Michael Harding: Two girls showed me that the misery of my all-boys school could not last

Every year, at this time, I long for porridge. I associate it with two young women who were lodgers in our home when I was a teenager. They were sisters, studying at Loreto College, and they treated me like their brother, confiding everything in me about their loves and longings.

On cold Cavan mornings, when ice clung to the window pane and the thought of getting out from under the blankets and putting on a school uniform was torturous, I could only think of porridge.

I would hear the girls’ voices as they showered in the bathroom or bounced down the stairs. I would hear them in the dining room below my bedroom. So I rose and got to the table as fast as I could, just to dish out my bowl of porridge and marvel at the fragments of their life in Loreto which they shared so freely. They cheered me up.

I learned more about life, love and country music over that breakfast table with them than in all the years I spent in dusty classrooms

The preoccupations of young women were strange to me, but gradually, as the months progressed, I constructed a more balanced view of life. I gained more confidence in school, and stood more aloof from bully-boys on the corridors, in the toilets or around the bicycle shed. I had discovered that women seemed to embody meaning differently, and the joy of waking each day to the gift of their laughter was a powerful counterbalance to my own private agonies. I began to realise that all the misery of adolescence in a male-only school could not last.

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Eighteen short months later, I sat the Leaving Cert and walked into a larger world, shaking off the restrictive ethos of secondary school. But I had learned more about life, love and country music over that breakfast table than in all the years I spent in dusty classrooms.

Those girls had been my anchor, and the breakfast table had been an oasis of tenderness in an otherwise grim adolescence. The porridge was a kind of Eucharist.

After breakfast we walked to the end of the avenue and waited for the bus. The fog hung deep along the country road and the bus would be heard before the lights came through the morning mist.

I contemplated the impending humiliations of an honours maths class while the girls discussed whatever television programmes we had watched the night before and interrogated each other about whatever bands were currently fashionable. When the bus stopped at the girls’ school, my heart sank. Sometimes, one of them would look back at me as she walked up the elegant avenue of rhododendron, towards the main building of what was a world beyond my reach.

I faced another day with boys and men – blustery, angry and unconscious of their own cruelties. And all I could cling to was the Shakespearean adage: “Come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”

That was our catchphrase. A mantra the girls used to spark my courage.

It’s only when we are old that we can decipher from memories that our parents were much more subtle than we had supposed

We passed the evenings together in splendid ease, doing homework, sharing the television with my mother. We smoked cigarettes up chimneys and fantasised about the future.

Sometimes, one of them came home as white as chalk and had to lie in bed for the rest of the evening. Not having had sisters up until then, I wondered what might be wrong, but the other one would reassure me.

“There’s nothing wrong,” she’d say, smiling. “Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”

It never struck me at the time why my mother left porridge on the table every morning and then went off to the kitchen, leaving us alone to talk.

I presumed she wanted to get on with her life. But I suppose it’s only when we are old that we can decipher from memories that our parents were much more subtle than we had supposed.

And the porridge worked; the shared breakfast, the open talk of love and longing, like intimate prayers flung from the hearts of true believers, all gave me hope.

After the Leaving Cert, life took us all on different journeys, with twists and turns and ups and downs for each of us. And we have rarely been in contact since. But it’s funny how a shared meal can engender so much love, and how the memory of love can endure for so long.

No wonder I reached out in the supermarket aisle when I saw that old familiar porridge package on the shelf. Even though I never actually told them how much they mattered to me at the time.