Читать книгу All of These People: A Memoir - Fergal Keane - Страница 11

…Yet he was kind; or if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault.

The Village Schoolmaster’,

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

I didn’t like the look of the place. St Joseph’s National School was a grim, grey edifice built in 1913 on the banks of the River Lee about a mile from Cork city centre. Directly opposite, on the far bank of the river, were the suburbs of Sundays Well and Shanakiel, terraced and grand with the mansions of the merchant princes. But St Joseph’s drew the bulk of its pupils from an area known as the Marsh. Poor and neglected, it was a mix of old tenements and new council flats. Other boys travelled down from estates on the city’s north side or from farming areas to the west. I arrived at St Joseph’s fresh from a private school in Dublin, a place which had its own swimming pool and rugby pitches and where we wore uniforms and caps in the manner of English public schoolboys.

My school career had been troubled. I’d started out in an all-Irish speaking ‘scoil’ and had been moved on because my teacher was an old viper; after that I went to a prep school called Miss Carr’s, run by a genial old lady and filled with the children of the Dublin middle class. I thrived there but on reaching the age of seven I had to move up to a senior school. This was St Mary’s in Rathmines, another citadel of the middle classes, where I struggled to settle. By now things at home were becoming more fraught and every raised voice from a teacher had me jumping.

I was taken out of St Mary’s and sent to the more easygoing Terenure College where I was a happy pupil until my parents’ separation forced another move. By the time my primary education was complete I had been to five different schools. A child who was not so frightened and troubled might have fared better, been more resilient in the face of aggressive teachers. I was simply scared.

Yet until I reached Cork my education had been exceptionally privileged. All private schools and middle-class children. At St Joseph’s I was immersed in the reality of Irish primary education for the majority. On my first day at St Joseph’s we were lined up in the yard and marched up a steel staircase into the school building. Ahead of us was a long, dark corridor that smelt of polish and chalk, and at the very end of that, on the left-hand side, was the Brother’s class.

The Brother belonged to the ‘hard-but-fair’ variety of headmaster. In his younger days he’d been a promising Gaelic footballer, and he was still fitter and tougher than the largest of his pupils. His school was not one of the hell-holes, similar to some run by the Christian Brothers and other religious orders, where the leather strap ruled. This was also the early 1970s and the nationalistic element of our education was receding. Ireland joined the EU in 1973, a year after I started school at St Joseph’s. The word was out that we needed to be more European, if we were going to benefit from all the jobs and money on offer from Brussels. The Brother belonged to the Presentation Brothers, who were always seen as one of the more politically moderate outfits, certainly by comparison with the ardent nationalism of the Christian Brothers.

To a little Dublin boy fresh from a broken home and with a strange accent, St Joseph’s was a mighty challenge. My first encounter was with a farmer’s son whom I will call Lonergan. The boy looked like a mountain man with broad shoulders and big shovels of hands. Lonergan came to school each day with his hair standing on end as if he had only that moment rolled out of bed; he had buck teeth which advanced with each month and he smelled of fried food. On my first day in class Lonergan turned around and asked if I was ‘handy’. Not knowing what the word meant, I said yes. Yes. Yes, always anxious to please. Whatever you want me to be, I will say ‘Yes’.

No sooner had the teacher left the room to get some books than Lonergan turned around and punched me hard in the chest. I was thrown backwards. There was laughter around the class. The others waited to see what I would do. Tears came to my eyes. I did nothing. There was more laughter. ‘Handy my hole,’said Lonergan.

In this way I discovered that ‘handy’ meant hard, tough, able to fight your corner, and I was about as tough as butter. The atmosphere was feral. Every weakness was noted. Our teachers were good men and women. But physical violence was often the preferred method of control and chastisement. Hardly a day went by when somebody wasn’t given a few lashes of the cane. You stood at the top of the class, watched by eyes that were both fearful and relieved that it wasn’t happening to them.

