Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (3 page)

For mysterious reasons I neither understood nor appreciated, making your First Holy Communion also meant that the boys would be separated from the girls. While the girls would remain with the nuns in the relatively modern convent school, we boys would move across town to the old grey stone buildings and cheap, felt-roofed prefabs that made up the Christian Brothers boys’ school. The buildings – classrooms, toilet, bike shed – huddled round a stark yard in the shadow of the town’s Catholic church, which, to all intents and purposes, was the town’s only church. There was a Protestant church, too, but it sat mostly hidden down a lane, barely impinging on the town’s consciousness, and I never saw a soul coming or going – though whether Protestants actually even had souls was still up for discussion because they’d never made their First Holy Communion.

The school’s reputation hung heavy, particularly with the principal, an angry, violent, un-Christian Brother: he beat boys who failed to memorise the words to the national anthem, or otherwise transgressed, with the ‘Leather’ – a piece of thick, sewn leather that was, incredibly, made specially for grown men to beat children with. And that reputation was mostly deserved, though there were
good, kind lay teachers, too. Thankfully for me, by the time I reached the dreaded principal’s sixth class he had been replaced by another brother who was less quick to take out the Leather, and even less so after an angry parent burst into the classroom one day and violently confronted him in front of thirty open-mouthed boys. The Traveller boy who shared the desk with me poked me in the ribs and pinched himself so he didn’t jump up and cheer.

When I was twelve and finished primary school, a decision needed to be made. One option was to stay in Ballinrobe and move to the Big School, which had a reputation for boozy teachers, crumbling buildings and an uninspiring track record of academic achievement. Whether this reputation was wholly deserved or not, I don’t know, but the twelve-year-old me viewed it with suspicion and some trepidation. It seemed depressing and shabby, the ‘big’ boys seemed rough and everyone said that one of them had blown up a prefab in chemistry class.

The other option was that I could follow my two older brothers and go to a boarding school run by Franciscans on the east coast near where my grandparents lived. We had grown up visiting them in their little house on the sandy beach. My parents assumed I would go, and I assumed I would go. In fact, I wanted to go. I was already beginning to be aware that I didn’t feel I really belonged in Ballinrobe. It was a vague feeling because I had no real experience of other places and therefore no
real idea of somewhere I might feel less … on the outside. But I felt it. I wasn’t exactly unhappy – I had friends, I painted pictures and made models out of plaster. I built the world’s worst barbecue at the bottom of the garden and left it unfinished for years. My parents (in an act of parental encouragement both wonderful and foolhardy) let me paint the whole of the long corridor in the house with bucolic scenes of Swiss mountains and cable cars filled with excited skiers (I had never even seen skis, let alone been skiing). I liked cycling down to the lake on hot days and diving into the dark bog water from the pier while the women of the town sat chest-high in the water, washed their hair and chatted.

And yet I was lonely. The kinds of things I was becoming interested in – drawing pictures, being one of Charlie’s Angels, Tony Danza – weren’t things my friends were interested in and I felt myself becoming more distant. I imagined myself far away from Ballinrobe, bounding from a cable car in the Alps, wearing a jumper with a hood, or ‘shooting the breeze’ with the rest of the Angels as we sat around the intercom, then got caught in freeze-frame, laughing at Charlie’s latest quip with our heads thrown back and our Californian hair caught in shiny mid-bounce.

Going to boarding school seemed a start. There’d be people from places other than Ballinrobe, and sure hadn’t my eldest brother Lorcan already left the school early, having won a scholarship to go to a weird but amazing-sounding
international school on an island off Canada. There he learned weird subjects and did sea rescue, and all the students were on scholarships and came from all over the world. That was definitely somewhere else and sounded so much better than secondary school with chalk-dusty Christian Brothers in Ballinrobe.

And my other brother, Fergal, he’d still be there and that would definitely make it much easier, right? Wrong. It turned out that Fergal was terribly homesick all the time and hated being constantly compared to our super-smart eldest brother, who’d gone off to Canada –

‘On his own?’

‘On his own.’

‘Without a murmur?’

‘Without a murmur.’

‘When he was fifteen?’

‘Only fifteen.’

‘Well, isn’t that something now!’

‘It’s something all right.’

– so he begged my parents to let him come home and go to school in Ballinrobe. And just before I was supposed to go, he did.

