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The Best of Times Short Story Competition


Spring 2023 Results




Thriving - a First Day of School

Copyright © Maeve McGoohan 2023


The launch of 1965's little greenhorns into the Big Wide World was not traumatic for their parents. Far from wailing at the blue door to the schoolyard, the Irish Catholic Mammies, for it was always the Mammies, skipped down the steps with winged feet, delighted that the Catholic nuns had finally taken yet another toddler off their hands. Most had several even smaller greenhorns at home.

The nuns, for their part, were on a mission to do God's holy work, and it's fair to say they did indeed make work of it, very hard work. But they were well equipped. The nuns gave big eyed glares through bottle-end glasses. They had hard hands. Thick leather belts with long key chains clinking against black rosary beads hung from the middle of their black shrouds. One wore cello tape at the end of her fingers to cover the wounds wrought by calligraphy and another, when animated, spewed little bubbles of spittle out of the corners of her mouth. They all terrified the living daylights out of me. I’m convinced it was nuns who inspired J.K. Rowling’s dementors.

Now that’s not to say the nuns didn't have their hands full. Most of the new girls were tame, if untrained, but a few, especially the country girls, were positively feral. Concepta Boyle was one such kid. The nuns were used to low level, ‘shuffling behind the mammy’ resistance, and indeed bitter tiny tears, but not so much the savage, winner takes all approach displayed by this wee newbie.

In a sort of pre-emptive strike, Concepta or Cepta literally kicked the whole day off with a heroic swift jab of her new brown Clarks into Mother Ignatius’ thick, varicose-veined right ankle. It seemed Cepta had some misgivings about being dragged away from the warmth of her Mammy. She was not going into the drill hall with the rest of the navy-clad novices. She was going home with Mammy. There were others among us who would have liked to go home with their Mammies, but none rebelled with the ferocity of Cepta Boyle.

Although violence featured heavily in her own slim portfolio of teaching strategies, Mother Ignatius wasn’t at all used to other people initiating combat, and for a moment it looked as if the little mite might get the better of her. Unaccustomed though she was to such ferocity in four-year-olds, Mother Ignatius rallied well, and the attack triggered a reflex response to slug away at the back of little Cepta’s legs with her huge right hand.

“Behave, you little brat!”

This appeared to have worked, in fact initially it did, and the audience of Cepta’s tiny peers held our collective breath, certain that the nun had prevailed. Not a bit of it. What the rest of us saucer-eyed onlookers mistook for acquiescence was merely Cepta pausing to draw breath, putting the key in the ignition, before smashing full throttle into fifth gear. With a glass shattering scream “Fuck Off”, she lunged at the nun, dragging the massive black tablecloth of a veil from her smooth white head.

Now I’d often heard my Mam saying, ‘Everybody knows their own’ and Mammy Boyle knew Cepta’s scream a mile away. Having heard the call of the wild, the curvy matriarch was compelled to turn and bound back up the steps she’d been descending, towards the shrieks of her beleaguered offspring. St Philomena’s was Bridie Boyle’s own Alma Mater, and she’d been the recipient of many a wallop from Iggy. Hardly surprising then, that Ma B had great form in this particular amphitheatre and relished the opportunity to play lioness to these particular Christians. But even Ma Boyle must have been shocked at the scene before her.

The puce headed nun and the toddler were engaged in something of a running battle between the open drill hall door and the carbolic smelling toilets further up the brown linoed hallway. In an uneven, sideways tug of war, the enormous black veil serving as a rope, a David and Goliath type skirmish ensued, thrilling all us littlies, and giving us pause to consider our own refugee status. Maybe we should not have come quietly after all? But still this was craic you wouldn’t like to miss. Context and timing account for a lot in life and in 1965 no one in our townland even had a telephone, much less a television. Entertainment of this calibre was hard to come by. You had to hand it to the nuns. They certainly got bums on seats, or in this case, on the floor. In truth the fracas could easily have been settled if the holy woman had merely relinquished her firm grip on the shredded veil in one hand, and Cepta’s little arm in the other. Except that was never going to happen. Relinquishing anything, from her virginity right through to a reluctant pupil was simply not in Iggy’s character, or indeed in her professional interests; given her current audience. But that all changed when Mrs Bridie Boyle, nee Kelly, pounced on her from the school yard door. For the erstwhile pupil Bridie, the sight of her snotty, tear stained little dote being set upon by Iggy or her ilk must have been a clarion call to arms. But her eagerness to enter the affray with such vigour spoke of something deeper. Perhaps she saw a chance to even up old scores, to salve ancient schoolhouse wounds? Either way Iggy was in trouble, and she knew it. The shoe was on the other foot now and baldy had it coming to her. Bridie loved a good scrap.