The Brother would produce his bamboo cane and tell you to hold out your hand. Sometimes boys were so frightened they pulled their hand back at the last minute. He waited until their hands were steady and then brought the cane thrashing down on the open palm. All at once you were assaulted by sharp stinging agony. Your hands were hot as if someone had poured molten metal on them. Blood rushed to your cheeks and you blushed with shame. After the first couple of strokes your hand started to go numb from the pain. You tried hard not to cry. But I saw some of the hardest boys in the class with tears in their eyes after being beaten.

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 religious life was a traditional route of escape for many boys in the poorer parts of the country. There was a large amount of snobbery attached to urban impressions of religious brothers. The popular belief was that they were all reared in smoky, dark cottages, gorged on bacon and potatoes, regularly beaten senseless by their mountain-man fathers, until such time as they could escape to the city and get good jobs beating the daylights out of us.

Jerome was different. He wasn’t escaping anything, so much as racing to embrace the world. After teacher training he left Ireland to become a missionary in the West Indies. The ignorant chatter among schoolboys was that the brothers were free to beat as much as they wanted on the missions, so that when they came back home they were half savage. In fact mission service had a radicalising effect on the Irish religious orders. Men like Jerome arrived in the West Indies and Africa as the colonial era was coming to an end and nationalist movements were on the rise. Those who came home often found themselves at odds with the stifling conservatism of Ireland. Jerome’s response to the country he found on his return was to try and change the children who entered his school: fill them up with ideas about justice; make them want to change their world.

The initial impression created by his formidable appearance was unfounded. When we filed into the big hall to be welcomed by Jerome he asked rather than told us to sit down, and when he spoke it wasn’t with the declamatory bellow of the staffroom autocrat but with calm assurance. He started to use words like ‘responsibility’ and ‘potential’. I remember being a little shocked. I’d expected nothing more than a list of do’s and don’ts. School was about rules and punishments. Jerome did list the rules – neat uniform, hair an inch above the collar, expulsion for bullying – but most of the talk was about how we should use school to get the best out of ourselves.

I did not immediately distinguish myself. Within a couple of weeks I was in trouble for talking repeatedly in class. In Pres you weren’t beaten by the headmaster for breaking the rules. Jerome did not approve of corporal punishment. He had his own sliding scale of punishments. You might be given detention or extra homework. If the offence was sufficiently serious, parents would be called in or you could be suspended. At the end of the line there was expulsion which good middle-class boys dreaded, for in Cork it was the kind of stain which might tarnish a reputation for ever.

A fortnight after arriving I found myself arraigned before Jerome. My co-accused was the future Ireland and British Lions rugby star, Michael Kiernan. We were thrown out of class and sent to Jerome’s office for talking despite repeated warnings. Jerome was sitting with his arms folded, shaking his head and looking at us as if we’d committed murder. After a few seconds of that baleful glare you not only believed that you’d killed someone but would’ve willingly signed a confession attesting to the fact. Jerome had big presence.

‘Right, gentlemen,’ said Jerome, ‘what have you got to say for yourselves?’

We snivelled something about being sorry and not getting into trouble again.

‘I am sure that’s true,’ he said, ‘but first I have a job for you both.’

It was dark by the time we’d finished cleaning a long section of the Mardyke Walk. Immortalised by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sean O’Faolain as the haunt of lovers in his story The Talking Trees, the mile-long thoroughfare ran from the school gates towards the west of the city and parallel to the River Lee, the rugby pitches of Pres and the grounds of the Cork Cricket Club, forming a green band between the river and the road.

With a faint rain falling we stood under the yellow street lights waiting for Jerome. So intimidated were we by his presence that by the time we’d finished, the Mardyke was, in the words of my grandmother, clean enough to eat your dinner from. Jerome smiled at us when he arrived: ‘Now, lads, you’ve made a very useful contribution to society. Off home with ye!’

The clean-up operation was tedious and exhausting but it did not seek to humiliate. And to anybody who’d been on the receiving end of a cane or a leather strap that was a revolutionary concept.

