We had no Staffroom to speak of but we took our eleven o'clock break in her classroom. She was the second- in-command of our three teacher school. I was just out of college, still moist behind my pendulous earrings and he was the principal. They had been husband and wife for many years and had soldiered together in this schoolhouse since the year after their marriage.
I was only a week there when it began to dawn on me that my two colleagues, so bound together in holy wedlock, were somewhat short of the entente cordiale that I might have reasonably expected.
Though we supped together at elevenses, we never assembled for a communal lunch. This we took in our own classrooms, where the clink of cup on saucer orchestrated faintly with the cacophonous sounds of the playground outside. It soon became the custom for the one not out on yard duty to gravitate towards my room for the final 10 minutes or so of the lunch break.
Thus I became confident to both parties, getting an increasingly bewildering insight into their querulous lives.
Their two sons had flown the coop, leaving them with a growing realisation of the unbridgeable gulf, the yawning chasm that had widened between them. He, it appeared, had discovered golf and bridge, while she had taken big time to amateur dramatics. From what he told me, he had to work hard at his new pursuits but she was simply a natural at hers.
Every Friday we had assembly for all the school and he was wont to drone on while we sat meekly listening to his convoluted moralising. He had two favourite themes: patience and compassion. Rarely did a Friday morning slip by without a twin helping of such virtues.
She failed to get impressed. "Patience and compassion indeed," she seethed one morning on our way back to class, after a particularly roistering discourse. "He wouldn't recognise patience and compassion even if they came up and slapped him on the balls."
She, in turn, knew how to get under his skin. She was the most outrageous flirt. Any male, from the retired canon, through to the inspector, the binmen, the Fallons' rep, all got the treatment. However unlikely the recipient, she would home in, a real "eyes dancing, burbling laugh and sinuous jewelled fingers on the knee of the Magee suit" job. And, invariably, she got the desired response, enthrall from new male, eruption from old one.
Again, I was usually left in the position of re-establishing normality. After one such episode, a particularly sizzling onslaught on the diocesan adviser (a willing enough corespondent), I just had to get some air. Husband joined me in the yard at the end of playtime.
"Would you tell Mata Hari in there that I'm taking the boys hurling for the afternoon while she takes her religious education," he asked in a voice I thought more than just a tad ironical. Such was the tenor of things there.
I stayed for the year, after which I packed my bags again, this time for Dublin. I look back on it now . . . lovely children, beautiful environment, unusual staff. I was very young to be cast in the role of confidante and go-between but I am sure, like all agony aunts, I really loved the salacious bits.
They are still there, you know. Occasionally, I ask about them and I'm told that little has changed. They have two other teachers now, which must queer the dynamic somewhat. But I'd just love to be a fly on the wall for their upcoming new curriculum in-school days. Priceless, I imagine.
