Diarium (Noo Yoik ) Part 1 "Running Uphill"

                                         

School Daze

50 years ago a young blonde woman in a green tweed suit walked hand in hand with a big eyed child adorned with a home- made bonnet up a street named School

Which was fitting.

Although the big eyed child didn’t know it yet.

And was more concerned about which crocheted string of her Nana Mahon’s hat she had to pull to open it. 

One released her tiny head, one constrained it lengthily.

                                                     School Street – Photo © MDM

The child had already been christened a scourge,that rip, a divilskin and a changeling baby......

A reputation she lived up to with ease before breakfast, which mostly consisted of her screeching when she was presented with tay and covering a radio in butter with malice aforethought.

The blonde woman was her mother Siobhán and a saint with the patience of Job.

The school yard was thronged with roaring children and Mothers trying to detach their miniscule offspring from the belts of their Poplin coats.

A Nun called Gertrude corralled 60 or 70 of the class of babies into a high windowed grey slate school room dispensing crayons and hugs to the wailing mob whose guardians then sprinted for the gates at some considerable speed striking up a dogger of a  Gold Bond.

After she prostrated herself across the desk in sobbing higs the little scourge dried her eyes, and looked around her. 

And in moments was leading another baby to the toilet by the hand.

First School Photo of "The Scourge"

Sister Gertrude was young and smiling, her cheeks two scarlet slashes against her pale skin in a permanent blush, her silver locket heavy against her slender neck.  

The childer were beside themselves when the bread rolls from Kellys with the blackened tops and a solitary dab of jam in the middle came out on a tray at 11am.

Unfortunately they were also beside the tiny glass bottles of milk with the gold caps, which released an aroma on hot days like a milking parlour or the cheese factory and were to be added to the tay list as never to be consumed in this lifetime.

In the yard the small and  tall, washed and unwashed, torn jerseys or patched, noses running or red,  threadbare or decadent, hopped over the giant skipping rope that it took 3 on each end to lift when it was their turn to “jump on” singing the playground classic - 

 “Vote, Vote Vote for De Valera, here comes O Higgins at the door”

They drew lines with pilfered chalk on the flagstones to play heck the beds.

They cried, snorted, wet themselves, and spewed liquorice sherbet across the desks when they had run themselves ragged playing tag.  

And were marched home in disgrace.

The convent was filled with nuns of all ages and types.

It smelt of lovely dinners, Mister Sheen and holiness.

The scourge always got sent on messages over there, none more so than the to’ing and fro’ing of a confessional child who made up 3 sins - quite unlike the ones she committed on an hourly basis - and recited them by rote in the dark box for the next 20 years.

Vestments - Photo © MDM 

 Sister Concepta took the communion class and demonstrated with bits of unblessed bread how to swallow the host. 

She was much older than Gertrude and had soft skin and a gentle wit.  She also led the white veiled angels in the procession where she handed them the baskets of petals to strew while they were singing “Ave Maria” and kept an eagle eye behind her glasses on proceedings by walking at the rear and spotting who was gatching.

As per.

The whole class got a newspapered rissole supper in the Faythe Chipper  on the way home.

 Sr Concepta and her class of Angels – {Scourge kneeling at far left}  Photo:© Denis O’Connor.

The Presentation Convent was not unfamiliar to the big eyed child, who was used to visiting a parade of Carlow women who had all taken the veil from the one house. So she was not overly daunted by being sent around the school on messages, and took to spying on the gardener from a recessed window ledge in the Cloister. 

How the Cloister looks in 2017. There is no smell of dropped scones.  ©MDM

He wore white overalls as he pruned beautiful scented roses with velvet tissue petals. She also watched nuns in pairs and alone saying their office and kneeling at the white crosses. She watched the Priest from the Manse arrive to say morning mass in the nuns own chapel with the peppermint organ. 

The Peppermint Organ  

                                                                          © MDM

The silent cloister with the burnished tiles smelt of the baking from the Home Ec. Room in the middle whose vents dispensed the waft of dropped scones, rock cakes, apple tarts and fish pie 5 days a week.

Due to the sheer amount of children in the Presentation at the time they were taught in Pre-Fabs which were like large mobile homes, but colder.