Suddenly I wasn’t at all convinced that I wanted to go. Now that Fergal wouldn’t be there I’d be all alone and would know nobody. What if I was homesick and hated it, too? Actually, no ‘if’. I was
definitely
going to hate it. I’d be miserable and the whole thing was a crazy idea – and I don’t care what Mammy says, I’m not going,
and if Lindsay Wagner, who plays Jaime Sommers, a.k.a. the Bionic Woman, was here she’d totally agree.

But then my eldest sister Auveen sat me down and she was my big sister and she had glamorous long-haired friends from Westport, who sometimes came to the house and smelt nice and flicked their hair, and she was the only one of the girls who’d gone to boarding school so she knew what it was like and she knew me and she just knew I’d like it and it’d be good for me, and won’t I at least go to the ‘entrance exam’ and see how I feel about it then because what’s the harm in that, and if I still don’t want to go after that, well, fine, nobody will make me, all right?

So I went to the entrance exam over a couple of days where, apart from sitting a few easy multiple-choice tests, it was like a holiday camp. We played games and ran around and I made friends with boys with funny accents from places I’d never heard of, like Trim and Balbriggan and Dundalk, and even the brown-robed Franciscans seemed nicer than the black-robed Christian Brothers, and one of them even had a huge, drooling St Bernard dog. There was an impressive front gate with a mosaic of St Francis and an imposing long driveway lined with trees that led to a castle where apparently the monks actually lived! There was a swimming pool – a proper swimming pool! A real one with tiles! Not like the cold, dank, above-ground slimy wooden thing we’d driven fifteen miles to in Claremorris every week,
crammed into the back of our car or Mrs Mayes’s car to have proper swimming lessons so we wouldn’t all drown when we went to the lake on our own in the summer.

I loved it.

And I was conned.

Not that I hated it and had a terrible time – I didn’t. My sister was right, boarding school did suit me, but the weekend had been a lie. We were never allowed near the ‘castle’ – only boys in senior year were allowed out the front with its impressive grounds – there was very little running around, we rarely saw the drooling St Bernard, and it turned out that the swimming pool was no place for splashing about, O’Neill! No place for wobble-swimming under water, pretending to be handsome Patrick Duffy in
The Man from Atlantis
in his little yellow trunks. The pool was for aggressive throat-screaming water polo matches or training till you puked.

Boarding school is Darwinism in action: survival of the fittest. The strong survive and thrive while the weak are cruelly crushed, and traits unhelpful to survival, like fatness or Dungeons & Dragons or an interest in an insufficiently heterosexual pop star are bred out of the gene pool through relentless mocking. Which should have boded ill for me, with my interest in art (definitely considered suspiciously gay), my lack of interest in field sports (gay and weird), and my well-worn copy of Wham!’s first album (on cassette, a medium still so new that the record company hadn’t bothered to make a
rectangular version of the album artwork so the bottom third of the cassette cover was just a lazy white stripe).

And yet boarding school still suited me. I was the kind of confident, mouthy kid who got on fine with the rowdy football types, but with enough nerdy qualities to get on with the studious dragon-slayer who had a burning desire to be a chartered accountant. I’d happily play Dungeons & Dragons after class with the nerds, and before bed smoke cigarettes in the toilet while entertaining the other smokers with my campy, slinky rendition of ‘I’m a Woman’.

But some boys simply weren’t the right personality type for boarding school and should never have been there. Boarding school is like prison: even though the inmates are constantly supervised, they develop their own crude society, with its own code, under the noses of the guards. And when the inmates are five hundred teenage boys away from Mammy for the first time, that code can be sometimes brutal and often cruel.

Some boys were simply cripplingly homesick and would never grow out of it. They walked around the school with slumped shoulders and drawn faces, and at night you’d sometimes hear the lonely sound of their blanket-muffled sobs. Others made the fatal mistake of showing a weakness. Or being fat. Or thin. Or ginger. Or awkward. Or buck-toothed or curly-haired or big-lipped or funny-named or green-eyed or any other seemingly arbitrary thing that the pack decided to turn against. And
the pack could be relentless. There were boys who went through years of torture; leaving them there to endure it was stupid and cruel. I suppose it’s possible that some of them now look back and think it made them stronger people – but I doubt it.

