Growing Up Irish in the Television Age
by John Doyle
EXCERPT
ON A BLOSSOM-BRIGHT May morning in 1961, my father took me to school. It was my first day at school and although it was just an experiment to get me registered, sitting at a desk and familiar with the idea of school, it almost unhinged me. I remember tears and laughter, but the laughter wasn't mine. My father, who sold insurance policies and collected premiums, had an Inspector working with him that day. The two of them took me into the schoolhouse and they followed as a teacher took me to a desk. Grasping the situation, I look up at the rafters and howled. Hot tears flooded down my cheeks but nobody stepped up to wipe them away and murmur something soothing to me. I looked over at my father and the inspector. Dad was frowning, as if he wanted to help me, but couldn't. The Inspector was laughing at my rage. After a pause, I stared up at the rafters of the schoolroom again, saw only pitch-black darkness high up in the criss-cross wooden beams, and howled again.
Whatever else happened that morning is gone from my memory now. But this much I know - at lunchtime I legged it home. Out the schoolyard gate I raced, turned right and ran and ran. Down Church road, past the girl's convent, the high-pitched roar of playing girls ringing in my ears, then with a faster sprint past the arched entrance to the old jailhouse where everybody knew the Cormack boys had been hanged in 1848 for a crime they didn't commit and their ghosts still haunted the old archway to mock the judges and lawyers who came and went, and turning right again but picking up a stick to clatter along the iron railings of the Court House clang-bang-clang-bang to keep all ghosts away, running and panting for the sight of home. I raced across Wolfe Tone Terrace past the new houses with the doors newly painted in bright colours baby-blue and yellow, catching the sun, with the scent of new-mown grass following me faintly from the Court House grounds as I ran and ran and ran, heart-pounding, looking for the gap in the stone wall that would lead me through long furrows of potato plants and beets to my own back yard.
I found the gap, climbed the big stones, stomped on small nettles growing there and raced in a straight line through the furrows to the gate of my own back yard. I wanted to call out, "Mam, mam, I came home!" but I was breathless and stood there, panting. My mother was hanging out the washing on the clothes line and it took a minute before she noticed me.
"In the name of God, John Doyle, what are you doing here?"
"I came home."
"Jesus, Mary and Joseph, did you run across the whole town of Nenagh and tell no one where you were going?"
Mam sighed, took me inside, put me sitting in a sugawn chair - an ancient country thing made of battered old wood and hay-ropes — and told me to keep an eye on my sister Maire who was sleeping in her cot. Mam went down the street to tell Mrs. Moylan, who was going over to the school to fetch her son Michael, and asked her to tell the teachers that I'd run home and was safe and sound in my own kitchen.