Jaywalking with the Irish

by Lonely Planet

  We scarcely had a clue. Sure, I’d completed a frenzied sampling of nine different Cork schools a few months before, wrapped a blindfold around my head, spun around three times, and stuck a pin on an institution that said Christian Brothers College. Everyone said that the primary level of that private school, a ten-minute walk from our house, was A1. The crème de la crème of Cork went there, starting way back with the offspring of the “Merchant Prince” class who weren’t much bothered by the Famine at all. Adult graduates of Christians’ various institutions around Ireland were still complaining bitterly at the moment about the arbitrary humiliation and harsh corporal punishment they’d experienced long ago. “But sure, it did us no harm,” lots would say in the next breath. “I’d never have learned a thing had I not been sufficiently scared of my teachers,” a friend, who was a graduate of this system, once told us.

  In fact, the principal of Cork’s Christian Brothers primary school, once exclusively the domain of celibate priests, was now not only a female but a middle-aged mother of captivating warmth who had recently lost a young son. Deeply compassionate, Síle (pronounced Sheila) Hayes had even called at our door to extend warm greetings the day after our arrival in Cork. She was a breath of reassurance, especially because the Christian Brothers order, racked by scandals of pedophilia in the eighties, had not attracted a single new novitiate in the last five years. Cork’s Christian Brothers College – the primary school a feeder institution to an adjacent nine-hundred-boy secondary school that places many of its students into Ireland’s best universities – has no Brothers at all on its teaching staff, not a one.

  As we headed down the Wellington Road, it wasn’t hard to keep the boys’ minds diverted, the first day of school in Ireland being a bizarre testament to the creativity of the Celtic spirit. Mothers and fathers were all hand-delivering their kids to this rite of passage, shared by four schools within a thousand-yard nexus, and many were so overcome during their last-minute embraces that they parked in the middle of the road, on sidewalks and crucial intersections, and lost sight of the half-mile-long string of cars stalled behind them. Nothing moved and pandemonium ruled. Our fellow Corkonians handled this predicament with aplomb, however, by not honking or shouting but hitting the mobile phones for a thousand lamentations to other drivers stuck like themselves, half of them perhaps only a couple of hundred feet away. A garda or police officer (versus gardaí, the name for a rare gathering of two or more of them in one place) ambled from mist into reality, but it was instantly apparent that he had no rule-enforcing intentions beyond chatting with a friend recognized through a rolled-down car window just ahead of ours. Ireland has not tossed aside its implacable patience and forbearance, not yet. Everything will eventually be “sorted,” if one just sits and waits, as our fidgeting boys were consigned to do, even if their hair was nearly standing on end.

  Getting into the swing of things, we double-parked and ushered our anxious progeny into a holding-tank-like front room, where a grim painting of the Last Supper had absolutely no calming effect on the squirming masses of nearly 200 five- to twelve-year-old boys. Jamie and I folded our arms serenely and waited for the welcoming first-day-of-school speeches we’d by now heard for a good number of years.

  But the pedagogues had a neat Cork trick for us this time: they said nothing. I looked at my shoes for a while, then Jamie’s. I always thought her feet were nice, but still – there wasn’t a lot new to see there. Meanwhile, the teachers and students watched each other with mutual dread, and one could envision spitballs being worked into readiness. Suddenly, a whistle blasted through the stillness, as deafening and shrill as a call to order at Alcatraz or Sing Sing. I looked at Harris – he looked at me. Don’t leave me in this place, his eyes seemed to plead. But there was an unmistakable message to the parents in that whistle – go away.

  “I liked what they said about nurturing the whole child,” I muttered to Jamie as we walked away, baffled to the core.

  My wife looked set to kick me where it hurts. “This isn’t the time for sarcasm. I just hope you knew what you were doing with this place,” she moaned, with a small tear streaming down her cheek.

  The next day, it was Laura’s turn. We set off to her venerable, 361-year-old Bandon Grammar School, which is a coed secondary school teaching kids aged from twelve to eighteen. In Ireland, children begin high school in the seventh grade in a belief that they are already equipped to master a greatly expanded range of subjects, including foreign languages, and more in-depth mathematics, geography, and world history than is sanctioned in the more hand-holding middle schools of North America.