And then there were the alpha-boys: the football team, the rowdy lads, the ‘cornerboys’ (as our classical-studies teacher, Mr Seavers, had it), the early shavers, who sat atop this volatile teenage flesh pyramid and beat their boy-man chests. No doubt some of those boys went on to great success later in life, but for many this was their peak. Their particular collection of personality traits and talents perfectly suited the somewhat primitive society of boarding school, and they ruled like demi-gods; once they were released into the real world they found they needed a whole other set of skills they simply didn’t have.

These were the kind of boys who, years later, would call into the school as ‘past pupils’ to have a look at the old place and relive their triumphs. The kind of wistful men who’d occasionally interrupt one of our classes to reminisce with the monk who was teaching us: ‘Oh, I was just passing, Father, and thought I’d pop in to see the old place,’ a nostalgic half-smile wrinkling their still-new crow’s feet. They’d wander the corridors remarking how small everything looked and exclaiming that the fish tank was still there! After they left, Father Declan would tell us that one day we’d look back and realise that these were the best days of our lives, and I would think, Fuck.
If these are the best days of my life I’m going to kill myself.

But for me, although boarding school was annoying and boring, it was bearable. It quite suited me. I was always very independent and self-contained and (I think to my mother’s secret disappointment) I never had a single moment’s homesickness. I was a lazy and poorly organised student, but I was naturally book-smart so coasted along with reasonable grades without much effort. I got on with pretty much everybody, pupils and staff, and although I was often in trouble as I got older, there was never any malice in me – I was simply testing the boundaries of my limited freedoms. And my ‘gang’ were similar types, as happy to smoke cigarettes and sneak off school grounds as to represent the school in a classical-studies competition with a homoerotic wall project on Perseus.

Often when I mention to people that I went to an all-boys boarding school they raise a knowing eyebrow because they’ve seen all that
Brideshead Revisited
/English public school/Rupert Everett/blowjobs ‘n’ bumming stuff. No doubt boarding school was just one long sword fight with teenage erections so hard they could cut glass, right? But I have to disappoint them: a Franciscan boarding school outside Balbriggan is a far, sexually repressed, cry from Eton ‘fags’ and Guy Burgess.

Any hint of sexuality of any sort was cause for alarm. The Franciscans were like Carrie’s mum, aware of the
awesome, unpredictable power of burgeoning teen sexuality and terrified that if even a little escaped it could run amok, becoming more and more powerful and impossible to control till it destroyed the school dance and killed John Travolta. And how terrifying it must have been for them when every year a new influx of healthy, soon-to-be-horny young boys on the cusp of puberty arrived, full of raging hormones and confusing dreams about Farrah Fawcett. Was one of these fresh-faced young boys the soon-to-be-acne-faced sexual terrorist with a backpack of hormones so explosive they might destroy the school?

But while the school was terrified of any suggestion of sexuality among the boys, the main fear was, of course, homosexuality – the bumming that dare not speak its name. Not only because homosexuality was A HORRIBLE CRIME AGAINST GOD AND AGAINST NATURE but because unlike heterosex, homosex was an actual real-live possibility. After all, here were five hundred boys with boundless energy, hair sprouting in new places, and not a pair of X chromosomes as far as the eye could see. To all intents and purposes, we were living in a Sahara of penis, a tundra of testosterone, where no oestrogen bloomed. (It wasn’t strictly true. There was an attractive lady biology teacher, but we only ever saw her in class, and local women worked in the canteen, throwing beans onto our plates from the other side of a hatch, but in their shapeless overalls and
funny hats they seemed less like women and more like sitcom characters.)

The school’s main strategy in the war against homosex was never to allow any privacy of any kind. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, we were surrounded by other boys or supervised by adults, and usually both. We slept in huge dormitories the size of aircraft hangars where rows of beds formed long corridors that seemed to stretch to a vanishing point. At night the pale light from the curtainless windows would pattern the parquet floor and the quiet squeak of leather sandals would timidly announce the passing of a shadowy monk by the end of your bed, as the priest or brother on dorm duty made his rounds. Hanging high on the wall at the end of every dorm, looming over us like a gruesome horror-movie prop, was a life-sized plaster crucified Jesus, his bony ribs sticking through his grey-painted death-pallor skin, livid red blood pouring into his eyes from his crown of thorns, and – in a detail all too real for a twelve-year-old boy – the skin scraped painfully off his bloody knees. (I can only assume that an unusually high number of ex-pupils must have ended up paying prostitutes to tie them up and beat them.)