To call someone ‘seven different types of bitches’ is a sort of an Irish catch-all encompassing the many insults one woman can heap upon another without actually getting herself arrested by the Guards. I’d be lying if I said I could remember every slur that was cast between the crimson faced holy sister and her ex-pupil in those first few seconds. ‘Whore of nun’ definitely featured, and I’m almost certain the word ‘hallion’ was bandied about in the now blue air. If the case had gone to court, which nowadays it almost certainly would, I’d have made a poor witness for either side. Even though I’d heard most of the words before (I was the youngest of six) I would have been hard pushed to truthfully swear who said what to whom, such was the melee. I must admit though ‘baldy ’oul bitch’ was new.

Whipping her wailing baby up in one ham hock of an arm and catching the edge of the now threadbare veil with the other, the Mammy, rather than pulling at the garment, wound it tightly around her spare ham hock, thus drawing the now cowering nun into her considerable body space. Eye to eye, the Mammy then loudly informed the Mother that if she ever ‘even looked crooked’ at a child of hers again her husband Ger The Mechanic would come calling. Striding towards the blue door, a smirking Cepta straddling her hip, she turned back to the nun with a final shot across the bows.

“You’ve had your warning! And you can say goodbye to My Ger mending your manky little micra from now on.”

The quivering nun went to take after Bridie, when she was suddenly distracted. A human eruption rocked the drill hall. One of the frail little townies, who was doubtless nervous even before witnessing the violence, gurgled a Vesuvius of vomit into the coat hood of the girl sitting on the floor in front of her. Could this day get any better? Jacinta Healy (the vomiter) and Catherine Early (the vomitee) began to wail in unison. The nun changed course and ran towards the drill hall, reluctantly relinquishing the chase.

Things quietened down considerably after that, as the new intake of Small Babies, as we were known, was shepherded swiftly to the relative calm of the lovely Miss Gargan’s classroom.

At the end of this exhilarating first foray into the world, Mammy met me at the school gate at two O'clock, and we strolled the country mile home together. Back in sixties Ireland, no one wished you a nice day or asked you if you had one. That was for yanks. And since every day was the same it would have been a waste of words. My Mam, like all the others, was not particularly curious whether her youngest had enjoyed the day or otherwise. Irish Mammies had plenty of questions, of course they did. But they wanted facts, not feelings.

“Did you eat all your sandwiches?”

“Yes.”

“And your apple?”

“Yes.”

That wasn’t a complete lie, since I’d taken a couple of bites out of it before firing it into the ditch of whitethorn hedges around the schoolyard. Everyone knew that you needed two hands to play Red Rover and I was keen to play with the big girls in High Babies – the year above us. It’s not that I didn’t have older girls in my life, I had two older sisters, and plenty of cousins. But some of these girls wore store-bought navy uniform cardigans, rather than the knitted hand me downs foisted on me. These girls from the town had shop bread followed by Curlywurlys for lunch! These were the girls I needed to know. I’d overheard enough heated debates at home to know that the chance of Mammy changing my lunch menu to include such delicacies was nil. Despite pleas from older brothers and sisters, cheese or ham on homemade brown bread would be my lot for many a year to come. There was nothing I could do about the brown bread, but the town girls didn’t need to see my homegrown apple, which if Mammy had anything about her, would have been swopped out for a Crunchie.

