The French exchange student, our school coal shed and the Sunday World’s ‘night of passion’

I spent a few Septembers of my school years in dread of ducking, an initiation ceremony that involved having your head held under a tap. At least I think that’s what it involved. I don’t know, because somehow this ritual baptism, which was dying out then and is unknown to my children, never actually happened to me.

Even if it had, I would have got off lightly compared with some schoolboys of the past. Patrick Campbell, an Irishman’s Diarist of the 1940s, recalled attending a preparatory school on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin where two bullies held his head down a toilet bowl every day, and flushed, to punish him for having a stammer.

Ours was a more enlightened era, or the dawn of one anyway. The Patrician Brothers of Carrickmacross were like a Christian Brothers political wing, committed to achieving education through peaceful means, if possible. Most of the students were nonviolent too.

Strange to say, neither the group composition nor its success in national media impressed Mr O'Brien, our English teacher

The best prank we ever played was a literary one. It arose from the visit of a female French exchange student who may or may not have been romantically involved with one of our classmates. The Sunday World’s agony aunt later received and gratefully printed a letter detailing their supposed night of passion in a coal shed, and the resultant fears of teenage pregnancy. Strange to say, neither the group composition nor its success in national media impressed Mr O’Brien, our English teacher.

The teacher was driving me to A&E, my nose a Niagara of blood. But then he stopped the car

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My preferred newspaper was, of course, The Irish Times. This led to an apocalyptic scene one morning when I was holding it open in front of me, for maximum ostentation, no doubt reading about the latest crisis in Afghanistan. Suddenly, never mind Kabul, the paper itself was in flames. No, it wasn’t an omen. It was Gerard Martin, who had set fire to it with a lighter.

A few years earlier the same arsonist needed to be rushed to Dublin one afternoon after a classroom frolic in which a tennis ball nearly took his eye out. The event might be forgotten now except it coincided with one of the worst days of the Troubles rumbling away across the nearby Border. Approaching the city that evening, en route to the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital, they heard a loud bang in the background. It was May 17th, 1974. The first of the Dublin and Monaghan bombs had just gone off.