Two Walls and a Roof

by John Michael Cahill

  That school had such an effect on me that even after I had long left it, I was having nightmares about it for years. I would wake up sweating, thinking I had no homework ready, then realize that I was gone from it. I did get my revenge in the end, but it was a pyrrhic victory.

  Some years later, when I was almost eighteen, I was asked to join a public speaking team in Buttevant. By then I had been well gone from Pad’s school and had a huge chip on my shoulder from those earlier days.

  By a fluke, the subject I was asked to speak on was ‘corporal punishment’. That was one I knew only too well from personal experience, as did all those others who had gone through Pad’s school.

  The first heat of this public speaking competition took place in a small hall in Dromina, not far from Buttervant, and the hall was almost full on the night. I was to speak for four minutes, then take questions from the judges. I had written a speech which was greatly critical of this form of education, and as I was sitting listening and waiting for my turn on stage, who do I see arrive into the hall but Pad Keely. He sat some three rows from the back and my blood boiled over at the sight of him. Then remembering my glasses day and my oath of revenge, I saw that Pad still had his same smug look of superiority on him and the more I saw it, the madder I got. Temper and fury took over, and I could not wait for my turn to speak. I was last to speak and spent the time glaring down at Pad from the stage. He did not even acknowledge my presence. This ‘Foolah’ that he had taught now had a rage burning inside him, and was far from needing a shovel on that night. The chairman then spoke, “And finally we have John Cahill who will speak on the subject of corporal punishment in schools. Over to you John”. I started my intro, “Ladies and gentlemen, my subject tonight is corporal punishment, and here I have prepared some notes….. but I don’t need them.” With those words I threw my sheets of paper out into the audience saying, “Because I intend to give you all a detailed description of just one of my schooldays in Buttevant”. A lull suddenly came over the whole audience. This was not the done thing, and all could sense it. Something was going to happen here tonight. Pad was well known for his teaching methods, but no one ever dared to challenge him, but that night I was going to change all that.

  Over the next four minutes, I described a random day from memory for me in the school. I described the fear of going to school, the beatings, the hatred for our national Irish language, and the stress of trying to do homework you knew was always half guesswork. I described the constant insults and browbeatings we were given, and I did all this in a way that showed my anger was rising. You could hear a pin drop in that hall as I was coming to the end of my speech. I finished by speaking directly to the audience saying, “And that, ladies and gentlemen, was just one day at Pad Keely’s school in Buttevant where I was taught for five years, and Mr. Keely is here in the audience tonight. He is sitting there at the back of the hall, and I challenge him to call me a liar”. He recognised me then alright. Pad got up and left the hall. A cheer went up. I got a standing ovation, first marks too, and we won the competition that night. The nightmares only got worse. That night I saw Pad like the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse coming for me. I awoke in terror, sweating profusely. The only plus that came from it all was that I have never had a fear of public speaking since that night, and that wonderful gift has stood to me well over the years. It’s sad for me to say that I absolutely hated Pad Keely. I never hated anyone in life like I hated him. I told everyone of the type of teaching he gave to us, or the lack of it. I have to say that I took personally all that had happened to me in that school, and I deeply resented all that he did to us. I specifically resented the fact that Pad never entered Kyrle or me in the Young Scientist Exhibition, which we would easily have won, especially in its early years. At that time we were making electronic projects so far in advance of our age that we were light years ahead of those students who were actually winning the event. It would have given us a scholarship and a future in science, and also brought great prestige to his school. Pad never even asked us to take part, and I never understood why. It was as if he resented our obvious abilities in that area. Most of all though, I hated to be beaten in front of my brother Kyrle, who would be sitting in the class with their backs to us. It was a terrible feeling of shame indeed.

  Kyrle did bring honours to the school, or at least in Pad’s eyes he did. He got more honours in his Intermediate Certificate than anyone ever before, including Pad’s own children. Pad was so proud of his teaching methods that he decided to personally deliver the Certificate to the mother. A big mistake indeed, as by then Kyrle told her the truth about the beatings and the name-calling and how he was known as a ‘donkey’ and a ‘street urchin’. When Pad called home, father met him and he too knew of our school days by then, but he also knew that mother would be better able to handle it. He told Pad that mother was over at Kit’s doing her bar work, and she would love to get ‘the good news’. The bar was full when Pad walked in. He had such a presence and was held in such awe in those days that when he entered a room, it was like the parting of the Red Sea as he moved to the counter, and to the mother. She saw him and her temper rose. “My dear Mrs. Cahill, I am the bearer of great news. Your son Kyrle has achieved the highest honours in my school, and I bring you his certificate”. There was a long pause as mother just looked at him at the bar counter. He hands her the certificate and she takes it gracefully, still not saying a word. The pause goes on and on until Pad finally says, “My dear aren’t you happy? What do you have to say about this great news?” Mother looks directly at him and says, “Well Mr. Keely, I’d like you to answer me just one question”. “Yes of course my dear, what do you want to know?”

