All of These People: A Memoir

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.