  Naomi Jackson, a vivacious niece of Bun, had ardently recommended her alma mater, without dwelling on the logistical challenges of getting Laura twenty-three miles down the road every dawn to the always congested small town of Bandon. This was the moral equivalent of telling new arrivals in Vienna to try an academy in Bratislava, or doting parents in Baltimore to make arrangements in Washington, D.C.

  On tourist maps and brochures, Bandon appears to be about twenty minutes from Cork, but the reality is something else. After driving a half-hour with Laura fretting in the backseat, we slowed before one of Ireland’s more puzzling roundabouts at a place named, apparently appropriately, Half Way. No new traffic was arriving or departing from the lonesome feeder roads stuck into this ring of motorized jabberwocky, but here was a very handsomely laid-out roundabout indeed. Had young roundabout trainees been given the chance to test their skills in this forlorn spot? No other explanation was apparent. But then we hadn’t grasped that speculators had stealthily acquired a patchwork of nearby farms as part of an £800 million scheme to create an overnight town of ten thousand inhabitants squashed into four hundred acres.

  A few miles farther, the highway abruptly narrowed through the village of Inishannon, once the scene of repeated failed IRA attempts to blow up the local barracks of the British police constabularies in 1921. Every go fizzled like a vision from a Road Runner cartoon, but 315 of these outposts of the Crown were bombed and burned elsewhere. Historians tend to pay more attention to the IRA’s fatal ambush of sixteen British auxiliaries about three miles away on a boggy stretch by the village of Kilmichael, the work done by a handful of ill-equipped rebels under the command of General Tom Barry, age twenty-one. Surprisingly, this skirmish is celebrated as the most pivotal battle of the Irish War of Independence.

  The fertile soil of this part of Cork has always been prized in comparison to the barren ground of Ireland’s extreme west, and thus attracted determined cultivation by the carefully planted Anglo-Irish. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ascendant gentry systematically annexed the best small holdings of the native Catholic peasantry in the vicinity, a great number of whose owners were bled dry by the harshest landlords’ tithes during and after the Famine. The Georgian-styled plantations grew stately, and their protective walls formidable, owing to the willingness of destitute masons to work for a penny a day, while the thatched hovels of the natives were reconstructed ever deeper in the barely tillable hollows. The rank-and-file citizens of Bandon, the once walled garrison town four miles past Inishannon, didn’t fret. Their attitude was so virulently anti-Catholic that the place became known as “Bandon, where even the pigs are Protestant.” The peasants’ livestock, having some value in local eyes, were allowed to spend the night upon common grazing land within the town’s domain, while their owners were banished to the hinterlands at dusk.

  Bandon Grammar School’s promotional brochures didn’t mention that the town used to boast a sign by its entrance gates saying: “No Catholic, nor free thinker, nor dissenter may enter here – only Protestant gentlemen.” One night someone with a different perspective scrawled, “Whoever wrote it, wrote it well, for the same is written on the gates of hell.”

  Until about a generation ago, no Catholic in the Republic of Ireland would have dreamed of sending his child to a school with a Protestant pedigree like Bandon Grammar’s, nor would such a child h
ave been admitted. Indeed, it wouldn’t be long before one of Laura’s new friends would take her aside and advise that she should never tell her classmates that she had been raised as a Catholic – “Papist” is the way it used to be put in the Republic and still is in the North. The truth, nonetheless, is that the bitter religious divides have largely evaporated in southern Ireland, where elite Protestant schools tend to call themselves “non-sectarian,” and now draw 30 percent or more of their students from the once reviled Catholic masses. A very different situation still prevails in the troubled North, with Protestant mothers stoning and spitting at their Catholic counterparts seeking to infiltrate a supposedly “mixed” school in the Belfast neighborhood of Ardoyne.

  But in the Republic, little enmity or even notice is paid these days to sectarian distinctions, although the punctilious Protestants do have some distinctive qualities. For one thing, being naturally more organized and respectful of authority, they are much better than Papists at managing traffic. Numerous speed bumps slowed our progress up the tree-lined drive into Bandon Grammar’s seventy-acre campus, and not one parent stopped to gab in the middle of the road.