  “Well you’re a very educated man Mr. Keely, so please tell me this. How could my son Kyrle, a donkey and street urchin, possibly get such a great result? Can you answer me that…can you?” Stunned silence followed, but Pad said nothing. The whole bar waited in shocked silence as everyone expected some answer from the great man, but none came. Pad just turned on his heels and walked out. As he left, the cheer that went up from the bar was ringing in his ears. Neither Kyrle nor I ever returned to his school. Instead, we were headed for Charleville, and numerous other adventures there.

  In the end, after years of nightmares, after trying everything I knew to get even and finding that nothing worked, I came to the simple conclusion that all I had left was forgiveness. He was doing the best that he could do to drum knowledge into ignorant students, as he saw us. I am totally sure that he never took any pleasure from the hidings he gave us, unlike others of that era. I believe he himself was an incredibly intelligent man, and was just so frustrated at our inability to learn what was simple for him that he resorted to fear and violence as a last resort, believing that we were just too lazy to learn. The only time he ever let down his guard and showed any kindness to me was during a carol singing session on one Christmas Eve. Every year he would make the whole school learn carols and sing them as we marched around the town at Christmastime. This particular year he decided that we should also play music. We were all going to became flageolet players. This was great in theory and we learned the Adeste Fideles in the comfort of a poorly heated school in early November. However, the reality of the Christmas week cold with biting freezing winds and no gloves was a different story. We were to do two nights of carolling. After the first night of freezing and singing, most of the students decided to either give up the whole business, or did not bring their flageolets at all on the second night. In fact the only music being provided that night was by myself and his daughter, who played the accordion. When we were gathering to begin the march, he arrived, and seeing no one with instruments except me and his daughter, he looked at me and smiled saying, “Maith an fear a Shean,” meaning ‘good man John’. I was so pleased at his remark that I played my heart out that night and noticed him smiling at me proudly now and again. It’s a sad thing to go through a school for five or six years and only remember one happy word from you
r headmaster, yet there was no badness in the man, but it took me years to discover that fact.

  I was visiting the Nannie one evening and we heard the funeral bell toll above in the church. Nannie said, “John close the door, and you should go to that funeral. Pad Keely is dead”. Rather curtly I told her that I’d rather dance on his grave than honour him with my presence in a false display of sorrow. She just shook her head and said, “Sure he educated you, didn’t he? And anyways, what harm did it do you?” Her words stuck in my head all the rest of the night, and later I could not sleep, tossing and turning in bed all night long. It was then that it hit me, and I realized the power of forgiveness. I spoke to him in my mind and he came to me in my thoughts asking me to forgive him, which I did truly and honestly from my Soul. From the very moment I did this forgiving, I felt a huge weight lift from me, but strangely too it seemed to lift from Pad as well. I could clearly feel him smile at me again, just like that Christmas many years earlier. He thanked me and said he was sorry, and then he disappeared from my mind never to return until now. Was it all in my imagination, did I just dream of him? I am sure not. Since that night I never again had a nightmare about Pad or his school, and now only think of him and that Christmas when he tried to make musicians of us all. As he would say himself of another friend passed over, ‘Ar dheis De go raibh a anam ailis, may he rest in peace’.

  Big Kyrl adventures.

  I think I was born curious. I believe most children are naturally curious, but it’s driven out of them by many outside factors. The obvious one is parents who unintentionally instill fear rather than self-confidence into their children. They do this by almost daily telling the children what they can’t do rather than convincing them that they can and should do everything humanly possible to enjoy the gift of a wonderful life. My mother had a great saying, often quoted by me to all and sundry. She would say, “John, do everything you can when you’re young because when you’re old, you’ll only have your memories”. I absolutely love that advice and as a family we were so lucky to all receive it. The other area that parents could help is in encouraging their children to read, read, read, at all costs. Father would say a book is the entrance to another man’s mind. Naturally then our houses were always full of books even though mother only ever read one full book in her life. She had this mad idea that if you read a few pages of the front, a bit of the back and some random bits in the middle, then that’s the book read. Her method was pathetic, and that’s why we relied on father for almost all of our knowledge of the world, and on mother for our security and love when that same world beat us up. Our ‘video games’ were numerous old books with tattered pages, comics and the odd magazine, with drafts and chess for added excitement.

