by Joseph Hone
Mine was an awkward arrival, one that exposed me embarrassingly. I was coming to the school very late, at fourteen instead of eleven or twelve. I was neither a senior nor a junior, an in-between boy. I was put in a new House, Gwynn, run by the ex-Balliol classics master, G.K. White, long a fixture at the school – put in his house no doubt because White was a friend of my grandfather’s and had been in charge of my uncle David, in another House, ten years before when David had been at the College; the assumption being, I suppose, that G.K., as he was known, liked and knew how to deal with the Hone family, many of whom had been at Columba’s in earlier years. Certainly, as I learnt afterwards, he liked David, not only for his good behaviour but also for his artistic talent. It was not to be the same with me.
Two incidents occurred on my first day that set the tone of my experiences at the school, reflecting the position in the College of the two Irish classes, two religions, the two utterly different sets of values that the College lived by: on one side the many maids (‘skivvies’), other servants, gardeners, groundsmen, and odd-job men – the Catholic Irish, impoverished, decent but largely ill-educated; on the other side their masters: the moneyed, well-educated Anglo-Irish Protestant boys and teachers. While one side imposed their sanctions through the confessional, the other took to floggings with the birch, and rarely did the twain meet. But of course they did meet now and then. The unfortunate evidence of this was there on my very first day in the school, a more-or-less empty one, since for some reason I’d arrived a day early.
I’d wandered round to the ‘bogs’, a set of lavatories next to the Masterman Library. It was roped off, with one or two official-looking men coming in and out, telling me to move off. Next day the news was quickly on the grapevine. A skivvy had aborted her baby in one of the lavatories, and the culprit was almost certainly one of the senior boys, since he was known for his flirting with the maids and had not returned that term. No more was heard of the incident. It had never happened.
Of course this sort of thing was a problem in the monastic, single-sex school that Columba’s was then. For sexual release among urgent young men in the College at that time it was a skivvy (droit de seigneur) or one of the junior boys (‘Close your eyes and think of England’). I was to learn more of these activities and proclivities later. Meanwhile, on the first weekend, I was to see how the Master Race ruled the school, through its hierarchy of housemasters, prefects, house captains, spies and fifth columnists. And in this Columba’s was different from the haphazard drunken order of Major Wormell’s Sandford Park; there were many more gauleiters here, better trained and sober, and many more boys to punish – and seduce.
On that first Sunday, when we were free in the afternoon and could roam up the Dublin mountains behind the school, I fell in with two friends, from my time with the Guthries in County Monaghan, already at the school: Nick Fitzsimon, who had lived at Annaghmakerrig during the war, and John Killen, a doctor’s son, who came from nearby. And a fourth new boy, ill fitting like me (indeed he was much older than me – he must have been in his late teens), a large blond Swiss-German youth called Charlie Seltzer. Charlie was the son of a government minister in Switzerland and had done something very wicked at home, and had been quietly exiled to Ireland, to St Columba’s, to finish his education, of which he seemed to have had little, his English being sparse and inaccurate. But Charlie did have one thing about him in abundance that Sunday – hard cash. Swiss francs, Irish five-pound notes and a lot of jingling coins. And nothing would do but that we took him to a pub that afternoon.
Nick and John knew the ropes in this matter, how one could take a mountain road up to Lamb Doyle’s pub, in those days more or less a shebeen, a white-washed cottagey pub where one knocked on the back door if the place was closed and, if one was tall enough and known to the proprietor or the missus as a sensible Columban – that’s to say one with money and a head for drink – one was admitted for a pint or two of porter in the back room. Or something stronger, which was Charlie’s tipple that Sunday afternoon, whiskey, which, with his Irish fivers, he took to like a Trojan. It was drinks all round.