Later that evening, as Daddy allowed me to help him fill his after-dinner pipe, he asked me what I thought of school. Like most four-year-olds I was an assiduous little vocabulary builder, and Daddy always enjoyed listening to me wrangle the English language. It gave him no end of fun to hear phrases like ‘the lair cheg of the table’ or ‘lowing the mawn’, so when he was in the mood, he’d sit me up for what I called a ‘chatter’. These spoonerisms, of which of course I was unaware, caused no end of laughter from visiting uncles, aunts, and neighbours. Remember there was no television, and of course I was delighted to bask in the warmth of adult attention.

For the most part I usually made myself perfectly understood while doing considerable damage to the spoken word. But there were occasions when my tentative grasp on the true meaning of words sort of slipped between two stools. That evening, my after dinner ‘chatter’ over tea and plain biscuits (I was happy to chat, the biscuits were a bonus) probably threw up the starkest example of this. Over the years it's become so entrenched in family lore I’m almost proud of it.

In my defence, the fault for my linguistic shortcomings on this occasion lay partly with Mammy. Her two favourite maxims were ‘You’ll have me tearing my hair out’ and ‘Running around like a headless chicken’. According to herself she engaged in one or other of these activities daily, often concurrently. Much like the ‘seven different types of bitches’ idiom they were handy catch-alls for the many endless annoyances of living with seven other people who expected you to provide everything for them by way of domestic needs. In fact, although I’ve been one myself, the role of the housewife and stay-at-home mother is, in truth, ludicrous. Life-giving, delightful, rewarding, but ludicrous.

Either way, Mammy’s two phrases had confused me, and to be hairless was to be headless and vice versa. Everyone in Small Babies knew the nun’s secret now. God’s work must have been harder than housework. Because the smooth skulled nun had obviously torn her hair out.

“Well. What did you think of school, pet?” Dad enquired.

“Good.” I nodded my head. “Missive Garden said we’re getting slates and chalk tomorrow to do our ABCs.”

“Missive Garden?” He bit his lip and Mammy turned slightly from the kitchen sink.

“And what about the other girls in your class, are they nice?”

“Some.” I licked crumbs from my thumb and forefinger, wondering if I could venture back to the tin for a fourth biscuit. Mammy had returned to dishwashing, and Daddy, with his own sweet tooth, wouldn’t dream of denying a child a treat.

“Some? Why were there girls who didn’t play with you?”

“Yeah, one."

“Who?”

“Septic.”

“Who?” Daddy let out a roar of laughter, almost burning his hand as he caught the pipe falling from his open mouth. “Who?” he boomed again as Mammy turned a second time from the kitchen sink grinning.

“A girl called Septic Boil. She had to go home early because her Mammy won tug-of-war with a headless nun. So, she didn’t get to play with anyone.’

“What?” Mammy was pulling off the rubber gloves now.

“Mrs Boil came back and took Septic home with her.”

“Did she now?” Mam gave Daddy a knowing look.

“Which nun?” Mam again.

“Sister Ingratious, and then she came into our class after lunch, and she said that Septic had made HailHolyMary very sad, and she never seen a girl in a Saint Milophena’s umiform being such a shame on herself and her fambly and that if any of us did such sinful mishaviour or used such filty words we could forget making our First Holy Mecunion and would likely end up in the roaring fires of hell for all maternity.”

I looked at them both as I finished imparting this solemn news. Poor Mammy was bent over clutching her tummy and holding on to the metal edge of the kitchen sink. Daddy, pipe discarded now, was wiping tears from his contorted face with his big brown farm hands. I was quite shocked at their response and thought to console them somewhat.

“But she had the black tablecloth back on her head, so she wasn’t so scary anymore,” I offered kindly.

After several minutes of snorting (Daddy) and shrieking (Mammy) laughter, Dad put his forehead in his hands declaring, “Christ on a bike Bernie, what will we do with this one?”

What? Baby Jesus had a bike! Why didn’t I know this? I needed to get a handle on my ABCs. Santa had an important letter coming.