After the Lockout (13 page)

Stanislaus straightened his cassock, overcoat and hat, and lightly lifted the latch. Miss Cavanagh was near the back of the classroom with a textbook in her hand, far from her desk by the fireplace. What on earth she was doing all the way back there?

‘Good morning, Your Grace. Children, say Good Morning to Bishop Benedict,' she commanded.

‘Good morning, Bishop Benedict,' they incanted.

‘Miss Cavanagh. I thought I might sit in on the class and see how you're all getting on.'

‘Always a pleasure to have you, Your Grace,' she said sunnily, and with a swish of her skirt she turned to a boy at the back of the class and instructed him to move, so as to make room. The boy took his copybook and writing materials to the other side of the room, leaving a tiny space between a young girl with her wool and needles out for her knitting work, and an older boy with copybook and pen in hand, who seemed to be trying to look irreproachably busy. Stanislaus's knees rubbed against the underside of the desk. The overcrowding was worse than he had realised. People were always complaining that there were too many pupils for such a small school. Some people had even suggested sending some of the children to the other schools – the Protestant schools – where they had spare capacity. He looked up at the blackboard, decorated with Latin verbs on one side and times tables on the other. Usually the problem of
overcrowding was alleviated by the fact that on a given day you could expect a third of pupils wouldn't turn up, but, problematically, Miss Cavanagh seemed to have a very high attendance rate. Still, it was better for them to be here than outside, meeting adulthood too early in the fields or, like those cursed to live in cities, up chimneys.

‘What lesson have I interrupted, Miss Cavanagh?' Stanislaus asked.

‘The younger girls are knitting, the younger boys are doing free-hand drawing,' she said, pointing to a huge green map of Ireland with the place names in Irish. Stanislaus could have sworn there had been a map of the Empire there previously. ‘I'm leading the older pupils in dictation,' Miss Cavanagh went on, showing him the book she was reading from. Thucydides. Many learned and respected men sang the praises of the ancients, of course, but Stanislaus still didn't know why one would read works of paganism when one could reach for the Gospels, for St Paul, for Thomas Aquinas. Miss Cavanagh walked up and down the aisle between the desks reading aloud from the textbook.

‘The greatest achievement of the former times was the Persian War; yet even this was speedily decided in two battles by sea and two by land. But the Peloponnesian War was a protracted struggle, and attended by calamities such as Hellas had never known within a like period of time. Never were so many cities captured and depopulated – some by Barbarians, others by Hellenes themselves fighting against one another; and several of them after their capture were re-peopled by strangers. Never were exile and slaughter more frequent, whether in the war or brought about by civil strife. And traditions which had often been current before, but rarely verified by fact, were now no longer doubted.
For there were earthquakes unparalleled in their extent and fury, and eclipses of the sun more numerous than are recorded to have happened in any former age; there were also in some places great droughts causing famines; and lastly the plague, which did immense harm and destroyed numbers of the people. All these calamities fell on Hellas simultaneously with the war, which began when the Athenians and Peloponnesians violated the Thirty Years' Peace concluded by them after the capture of Euboea. Why they broke it and what were the grounds of the quarrel I will first set forth, that in time to come, no man may be at a loss to know what was the cause of this great war. The real though unavowed cause I believe to have been the growth of the Athenian power, which terrified the Lacedaemonians and forced them into war.'

Something unnameable in the passage disturbed Stanislaus. Two millennia and more had passed since the Athenians and the Spartans had thrown their respective alliances into total war against each other, and Grecian civilisation had passed into history soon afterwards. Why should this be troubling now?

‘Well, what do we think, class? Is Thucydides right? Is that really why the Peloponnesian War happened? What do you think, Master McCoy?' she asked, pointing to a young fellow near the front. Stanislaus shifted in his seat. This was dictation?

‘Yes, Miss,' said the boy. The teacher's expression told him more was required. ‘The Spartans were the main ones out of all the Greeks who beat the Persians so they thought they'd be the main men, but the Athenians were getting stronger and building up a big alliance, so eventually something was bound to happen.'

‘It was bound to, you say? Why was it bound to? Geraldine Smith,' said Miss Cavanagh, pointing across the room to a girl
with ringlets in her hair. The girl hesitated. ‘Come on, Geraldine, think,' said Miss Cavanagh, ‘what are the rules?'

The girl's face brightened. ‘Everything is made up of opposing forces or opposing sides. Gradual changes lead to turning points,' she said proudly.

‘Turning points. What happens at a turning point? Sarah Foy?'

‘One of the opposing forces overcomes the other,' said Sarah.

‘That's right,' said Miss Cavanagh. ‘The Spartans had been the strongest but after thirty years of peace the Athenians gradually caught up. Sparta was militarised, Athens was civilised. The Spartans were invincible on land, the Athenians at sea. The Spartans had muscles, the Athenians had brains. Eventually the Athenians were too strong to be simply dismissed by the Spartans. You see how everything in existence is a unity of opposites?' She locked her fingers together in a double fist to demonstrate the two forces pulling against each other. ‘One of the opposing forces had to overcome the other. The turning point had to come.'

Stanislaus stood up noisily from his seat, clattering his knees painfully against the desk as he rose. ‘Miss Cavanagh, what on earth are you teaching these children?' he said.