But I kept on getting into trouble, always for mouthing off in class or playing the fool. I engaged with those subjects I found interesting such as English and history but switched off when it came to maths and science. I refused to apply myself to things which bored me and would either retreat into my old habit of daydreaming or seek to entertain my colleagues with impressions of the teachers. I had inherited some of the Keanes’ love of mischief-making; I was also very desperate for notice. I was perpetually late and an inventor of some genius when it came to explaining missing homework. After a few months of determined attention seeking I received my first suspension from school. This was serious. Three strikes and you were out altogether.

Jerome called me in. He was shaking his head as I walked through the door. ‘You are in a bad position, boy. You need to make some choices,’ he said. He went on to describe the options. They were few but emphatic: I could stop messing and work hard, or leave and go to some far less gentlemanly establishment, in other words back to the world of Lonergan and his cohorts. I pictured in my mind’s eye the logical consequence of expulsion from Pres. There would be family disgrace, the loss of my new friends in Pres, the prospect of a different school most likely under the rule of the cane, and the firm belief that expulsion would lead eventually, but inevitably, to either the unemployment queue or jail. I was nothing if not prone to dramatic visualisations. So I changed.

Jerome kept a close eye on my progress. He recruited me into the school debating society, a good outlet for my performing instinct, and would call me in every few weeks to see how I was getting on in class. They were fatherly chats sprinkled with little nuggets of Jerome wisdom, chief among them the imprecation: ‘To thine own self be true.’ Jerome knew I came from a broken home. He knew I was adrift. But where other headmasters might have seen a troublesome idiot who should have been booted out of school, Jerome went out of his way to help me grow up.

He was a revolutionary figure in Irish education. I cannot imagine another school run by a religious order where the headmaster, a devout Catholic, would institute philosophy classes alongside religious instruction, or where he was happy to allow one of his teachers to ask us to prove to him the evidence for the existence of God. It was done to make us think. Jerome abhorred the idea of faith and belief being taken for granted, as much as he opposed the notion of a society with no spiritual values at all: ‘Think for yourselves, boys.’

In the mid-1970s he decided to build a radio and television studio in the school, a move prompted by his conviction that if we were to succeed in our careers we needed to know how the mass media worked. I had my first broadcasting training in the Pres studio and went from there to appearing with classmates on a local radio schools’ programme. The experience was priceless. I could feel my confidence growing. For the debating matches Jerome would pack a team of four of us, occasionally accompanied by a girlfriend or two, and head off into the distant recesses of the Irish countryside to speak in bleak convents or cavernous boarding schools. Debating taught me to think on my feet and gave me the self-confidence to speak in front of large groups.

It also exposed a chronic lifelong weakness, a tendency to leave everything to the last possible minute (a sure sign I was made for a life in journalism). Time and again I would find myself hiding in the toilet before the debate, frantically scribbling down my notes while my team-mates waited impatiently. I lacked the self-discipline to focus until the clock forced me into action. When time caught up with me I usually managed a creditable performance, occasionally even winning a medal.

Jerome was acutely aware of the school’s image as a place of privilege. He had been raised in poor circumstances himself, and had served in the West Indies at a time when the anticolonial struggle was reaching its crescendo. When he taught us religion Jerome emphasised social justice. At the heart of his message was a simple code: talk without action is meaningless. He became an activist. In 1972 he set up an organisation called SHARE – Schoolboys Harness Aid for Relief of the Elderly – to attack the housing crisis among Cork city’s elderly poor.

When he arrived in Cork, fresh from the missions, Jerome was immediately struck by the wretched living conditions of many residents of the Marsh area. This was just a few hundred yards from the gates of Pres. There were damp and crumbling buildings. Rat-infested tenements. Here the elderly poor cooked on primus stoves and kept warm under coats, blankets and piles of newspapers. Many were social outcasts. Perhaps they had a drink problem, or depression, or maybe they had no living relatives or had lost contact with their families – they were all Jerome’s people. Through his example he made them ours. Jerome visited them and listened to their problems. Then he asked the schoolboys if they would volunteer for a visiting roster. At the very least the elderly poor would have someone to talk with.

