an honest man and an adult, was a débâcle.
‘She’s the race-horse breed,’ Eileen warned my husband, Lauro, when they first met. She had taught in Ballinasloe, whose schools closed down during the days when the International Horse Fair was on to let everyone get an eyeful of the world-famous horseflesh. I imagined tremulous muscles quivering in a paddock, and wondered if that was really how I struck people, old schoolmates for instance. I wondered about this again when, on one of my visits back from abroad, a group of them gave a dinner for me. Women only. This made sense, since, if our aim was to remember the past, why drag along husbands? Inviting old teachers might have been interesting, though. They were all nuns, so they and we had not been close. But now – it was the Sixties – convent rules had changed. So might we not get closer? No? Perhaps not. Yet some were clever women who, if born in more prosperous times, could have had enviable careers. Would they, I wondered, have liked to know that some of us thought so? Again, perhaps not. They might even have mistaken the praise for pity.
I didn’t query either their zeal or their vocation – the divine call. But how can it be denied that the call was seldom heard once opportunities for women increased, even before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, as the Irish economy picked up?
The ones who benefited from generations of talented women being obliged to settle for teaching were, of course, their pupils. Iknow this because, in the Fifties, during the year I spent testing myself and my French lover, the Irish economy was at its nadir, so I went to London where I worked, among other jobs, as a supply teacher. This took me from a pretentious private outfit in St Albans to a rough one on the Mile End Road and in and out of many in between. Nowhere in this bird’s-eye view did I find the attentive efficiency of the Sacred Heart nuns. I didn’t see it later either, not in my son’s English prep school, nor in Bryanston nor at the French Lycée, which he had attended earlier in Los Angeles. This is not a puff for the nuns: their schools are now either quite gone or staffed by lay teachers, and that change must have put paid to the attentiveness my generation enjoyed, since lay teachers have a home life, whereas our only rival for the nuns’ attention was God.
Come to think of it, the Celtic Tiger’s brief prance owed them something, too, since one reason why international corporations set up businesses in Ireland was our well-educated population.
It is fair to admit though that, at the second convent school I attended, while the humanities were splendidly taught, we learned no science at all. The school was new and had no lab, so, while waiting for one to be built, the Department of Education let us substitute Thomistic Logic for the science subject which should have figured in our curriculum. Even now, I sometimes wonder if this left my thinking a little quaint.
How would I know?
*
At my old schoolmates’ dinner party, I marvelled as much at the intricately folded linen napkins as at the absent husbands who had presumably footed the bill for a display as immaculate as a feast-day altar. Perhaps I mouthed something about this, for a woman I didn’t recognise asked if I remembered the time I hadturned up for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception wearing the wrong uniform.
‘You had on the grey everyday one instead of the white. You had to be hidden in the back.
And
you left your lily in the bus! Dropped it!’
‘Oh God! Did I?’
‘It wasn’t for God,’ she corrected. ‘It was for Mary!
Mater admirabilis!
Tower of Ivory, Hope of sailors! She should have transformed herself into a clippie and patrolled the buses looking for your lost lily. If it had turned up, we’d have had a miracle to our name.’
Hooting with laughter, voices down the table from us chorused, ‘Oh Mary, I give thee the lily of my heart. Be thou its guardian forever.’ Former
‘She’s the race-horse breed,’ Eileen warned my husband, Lauro, when they first met. She had taught in Ballinasloe, whose schools closed down during the days when the International Horse Fair was on to let everyone get an eyeful of the world-famous horseflesh. I imagined tremulous muscles quivering in a paddock, and wondered if that was really how I struck people, old schoolmates for instance. I wondered about this again when, on one of my visits back from abroad, a group of them gave a dinner for me. Women only. This made sense, since, if our aim was to remember the past, why drag along husbands? Inviting old teachers might have been interesting, though. They were all nuns, so they and we had not been close. But now – it was the Sixties – convent rules had changed. So might we not get closer? No? Perhaps not. Yet some were clever women who, if born in more prosperous times, could have had enviable careers. Would they, I wondered, have liked to know that some of us thought so? Again, perhaps not. They might even have mistaken the praise for pity.
I didn’t query either their zeal or their vocation – the divine call. But how can it be denied that the call was seldom heard once opportunities for women increased, even before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, as the Irish economy picked up?
The ones who benefited from generations of talented women being obliged to settle for teaching were, of course, their pupils. Iknow this because, in the Fifties, during the year I spent testing myself and my French lover, the Irish economy was at its nadir, so I went to London where I worked, among other jobs, as a supply teacher. This took me from a pretentious private outfit in St Albans to a rough one on the Mile End Road and in and out of many in between. Nowhere in this bird’s-eye view did I find the attentive efficiency of the Sacred Heart nuns. I didn’t see it later either, not in my son’s English prep school, nor in Bryanston nor at the French Lycée, which he had attended earlier in Los Angeles. This is not a puff for the nuns: their schools are now either quite gone or staffed by lay teachers, and that change must have put paid to the attentiveness my generation enjoyed, since lay teachers have a home life, whereas our only rival for the nuns’ attention was God.
Come to think of it, the Celtic Tiger’s brief prance owed them something, too, since one reason why international corporations set up businesses in Ireland was our well-educated population.
It is fair to admit though that, at the second convent school I attended, while the humanities were splendidly taught, we learned no science at all. The school was new and had no lab, so, while waiting for one to be built, the Department of Education let us substitute Thomistic Logic for the science subject which should have figured in our curriculum. Even now, I sometimes wonder if this left my thinking a little quaint.
How would I know?
*
At my old schoolmates’ dinner party, I marvelled as much at the intricately folded linen napkins as at the absent husbands who had presumably footed the bill for a display as immaculate as a feast-day altar. Perhaps I mouthed something about this, for a woman I didn’t recognise asked if I remembered the time I hadturned up for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception wearing the wrong uniform.
‘You had on the grey everyday one instead of the white. You had to be hidden in the back.
And
you left your lily in the bus! Dropped it!’
‘Oh God! Did I?’
‘It wasn’t for God,’ she corrected. ‘It was for Mary!
Mater admirabilis!
Tower of Ivory, Hope of sailors! She should have transformed herself into a clippie and patrolled the buses looking for your lost lily. If it had turned up, we’d have had a miracle to our name.’
Hooting with laughter, voices down the table from us chorused, ‘Oh Mary, I give thee the lily of my heart. Be thou its guardian forever.’ Former
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