The children dropped their pens and chalk. The young girls looked up from their knitting. Miss Cavanagh seemed shaken. ‘It's dictation, Your Grace,' she said.

‘This is not dictation. Do you think I'm unaware of what you're drip-feeding these children? Everything is a unity of opposites, gradual change leads to a turning point – you're teaching them revolution. In my own school!'

‘It's dialectics,' she whispered.

Stanislaus stepped into the aisle and strode towards the teacher. ‘That was Marx, what you were just telling them.'

‘It's Plato.'

‘I don't care who it is! Your job, Miss Cavanagh, is to teach these children skills that will help them in life. Reading, writing, arithmetic, handiwork. If you have any pupils with vocations, you will direct them to me and I will arrange for their further instruction. Otherwise, you teach them the how, not the why. This is a schoolhouse.'

Stanislaus stared at her till her eyes dropped to the floor. He walked to the door, turned and looked around the classroom, as if to make clear that he would be keeping an eye on things from now on. When he was satisfied that Miss Cavanagh seemed to understand, he left the shamefaced schoolteacher. He would put a big question mark by her name, he thought as he headed back to the Parochial House. What was it she said it was: dialectics? It had been forty years since he'd read Plato, but that did ring a bell. He would have to consult his
Republic
.

The blinds of Quinn's General Stores are still drawn but the lights are on inside. I bang on the door and shout for Charlie to hurry up. It's not quite opening time but I'm too close to Ida Harte's for my liking.

‘
In Dublin next arrived, I thought it was a pity to be so soon deprived of a view of that fine city, 'twas then I took a stroll
…' someone sings, loudly and badly. Jerry McGrath comes around the corner: ‘…
all among the quality, my bundle then was stole in a neat locality, something crossed my mind
…'

‘You're in great form this morning,' I say.

He pats the postbag hanging limply from his shoulder. ‘That's my duties discharged till Monday morning. “
Says I, I'll look behind, no bundle could I find upon my stick a-wobbling, inquiring for the rogue, they said my Connaught brogue, it wasn't much in vogue on the rocky road to Dubbelin, one two three four five.
”'

Charlie opens the door and ushers me inside. ‘My favourite customer,' he says. I tell him about our roof and he whips out notebook and pencil. ‘Spurtles, grapes, rope, wire mesh: I have everything you need,' he says, gesturing to the highest shelves behind the wooden counter.

‘Spurtles?'

‘Spurtles. Fletches. Thatching forks. Whatever you want to call them.' He sets a thatching fork on the counter. It's like a square hairbrush the size of a tennis racquet with nails for teeth. I scrape the sharpened points against my palm. Charlie sets a bundle of two-foot sally sticks on the counter. ‘You'll need loads of these. Scallops. You remember what scallops are, city boy?'

‘Shellfish.'

‘You twist and bend them into a U-shape and use them like wooden bands to hold the thatch in place,' he says, demonstrating the process.

‘Yes, I know what fucking scallops are. I have thatched a roof before, you know.'

He smiles as he scribbles on his notepad. ‘I'll draw up a list of all the things you need and get one of the young fellas to drop everything up to you this afternoon. Have you plenty of straw?'

‘I thought I'd get the tools first and then see about cutting some of them reed spires that grow over there in Granemore …'

He loops his thumbs inside his apron and leans forward on the counter. ‘They're no good, them reed spires. Leave it with me. Straw is a bloody nuisance, truth be told. There's plenty of people around here mad looking rid of the stuff since the wheat was harvested.'

‘Thanks, Charlie.'

‘Is it just you and Pius doing the whole roof? Big job. You should take on a few men.'

‘I'll get Turlough and Sean.'

‘I'll come and help too if you want. But I'm not much use up a ladder any more though.'

‘Shite, I don't think we have a ladder either.'

Charlie shakes his head, as if he's looking at the most pathetic sight in the world. He ushers me under the counter, through his little office and out to the yard at the back of the premises. Under a canvas tarpaulin he shows me a huge stock of perhaps twenty ladders laid out carefully: some are six or eight feet, others must be thirty, all expertly crafted in cedar, I think, with smoothly rounded rungs buttressed by metal strips. I see the price-tag on one of them and whistle. ‘I'm getting a nosebleed just looking at the price of that. I didn't know they were so dear.'

Charlie puts his hand on one handsome-looking twelve-odd-footer. ‘I'll loan you this one for the job, as long as you promise not to get any scratches on it.'

‘Big demand for these, is there? You're carrying a lot of stock.'

‘Big order in from the Fire Brigade, but keep that to yourself now.'

The next morning the sun is still rising and the fat in the pan hissing and sputtering as Pius fries up breakfast when Charlie and the Moriarty boys arrive with straw enough to thatch the shell of the GPO. They've brought young Aidan Cavanagh, Maggie's brother, with them. We take the squelchy, gristly bacon and kidney sodas in our hands and meet the lads outside. Turlough looks to the sky and says he reckons we might have nine hours of daylight ahead. The day will be cold but dry.

‘And how much am I going to have to pay you?' I say to Aidan.

‘Nothing, Victor, nothing. It's my honour,' he says, and he's so earnest that it's hard not to be embarrassed.

‘A working man has to be paid. Let's say five shillings for the day.'

‘Honestly, I wouldn't accept it, Victor.'

‘Six shillings, and you have to tell your sister I was asking for her. My last word.'