Once the visits were running he suggested an annual collection to raise money for the elderly. Jerome’s idea was that he would raise a large sum of money and then challenge the city corporation to match it. Between them they would build new homes for the elderly poor. He used a mixture of flattery and relentless pressure to get his way. Jerome was a force of nature. He worked the phones, went to endless meetings at City Hall and used the local media to highlight the crisis of the elderly. City officials who helped were sure of generous praise when Jerome outlined his plans to the Cork Examine.. As for those who didn’t help him? Nobody dared refuse. ‘You just keep at them, boy,’ he would say.

By the time I arrived at Pres the annual collection was an established success. New housing projects went up all over the city. But there was another success for Jerome. By using schoolboys to manage the project he gave us an early taste of responsibility and, just as important, a sense of social justice. I came to love the man for his bustling energy and because he cared about me. Jerome Kelly ensured I didn’t become an educational casualty. I look back at secondary school and feel blessed. Jerome and I stayed friends after I left school. He would occasionally call and ask me to do something in relation to SHARE or Pres – as astute a manipulator of the old boy network as always. I could never refuse him.

Jerome was ahead of his time. But the country was starting to catch up with him. We were exploding out of the concrete overcoat lovingly tailored for us by Éamonn de Valera. Despite the best efforts of the bishops and the politicians we were having fun. On television we had brave current affairs programmes where we could watch our politicians being grilled by tough interviewers; a journalist called Vincent Browne had emerged as the scourge of a lying, swindling political class; Senator Mary Robinson, a future President, emerged as a powerful advocate of women’s rights; government ministers were ruthlessly satirised on television on a programme called Hall’s Pictorial Weekly.

The Ireland of myth and reverence was being dismantled in front of our eyes. There were also the first stirrings of a sexual revolution. Ireland being Ireland it was pretty tentative. But there was enough happening to provoke parish priests into apoplectic sermons on a weekly basis. The Capitol cinema on Patrick Street introduced jumbo seats for courting couples; on the weekends it screened films like Virgins on the Verge and Rosie Dixon Night Nurse as late shows.

Contraceptives were still officially banned, however. Our Prime Minister even voted against legislation being introduced by his own Minister for Health. But an Irish schoolboy could get a supply of ‘rubber Johnnies’ if he was determined enough. Most of the condoms bought on the black market by teenage boys were never used. They were blown up as balloons, furtively shown to friends at the back of the class, sold on to other boys, occasionally shown to girls in the hope they’d get the hint.

Pornography was also starting to appear in Ireland. I went to England with the Catholic Boy Scouts once in the mid-1970s. A gang of the older boys went from the campsite in Chingford into Soho and came back with ‘dirty’ magazines. ‘Dirty’ was the word given to anything which had a sexual content, however vague. There was a troop leader whom we called ‘Stab the Rasher’ because of his skinny frame and sneaky nature.

‘Come here and look at this, Keane,’ he shouted from the tent door.

I was eager to be wanted and ran over. He showed me a photograph. There was a woman and a man doing something, but I wasn’t sure what. The man was standing over the woman holding his langer (the Cork word) and she was looking up at him smiling. I felt ill and started to walk backwards. This caused Stab to explode with laughter. ‘Come here, lads,’ he shouted to his friends. ‘Come here and look at the fucking face on Keane, will ye!’

I ran off but when I came back an hour or so later they gathered around me laughing.

I hadn’t even the vaguest clue about girls. My mother taught in a Protestant school in Cork. The Protestant girls of Cork had names like Bronwyn, Paula, Penny, Susan, Stella. They were children from the outlying farms and old Cork businesses, the remnants of a much larger Protestant population driven from the country after the Troubles of 1921-2.

I thought those girls exotic. It was widely said among my counterparts that Protestant girls were the best because they let you go all the way. That turned out to be nonsense. But they were different. They had not endured the grim piety of the nuns, and so they were more at ease around boys, they could joke and laugh with us, they treated us as humans rather than some predatory species sent by the Devil to torment them. And then a girl named Penny took the initiative and kissed me at the Cork Grammar School disco in the spring of 1975. I walked around on air for days. Not because I loved the girl, but because I had discovered I was not a toad. On the other side of the world Saigon was falling. Cambodia was succumbing to the Khmer Rouge. A few hours up the road hundreds of people were dying in the Troubles. None of it touched us.