On returning to the college, Charlie’s breath smelt and he was somewhat merry when we got to the cloisters before going in for six o’clock Chapel. A prefect accosted him. Questions were asked. Where had he been drinking? Who had he been with? Charlie, since he was about nineteen and saw Irish pubs just as uncouth cafés which anybody could patronize at any age or time of day, thought he’d done nothing wrong, and apparently gave a straightforward answer – he’d been having a Sunday afternoon drink. To his credit he didn’t say who he’d been with. After Chapel, Charlie was reported to his housemaster, G.K. White, to await an appointment with him. We other three kept mum. Unfortunately one of the other masters, Kenny Mills, was driving by and had seen the four of us on the road coming back from the pub. This too was reported to White, who was now happily making devious enquiries into the whole matter. Finally we were all hauled up in front of him. We denied everything. We had simply met Charlie on the road back, had been nowhere near the pub. But of course the road itself was out of bounds. We three were gated. And Charlie was beaten by G.K. He took it in an amused but puzzled spirit, saying to us afterwards, in his guttural Swiss-German accent: ‘You Irish, so strange habits – you beat zee men like cattle! For zee having just a dhrink! Ha, ha!’
Charlie was right. It was all a nonsense, but as far as the College authorities were concerned it was a serious nonsense. St Columba’s, with its all-seeing housemasters, masters, prefects and house captains, its gatings and birchings, was going to be a tougher proposition than Sandford Park. I had moved from what had been an open prison to one up on the moors.
St Columba’s was not a prison in any real sense; we were allowed four exeats each term and we could roam as far as we wanted, among the sheep and gorse bushes, up the mountains behind the school. And some of the masters and senior boys were not gauleiters, but decent men, though they were in a minority. The school was certainly run by the tougher, the misguided and the more devious types. Misguided because, as at Sandford Park, there was a palpable aura at St Columba’s then of superior difference from, and indifference towards, the rest of the Irish world around us. Tougher because at St Columba’s there were more numerous, arbitrary and usually unjustified punishments – painful beatings, rarely by the masters (that was only for the most serious crimes) but by the house prefects. These young men could simply take the law and the cane into their own hands and, on the say-so of the younger house captains, beat viciously.
Some of these house captains were not to be trusted in their judgments of behaviour; some bore grudges or were in love with junior boys and would have their rivals for the boy beaten for some minor offence. Behind the workaday surface the school rather resembled Florence under the Medicis – the housemasters princes, the prefects and house captains Machiavellis, all consorting, listening, advising, plotting and planning punishments or other subtle retributions. One incident, on my penultimate day at school at the end of the following summer term, illustrates this.
Since exams were over I had gone with Nick Fitzsimon, John Killen and a third boy known as The Horse (for the size of his marriage tackle) down to the village of Dundrum where we had clubbed together and bought a bottle of sickly sweet Cyprus sherry. We drank almost all of it, in ditches, on the way back to school. The bottle disappeared – I assumed one of us had thrown it in the ditch. We all trooped into Chapel at six o’clock. Sometime after Chapel I was told to go and see G.K. White. On his desk when I entered his room was a half-empty bottle. But it wasn’t the bottle of Cyprus sherry we had bought in Dundrum. It was Spanish. G.K, tall, gaunt, grey hair en brosse, in his long black gown, smoking a cigarette from an elegant amber holder à la Noel Coward, said in his high nasal voice, ‘This alcoholic beverage, Hone, was found in your dorm locker after Chapel.’
The bottle had clearly been planted in my locker before Chapel, and found afterwards, both times when I wasn’t in
the dorm.
I said, ‘I didn’t put it there, Sir. Who found it?’ ‘The house prefect, Fish, found it there. But that is not the point, Hone. The point is that it was in your dorm locker, so it must have been put there by you, and you must have been drinking from it.’ ‘No, Sir, I didn’t put it there, I don’t know who …’ White stood up. ‘I shall not dispute the matter with you, Hone. You will see the Warden tomorrow morning.’
And so I did, but not until midday when, in the empty school – all the other boys had gone home for the summer holidays, whereas I couldn’t leave for some reason until the afternoon – the Warden, the Englishman my grandfather mentions in his letter to Hubert, the Reverend F. Martin Argyle, beat me thoroughly. This beating seemed gratuitous, superfluous, since he knew I was not coming back to the school, and that an hour later I was to leave the place forever.