  Naturally these books prompted numerous discussions and arguments, and all these arguments would lead us to develop huge egos. This, I believe, lead us rightly or wrongly to an odd kind of self-confidence. We developed a self-confidence based on the book knowledge we had, and insecurity from the poverty we lived through. I know that even today my mind still swings between those two powerful memories.

  My first memory of anything electronic was seeing an old triode valve lying sideways on the mother’s cabinet in our back kitchen. This cabinet doubled up as a place where she kept her cutlery, her cleaning cloths and the little food she could muster. One of the drawers was always dedicated to father’s collection of small tools, and his never ending supply of six inch nails. I would say I was about twelve or thirteen when I saw the valve, and I took it in to the father and asked him what it was. In his unique and gentle way, he explained to me what this valve was and what it did. I know now that everything he told me was technically correct, though at the time it seemed like sheer magic to me.

  Little did he know that his words would set me on a career that has brought me amazing adventures, earned me a great living and would eventually lead to many electronic ideas, inventions, and two US patents on a device to prevent the killer condition known as deep vein thrombosis. I got so fascinated with father’s words that I spent hours with him questioning and trying to understand this awesome electronic magic. He never once got tired of my unending questions either. After spending a whole night interrogating the father, my head was about to explode with excitement. I think that day and night I exhausted all my dad’s knowledge on the subject, and there was nothing for it now but to find some books to extend my overwhelming curiosity on the subject known as ‘electronics’.

  By a great stroke of good fortune, Buttevant was to be given a stop for a mobile library. The mobile library was to me the single greatest asset that the government had provided for rural Ireland. It used to come around every two weeks and would park outside the local bank. A borrower could take out only two books from the adult section, and I think one from the children’s section. By then Kyrle had also been bitten by the electronic bug because we began to think that we could use this knowledge to build a radar early warning system to save our submarine from future attacks. So the day the van arrived we went straight down and joined, hoping for books on electronics or ‘radio’ as it was known then. The librarian made it clear to us that we were not old enough for the adult books, where we had seen a great collection of American radio books. So we ran back home and got both mother and father to join and we picked the electronics books for them to take out for us. Obviously this was spotted by the librarian who was utterly amazed that two children should be planning to read such advanced technical books, but he had no choice but to allow it. We then had four radio books to read. It is a fact that before the week was out we had read then all from cover to cover, and both of us were beginning a second read on the second week.

  I know I literally absorbed the knowledge. I soaked in this magic and Kyrle did the same. We could not wait for the next visit and more books.

  After about a month of this tricking with father and mother, the librarian just said one day, “Lads just take whatever books ye want, it’s ok”. We became quite friendly with that kind man, and he always did his best to have the most modern radio books available for us, ultimately ending with television books before the mobile service ceased and we had left Buttevant.

  The minute I would read about a circuit I would want to build it, just to see how it worked or even if it worked. Kyrle did too, but he was always more patient than me and would always have some purpose before he began to building anything. Our main problem was that we had almost no parts, and early on we began to search all the local dumps for old radios. No place was safe from us then, as we searched everywhere: sheds, lanes, and quarries. Big Kyrl had his cinema going by then and he had two Vortexon amplifiers driving the sound into his picture hall. He had some spare Mullard valves which we stole, as well as a load of carbon rods for other experiments, and our stock began to build.

  The very first thing I learned in electronics was the colour code for resistors and how to read the values by the little coloured bands painted on the components. It was at about this time that Kyrle and I began our arguments on how circuits worked. The books were by then all read many times over, and it’s amazing how we could get different views on how things worked from a book. In the end, father became the inevitable adjudicator. All the arguing ultimately did was to hone our skills and we both developed different ways of doing things. Whenever we decided to build a new circuit, each of us did it in different ways and Kyrle’s method was the correct one for sure. He would not start to build a thing until he had every single correct component ready. Then he would slowly and carefully build it, and it would virtually always work first time. I’d be far too impatient for that, and in my case, the minute I decided what I was making, I’d be off building immediately. It did not matter to me what components I had, or what I was missing; I’d make do and just build away for the sheer fun of it. Virtually none of my yokes ever worked first time while Kyrle’s always did. It’s not surprising as electronics is an exact science. But these failures never upset me for some reason. Often Kyrle would b
e gloating and snickering at me, and many times we ended in a punch up, but the unwritten rule was no damage must ever be done to our parts. It was from my struggle to get devices working that I learned most, and oftentimes my solution made the circuit work even better than the original, or my device turned into something completely different. Those years of building and ‘doctoring’ as I called my method, were to serve me greatly over the coming years.