In the summer of 1976 I fell in love with a girl whose brothers went to Pres. I first met her in a cafe where schoolboys and girls spent hours sitting over a single Coke. But it took me months to become bold enough to ask her out. And then at the end of a warm July night she found my courage for me, and drew me into a spearminty kiss.

My girl. The pride I felt in walking with her. My girl had fair hair and green eyes, she smelled of shampoo and fresh clothes, and she was not afraid; this I remember about her best, the energy and hope in her, the laughter which drew me out of the long mourning for my absent father.

Those evenings of summer lingered forever, a deep blue that held its breath before the dark. My girl was the daughter of a sea captain and this added to her mystery; he had travelled to the places I dreamed of and she, by association, carried their exotic promise with her. Our love affair was intimately tied to the city we both loved.

We walked all over Cork together, up its steep hills and out to the Lee Fields, across the ‘Shaky Bridge’ over the river and all the way south to the marina where ships glided past, ludicrously large on the narrow waterway. Outside the city, on the coast, we cycled to the seaside villages dotted along the harbour mouth – Crosshaven, Myrtleville and Fountainstown, Roches Point – the last of the Irish mainland seen by hundreds of thousands of emigrants taking the boat to America. We would set our bikes down on the sand and swim. Even at a distance of nearly thirty years I remember the clear lines she cut through the water, the emphatic expression on her face as she headed out from shore, the water beads on her shoulders as she sat on the sand afterwards, and later the two of us stopping to catch our breath at the top of the hill leading back into the city and seeing all the twinkling lights of evening strung out like stars across the valley.

In winter I remember walking past the Lough on the way to her house, past the moorhens and swans, and stopping to look at my reflection in the water, wondering if I would ever feel so happy again. I had come to that love affair as a boy without confidence, who believed himself ugly and unworthy, and was pining for a father in a distant city. The girl and her family welcomed me into their hearts and home. And though the love affair ended, I remember those days as among the most precious I’ve ever known.

A former classmate recently reminded me of something Jerome had said in our last few weeks at school. He had taken us for our regular religious instruction class. ‘You’ll be heading out into the world soon,’ he said. How much would we take with us of what we had learned in Pres? he asked. ‘The thing to remember, boys, is that the world out there seems to operate on the principle of people walking all over each other. That is not the way you learned here. Don’t walk over people.’

I met Jerome for the last time shortly before the new millennium. By then I was a well-established journalist. He was already seriously ill with leukaemia but still busy with building houses for the elderly poor. It was an August afternoon in the garden of my cottage in Ardmore, a few yards from the sea on one of those rare Irish summer days when the action of the world seems suspended. In the drowsy stillness my son Daniel played around us on the lawn. Jerome asked if I had put his name down for Pres. ‘Of course, but only if you go back to being headmaster,’ I said.

We laughed and spoke about old times. He was still the headmaster at heart, still with an eye for the telling observation. While my wife was in the house he whispered to me. ‘Make sure you give time to your marriage. Don’t become too wrapped up in your work. All that work will go in the end but your family won’t, if you work at it.’ His instinct for getting to the heart of my world was as acute as ever.

I asked him why he had worked so hard to keep me at Pres. ‘That Fergal was a troubled boy,’ he said. And that was that. It was the only explanation needed. A few months later I had a call from Cork. It was a colleague of Jerome’s. He was dying. The leukaemia had attacked again. This time there was no hope of remission. The end was only days away.

I booked a flight to Cork for the following morning and arrived at the Bon Secours Hospital around lunchtime. Walking up the hallway I saw members of his family standing around crying. He had passed away a few hours earlier. I was late. I had been late for him all my life. I think he would have smiled at that, shaken his head and told me to do better next time.