So who had planted the bottle in my dorm locker? It couldn’t have been Nick, or John Killen or The Horse. But there was someone else who might well have done this. I had been having a bad relationship with the Gwynn house captain throughout the summer term, because one of the junior boys in the long Gwynn dorm, an attractive blond boy with his bed next to mine, had come to like me, partly I think because of my cricket prowess with the First XI. Several other seniors fancied him as well, as indeed I did myself in a platonic, romantic way. One of the particular fanciers was the house captain, who had not had any luck with the boy.
I have no certain evidence that the house captain put the bottle in my locker, and had told Fish so as to have me shopped. But as some say of Christ’s supposed image on the Turin Shroud, ‘If not him, then who?’
‘Such, such were the joys’ of St Columba’s College. Though I shouldn’t exaggerate by dwelling too much on the base attributes of the place. There were other, better, aspects to the school.
NINE
Because it so strenuously aimed for conformism in all things St Columba’s was a fine breeding ground for rebels. They could sharpen (I was going to say ‘hone’) their rebellion there, as I suppose I did. I say ‘I suppose’ because I didn’t consciously rebel. I just simply kept on getting caught, smoking with Nick Fitzsimon behind the cricket pavilion or whatever. I was a poor rebel in that way. Certainly I was way behind the elderly irascible science teacher, George Large, a Catholic who had been a senior member of the old IRA and had used his metallurgic skills to forge a prison key taken from a wax impression, and so, with a few other desperadoes, had sprung Éamon de Valera from Lincoln jail – imprisoned there by the hated British after the Easter Rising of 1916. What George Large was doing at this Protestant imperial school, a symbol of the oppressor in Ireland for many centuries, I never found out.
But it shows how St Columba’s did have an Irish side to it. Ireland was lurking in the bushes groping with a skivvy, or up at Lamb Doyle’s pub – or, spectacularly, right there in the science lab in the shape of tough little arch-IRA rebel George Large. He and I didn’t hit it off. The sadist Dudgeon had been science master at Sandford Park. Anything to do with test tubes upset me, renewed painful memories. George had a habit of suddenly shouting at me. ‘Hone! Will you just do one thing for me? Stand right away from the equipment, back of the class. And stay there.’
Well, that made two rebels, George and me. And there were a few others; Nick and the fine cricketer ‘Crooked’ Lee, the three of us with our little Woodbine-smoking school behind the cricket pavilion – and particularly Dan Brownlow, carelessly and much more daringly rebellious, an older, elegant and sophisticated Dubliner, a senior who had refused to be considered as a house captain or a prefect and just laughed quietly at school prohibitions. But unlike laughing Charlie Seltzer he was far too clever ever to get caught. Dan led a charmed life at the school. With the connivance of Fred the boiler man he kept a Fiat in the garage next to the boiler room, left the dorm after lights out and drove into town, to The Green Rooster in O’Connell Street – a daring place in the Dublin of the time, since it was open until midnight, and you could meet a girl there and get a mixed grill. What thrills! We few who were in the know admired Dan Brownlow. But for us there were no girls and mixed grills in The Green Rooster – it was Florence under the Medicis and cold spaghetti.
One of the benefits of the school was the fact that the teaching was generally excellent, if you availed yourself of it. The teachers were paid more than in other schools in Ireland, so St Columba’s could take the pick of the pedagogic crop from Trinity College. But this was a benefit I didn’t make much use of. Apart from English, History and Geography I just couldn’t get to grips with any other school work. Maths, Science, Latin, French – I wasn’t interested. It all seemed quite pointless. And so I created a record in the school, which I believe stands to this day. I was sent down a form in each of my three terms at St Columba’s, from Five A, to Five B, to Shell A, landing up among the real academic dunderheads, decent farmers’ sons and such like, where we didn’t even have the properly qualified French teacher. We were taken instead by the greatly talented art teacher, the bird’s-nest-bearded Oisin Kelly, conscripted for the job. Not so talented at French, at which we were much less talented, he would throw chalk at us, with great accuracy, especially at the ultimate dropouts chuckling in the back row, among whom, of course, I shared a proud place.
