Kate Thompson was chuffed to become a Junior Cert author - until she read the exam paper.
This time last year a friend of my daughter asked about an essay I'd written. It had, she said, been up for critical analysis on the Junior Cert higher- level English paper. No, I told her. She must have got it wrong. But she turned out to be right.
I had written the piece, intended as a whimsical, humorous reflection on my childhood holidays, for Lyric FM; then it was published in New Island's Quiet Quarter Anthology of New Irish Writing.
You can imagine that I was chuffed to be a Junior Cert author, in such illustrious literary company. Saki, Harold Pinter and William Trevor had all had extracts from their work pored over by higher-level English students. I wished my mother were still alive, to share my pride. All writers will tell you about the excitement of first seeing their name in print or holding their first book in their hands.
But when I tracked down the exam paper on the internet I felt as if I'd been kicked in the gut. The piece had been bowdlerised. The first paragraph had been cut in its entirety, the
final two paragraphs had been edited in a rough-hewn fashion and, worse, other sections had been completely rewritten. The memory of my mother, Hilary, had effectively been besmirched.
In the exam paper, my mother, who was cultured, elegant and gentle, came across as hoydenish, "hacking branches for firewood and foraging for edible mushrooms and berries in the local woodland". The reader was (mis)informed that she "loved these family adventures and would frequently recall them in vivid detail many years later". I also learned that "these childhood experiences later led my brother to adopt a vegetarian diet". My brother is one of the most robust consumers of red meat I know.
At the top of the exam paper, each student was instructed to "read carefully the following essay in adapted form by Kate Thompson" - my italics - "and then answer the questions that follow". That handy word "adapted" covers a multitude.
The first question read: "What impression of Kate Thompson's parents do you form from reading this passage?" As the editor blithely conjectured, on behalf of my mother, that "luck rather than any detailed knowledge of nature's bounty was probably all that stood between us and a severe dose of food poisoning", it appeared that Hilary was some half-witted hippy with a distinct dearth of maternal responsibility.
I love to speculate about whoever edited my piece. Did it cross their minds that I might have a child sitting the higher English exam that year? What would have been the effect on my daughter had she opened the paper and been required to read (and write) an inaccurate assessment of her grandmother? Did the thought occur to them that I might be upset by this "adapted" version of my childhood? And what led them to conclude that my father was "an early advocate of self-sufficiency and environmental awareness"? Why did they distort the chronology? Why did they feel the need to add exclamation marks to some sentences? Did they think that their changes were amendments?
Would they deem it necessary to fiddle with the work of, say, Seamus Heaney? Would they, on studying the opening lines of his poem Digging, decide that "gun" and "thumb" didn't really rhyme and that it might be better to substitute "plum" for "gun"?
Perhaps similar thoughts went through
Dr Bowdler's head when he slashed Juliet's "Gallop apace" speech in Romeo and Juliet from 30 lines to 15, or when he performed syntactic surgery on Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. After all, Bowdler's avowed intent was to enable the genius of the poet to "shine with more unclouded lustre". But while Bowdler excised words, at least he was not brass enough of neck to alter them.
I invested time and thought in the piece. How much time and thought did my own Dr Bowdler invest in his or her reworking of my text? How much time and thought went into the following sentences, which were ascribed to me but which I never wrote? "Comfort was not a criterion in our accommodation arrangements. Catering arrangements were equally unsophisticated." Cripes.
Incidentally, I received no fee from the State Examinations Commission for the inclusion of my essay in its exam paper. Nor could I sue for breach of copyright, as the commission,
I discovered, is not obliged to seek my permission.
My mother, who was a stickler for good manners, instilled in me from childhood the importance of a couple of words that are the mainstay of civilised social intercourse. Those magic words? They are, of course, "please" and "thank you".
Hard to Choos, by Pixie Pirelli, a Kate Thompson novel, has just been published by New Island, €9.99