalquiver was my downfall
. N
o matter how I tried I could not remember its name. She gave me such a hiding for that failure that, even though only sixteen then, I promised myself that not alone woul
d I never forget it again, but
one day I would stand over it and spit into it. Many years later on a trip to Spain I kept my promise. I went to Seville, walked out to the middle of the main bridge and spat in the river saying,
“
I won today, and I‘ll never be beaten for you again
”
. That day too I fell in love with Seville
,
so there was a good end to my ignorance and the hiding I got. I was a total dead loss at French though. It seemed to me to be a sissy’s language
. A
ll that pronouncing and polished accents just didn’t appeal to me at all. I was killed on a regular basis fo
r this language too; so much so
that I think in the end she just accepted that I could not learn it and gave up on me finally.

Monday morning was usually our worst day with Pad. He would arrive into the classroom singing, and if he had his old gown on, we knew we were really in for it. It’s also a fair bet that the man might be sick with a hangover
,
but he neve
r showed it. He would say
,
“C
eims
ea
ta
,
” and
, “Amach ar an line,
” the
most dreaded words possible.  ‘Ceimsea
ta
’
was the Irish word for
‘
geometry
’
and
‘amach ar a
n line
’ meant
‘
out on the line
’
. It f
elt like we were waiting to die
as we all formed a line heading for the executioner
’
s examination of our work.  Prior to this I would have arrived early at the classroom looking for a ‘cog’ from anyone better than me, which was easy. Unusually the better guys would arrive later though
,
and so the few boys who would even allow a cog were like gold
. The way it worked was like so: t
he two of us needing the cog would sit on either side of the good student’s workbook. This worked best for geometry as one would copy the drawing and the other boy would write the explanation of the drawing. Then we would swap sides and reverse the process
. T
hat way two students could do a cog at the same time with one of them holding the page up between them. This was of course totally forbidden by Pad
,
but he knew we were doing it and was always trying to catch us out.

One day Noellie Ryan from Knockbarry and I were sitting at either side of a copybook cogging away, when Pad arrived in early. It became a scene of utter confusion as the coggers scramble
d
to shut books and dash for their correct seats. “
Cheimseata, agus a
mach air on line”, and so it began. The line moved slowly along towards Pad who sat in a chair in front of the blackboard. I had been doing the proving part or the text part while Noellie had been doing the drawing, but neither of us had been finished when Pad made his surprise entrance. Now it was too late and we were both in big trouble
,
so we kept trying to sneak back along the line.

By the time Noellie got to Pad he had no text, just the drawing
;
the opposite of me. Pad asks him to explain the drawing, which should have had the text with it. Noellie has no idea and gets thumped around at the blackboard for a long time. Pad of course knew a cogger had been at work and became determined to make an example of the coggers that day. He called Noellie a Dunk and a Foolah and beat him around as he tried to explain his triangular drawing on the blackboard with no success.

Joe Hurley was next in line
,
as I had managed to scoot behind him in the confusion of Noellie
’
s clattering. Hurley had got his cogging so wrong that he had only half of either side done. Pad was really furious by then
,
figuring that there were at least two obvious ‘coggers’ at work and he laid into Hurey. Joe got a real good hiding that day, but he was used to it by then
,
being useless at almost all things and swearing that he was immune to pain. And then it was my turn. I had been working on a plausible lie for Pad
,
getting ready to say that I had done the drawing out roughly at home and was meaning to add it later to my page, but I never got a chance to tell it.