  Laura looked edgy, nonetheless, which was disconcerting. This was a girl who had played ice hockey the past winter on a team of nineteen boys with but one other girl, who had ridden horses five times larger than herself when she was six, and relished lead roles in school plays that thrust her before packed auditoriums. An expert-grade ski slope coated with ice was a piffle as well, even though she wasn’t particularly athletic. Laura, the dear heart, prided herself on trying anything. But where were we bringing her now? A few weeks earlier she had a brief tour of her new school under the wing of the personable young headmaster. But the place was empty then, and now the seventy-five “first-years” were spilling this way and that out of cars, all decked out in their immaculate uniforms, but carefully looking over their shoulders.

  We parked near one of the modest concrete outbuildings that fan out beside the somewhat dilapidated former manor house and patronage once belonging, like all of Bandon, to the Duke of Devonshire. His former pile was long since converted to classrooms, a meal hall, and library, with cramped Madeline-style dormitory rooms for the boarding girls on the upper floor. The school has quite decent facilities, with a floodlit, all-weather playing field; a soccer “grit pitch;” tennis courts; and an enormous gymnasium complex. Although sitting prettily on a cow-dotted hill, it bears little resemblance, however, to the grandiose visions of mock-Gothic campuses that the top American or British preparatory schools passionately pursue. But to our relief, Bandon charged a fraction of its foreign counterparts, and seemed, at least superficially, to sacrifice little in the transaction.

  Many of the incoming students spoke with the reedy trill of the first- or second-generation English, called “West Brits” in Ireland, who still find their way into the grandest remaining country houses in these parts; and very few betrayed the lilting singsong of the euphonious Cork accent we had come to love. But filing into the convocation hall, they all seemed as vulnerable as kids anywhere struggling with their first day in a new school. After a few minutes, the headmaster issued a call for attention, and I readied my eardrums for another horrendous whistle blast. Mercifully, there was none. We ushered Laura forward to where another new girl with strawberry hair and freckles just like hers sat alone on an empty row of stools, looking like she would rather be anywhere else in the world. “She looks like you, Laura. Sit down there and make her comfortable,” I urged. It turned out that this girl – despite sharing with our daughter the most classically Irish coloring of anyone in sight – was English. Quickly, they would become best friends. In fact, once Laura sat beside her new friend, she never looked back at the strange beings who had created her. Our daughter’s adolescence, the go-away time, had begun. It didn’t take a whistle for my wife and me to depart now.

  All three seeds had been transplanted to new soil, and now our fates hung on how they would take.

  Return to beginning of chapter

  Chapter 9

  Inevitably, new rhythms took hold. Each morning Laura rose on her own at six, made tea, and dressed for school. A few minutes later, Jamie would start fixing breakfast and packing lunches. Around 7:15 I’d take Laura down to Cork’s hideously Stalinesque bus station for her hour-long journey to Bandon, with a transfer at the far end, the same taxing trip to be repeated at the end of her school day, which sometimes lasted until 6 p.m. After dinner, the homework was stacked higher than she had ever seen before. Until now, she’d bicycled or been protectively driven the three short miles to her Connecticut school without the slightest worry, her every care looked after. Suddenly, every commonplace security was gone. Remarkably, this girl, who’d only just turned twelve, was too excited to complain. Laura’s self-confidence amazed us. Hers was a vision of a child maturing before our eyes.

  Returning from the bus station each morning, I would hear a revelry bugle wafting from the nearby military barracks to rouse the more tender souls of the Irish army. Peculiarly, it would often sound four more times over the next hour, sometimes with bagpipes mixed in, the local soldiery evidently being a more sleepy bunch than our young daughter.

  By now, the boys would be waking for their sweet cereal, packed, like so many other confections in Ireland, with at least twice the sugar punch of its counterparts in America – which may have something to do with why the Irish talk so much. Just before nine, we’d escort Harris and Owen through a sentry gate to the walled officers’ compound of the army barracks, then down past leafy, bird-song-rich lanes and playing fields where the dew sparkled in the sun. By the time we reached their school’s back gate, the world was fresh.

