Family Fortunes: One flew over the convent wall

When I was in second class at primary school, my friend Denise and I decided we would play a game. “Let’s see who can kick our shoe the farthest.”

Instead of walking directly home, we cut down a laneway by the side of our school to accompany another friend who lived on Leinster Road in Dublin, where we sometimes played hopscotch, and then carried on to Charleville Road, where the secondary school was located.

As we approached the high wall of the secondary school we started kicking our shoes to see how far they would travel, until I kicked mine over the wall of the convent, much to my horror and increasing panic.

Access to the grounds of the school was open, so it was perfectly possible to go inside to retrieve the missing shoe, but I was a bit scared to do so. I wavered for quite some time between going in and looking for the shoe and then getting cold feet (forgive the pun). This dilemma went on for ages until I decided to just walk home wearing only one shoe.

When I got to Denise’s house she gave me a pair of open-toe sandals, even though it was winter. It was all she could give me.

Eventually, as I reached the end of Frankfort Avenue, just approaching the junction of Rathgar Road, I recognised the absolutely livid face of my big sister, who had been sent out to try to find me and told me that “I was really in for it now”. It seemed such a huge crisis at the time.

Eventually my mother got to the bottom of the story, after refusing to believe the elaborate lie I had concocted. I was ordered to be home each day by a certain time. As Goethe said: “If one doesn’t make a little mischief in youth, and sometimes pay the price, what will there be to remember in old age?”

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