What saved me at St Columba’s was what had saved me at Sandford Park: I became tops at sport and, at the senior level, in cricket, athletics, even rugby and tennis. So I had access to some of the privileges that went with this: weekend trips to play cricket at Portora School in the north, and to inter-provincial athletic contests elsewhere in Ireland, where I won the high jump and some sprints, and in the shot putt (thanks to Len Horan at Sandford Park) swept the board and created records. I think I still hold the Columba’s record in the seven-pound shot – fifty-six feet, eight inches. I got my colours in athletics and in cricket with the First XI. As at Sandford Park, it created surprise that such a bad lot should excel in this major aspect of public-school life, where a sports star was marked out as one on course for all the other glittering prizes in life. Though in my case there were clearly grave doubts about this.
In the long dining hall, where the housemasters sometimes sat at the head of the table with us at lunch, G.K. White, towards the end of the summer term, asked me what I intended to do when I left the school. ‘I think I’ll take a rest cure, Sir,’ I said. ‘Hone, I asked the question seriously. You might consider a serious answer, if you are capable of such.’ Since I knew that White’s father had been a Dublin bishop, I thought to add insult to injury by pulling his leg again. ‘Well actually, Sir, I hope to go abroad – to Africa, the mission fields, and write inspiring articles for The Church of Ireland Gazette.’ G. K. looked at me sourly. ‘Hone, you will go far – downhill.’
White was a curious man. Dry to the point of clinical dehydration, with his superior amused chuckles, his slow and studied beatings. I always assumed he was queer. He may have felt this idea was generally to his disadvantage – for, sensationally, in the year after I left he married the matron and took over the house with her that had been the sanatorium. He stayed on at the school, as teacher and then as one of the Fellows, way into his nineties. Goodbye, Mr Chips. But G.K. was not as nice as Mr Chips. He writes to Old Joe towards the end of my final term at the school, in July 1953:
Dear Mr Hone,
Mr Lyon of the Public Schools Appointments Bureau interviewed Joe the other day and talked to me about him afterwards. I have seen Joe about it since and he is quite clear about what Mr Lyon’s advice is. I want to let you know briefly about it.
He can do nothing about getting him into the film industry (Joe’s ambition) and is not optimistic about it. Joe however says he intends to make use of Tyrone Guthrie’s introductions to people in England and see if anything comes of it.
Joe mentioned to him that he would like as a second string to get into journalism: with regard to that his advice is that the only hope for him will be to apply to a provincial o
r local paper (in Cheltenham if they have one) for a start in the humblest capacity … But there would be no chance for him in that sort of work in London.
Mr Lyon is not keen on the idea of making something out of his cricket: he says there is really nothing in it except for the very good, which Joe is not.
Finally he said that if Joe found later that he wanted to get a job in a commercial firm in England he could apply to their London office: they would interview him there and Mr Lyon is confident that he could get him a start somewhere.
I am glad to be able to tell you that in cricket at least Joe has impressed us by his readiness to discipline himself and to accept discipline. He is the best bowler we have and has had some useful innings as well, and he fields not badly. They say if he had good early coaching he would have been really good; as it is he is good by our standards. He has also distinguished himself in athletics.
I should add that he impressed Mr Lyon very favourably. He found him – contrary to what we had led him to expect – diffident about his prospects. I fear I cannot say anything good about his work. What was it that Scott said of Byron? That he dashed off his poems with ‘the easy nonchalance of a nobleman’? Anyhow that appears to be Joe’s attitude to the examination papers which he is now facing. If it is all as easy as he thinks it will be, if a lordly assurance will take the place of knowledge based on previous work, then he should impress the examiners favourably. But I fear it may prove otherwise, if my previous experience of these examiners is worth anything. We have done what we could but we have failed to get Joe to work even this term in anything like the way he should; we cannot treat boys of his age as if they were six years younger and jump on them all the time.