  Owen loved his first-grade teacher, and Harris was relieved to discover that his classroom was not the house of horrors he had feared – not yet. No sooner would one of us ferry them home around 3 p.m. than the super-charged doorbell commenced splitting eardrums as their eager new friends called to play in the garden.

  About an hour later, I’d often watch from my top-floor office window high above as the duo of crisp-strewing malcontents, now often joined by an immense friend, began their afternoon’s slink down our lane, sometimes crawling as if seeking invisibility, for a new afternoon’s installment of sniggering and menace toward the youngsters playing on the other side of the hedge. With newspaper stories constantly circulating about the sometimes ugly treatment of dark-skinned asylum seekers in this island of the welcomes, we should have grasped by now that there were elements of Irish society that abhor outsiders of every kind, and in fact savor the challenge of trying to scare them back to wherever they come from. But we didn’t.

  For a while, we merely tried to ignore the creeping and crawling things outside. Our boys, for their part, were scarcely troubled, so long as they played on the right side of the protective gate.

  In the evenings they were kept busy anyhow memorizing the principal towns of the twenty-six counties and all the exotic river and mountain names of the Republic, or in Owen’s case, learning to say “dog” in Irish. Sometimes they grew snappish, one or the other joining with a new friend in an abusive “slag fest” – a prime Irish sport – insulting their sister or brother to curry favor with the ever-shifting allegiances outside our door.

  “Don’t you understand how important it is that we stand together as a family over here?” Jamie or I would scold. Nice words, but they fell on deaf ears. In truth, there were bitter fights about first goes at jams, juice, butter, bread, biscuits, toothpaste, television, and maddeningly short shower times before the heater conked out – the typical fodder of parent hell.

  But mostly our problems seemed minor, even if I was worried about not yet having harnessed the same volume of work assignments that always seemed to materialize back home. True, I had my occasional website feature column as the guru of new developments in the medical device industry, but arrangements for the next big ticket newsletter were falling on deaf ears – and, alas, the magazin
e and newspaper work I had counted on rekindling was, shall we say, materializing “slowly.” Too often, I found myself sitting at my desk and staring at the far hills in hopes of inspiration or at least a ringing phone. The process became something of a pantomime. The light changed so constantly that one had to circle the room again and again, like a caged cat, to open and close shades and switch lamps off and on to cope with the baffling transitions from filmy gray to strange shimmer, followed by floods of heavenly brilliance, and then back through the kaleidoscope once more.

  But Ireland remains rightly famous for its infinite avenues of procrastination. So Jamie and I solved early anxieties by enjoying some leisurely lunches, pretending we were on an idyll in, oh, say Provence. A couple of the nicest were savored at the nearby Arbutus Lodge, a stately nineteenth-century inn with a veranda over a tranquil garden descending toward the grain elevators that rise up like tin porkpie hats over the River Lee. The food was excellent: roasted chicken and shallots and what appeared to be leeks landslided beneath creamy garlic potatoes, washed down with a tasty New Zealand chardonnay. Another afternoon saw us picking at wholesome salads in the balcony restaurant above the downtown English Market, which is a gloriously colorful, vaulted-roof arcade wherein earthy butchers and fish-beheaders man stalls beside petite sellers of Brie. Ghoulish monkfish and sole; blood-red slabs of beef and fowl hanging limply from scrawny necks; stacks of sweetly scented bread; vegetables and fruits just in from Kenya and Spain; local cheeses from West Cork; fresh Italian pastas; Lebanese olives; Israeli artichokes; and Skippy peanut butter – you can buy a mouthwatering array of foodstuffs from the booths in that emporium. Indeed, one can eat infinitely better in Ireland than was possible even ten years ago. One can feast, and until we got the hang of how much we were actually spending, we did.

  It was hard not to celebrate. So one evening of that first week of school, I brought Harris with me to a lake in an abandoned limestone quarry in North Cork for a little fishing. Mostly he was captivated by the task of rowing a rented boat, as if he was the one steering our family ship of state forward. In the rosy light, one fat trout after another surfaced to take my flies, and I let Harris reel them in. In Ireland, big fish have always cast a mystical wake; ancient Irish poets used to lie for hours in remote river pools seeking wisdom from the bubbles released by passing salmon. Their breath exuded knowledge of the godhead.