When the scourge returned from running amok in another school to join the ranks of the green uniformed girls in 1977 she was on her best behaviour. In fact they even made her a Prefect and gave her a badge which enabled her to give out to the other girls if they were caught in the halls. 

Where she was normally to be found.

                                               Christmas Report 1st year ©MDM

But alas this was a temporary hiatus.

Unknown to the teen, her family, or her teachers, the Scourge had too many chemicals fizzing in the test-tubes of her brain which meant she did all her thinking from the limbic area at the back, and not her frontal cortex like a normal person  and in a heroic attempt to control her they sought to remove her from the body of the class, teach her at a desk in the hallway, and the then Principal Sr Theresa McCormack who had taken over from Sister Patrick {who was now Margaret} in the move to the purpose built new school in Grogans Road staged an intervention - her entire teaching staff and the moody teens parents present and waiting in Eileen Herlihy’s office after the bell. 

Despite the entreaties and exhortations of all concerned she merely hung her head and plotted. 

She also gave up deciphering the numbers on the board of Miss Nelligan and was known to finish off her domestic science project in double maths -  hastily tacking hems on aprons, sewing up the sides of pillow cases  and despite knitting it for an entire 5 years never finishing the fetching concoction of lime/black/yellow wool into a teacosy.

She did however win the BIM Award for the best fish pie in all of Ireland.

She admitted it was probably the half a pound of butter in the mash and not the quarter twist of lemon and a sprig of wilted parsley that clinched it.

Her Form Mistress realised that she had a girl in her class who could talk the hind leg off a statue and so made her the Captain of the Debating Team.  She flayed the opposition from schools all over the county and passed notes up and down the table at a rate of knots to decimate the opposing arguments.  There was much cheering in the aisles of the school hall from the starving Peters Boarders and the lads with beards and parka’s from CBS whom she would be trouncing around the floor with ( in undulating waves dancing “The Siege of Ennis”) in roasting  fair isle jumpers and Donkey jackets at a Ceilí later that night. 

Miss, I CAN'T get togged off, I've no gear. Ahem. 

    

                            "Scenic" Ten Mile Walk #BuildingFund 1978  - Artwork MDM

Sr Marie Murphy, constantly as elegantly turned out as a Parisian model, with carefully coiffed hair and trademark heels had the measure of the scourge at their first meeting. She eyeballed her like a hen looking into a bottle. And then handed the poacher turned gamekeeper  an armful of notes as gaelige to dispense to the class about PEIG.

Over the next 5 years she dragged the scourge kicking and screaming across the line in her leaving cert and managed to quieten her long enough to  achieve the highest recorded mark for her Irish conversation in the orals, thus implanting  a life- long love of the language which she listens to daily on the radio.

 Sr Marie is beloved of generations of Wexford girls who had the honour of being taught by her, and in a recent conversation admits she still worries about her Leaving Certs.............. 

She is still teaching to this day. 

Sr Grace Redmond (Mairéad)  had the unique distinction of being followed by a BBC film crew as she joined the convent from her family home to take her vows on camera, owing to a siblings conversation with a pile of English strangers in a big van filled with equipment and lights who picked him up as he was hitching home to Taghmon from work in Johnnie Hores.

"Are yee on hollydays?" says he as a starter for 6.

"We're looking for interesting things about Ireland " said the Director who was only mildly surprised to be brought to Taghmon for Tay , Apple Tart and permission  with the entire Redmond family. 

The Scourge rang the BBC to say they should come back half a century later to film Grace now, on her laptop, or sitting at the Opera,  zipping about the roads in her car, travelling the length and breadth of the country as the boss, a far cry from the shy young girl who laid face down on the tiles in her white robes to declare herself to God while the thin reedy voices sang hymns. 

Sister Grace Redmond © MDM

She is  bright and irrepressible today with a spontaneous laugh and an enquiring mind. 

Just when they thought they had got shut of the Scourge in 82, she rocked up again in September to begin a “Secretarial Course” which consisted of being caught by Sr Margaret Sullivan (Patrick) -   a legendary Nun who has been the backbone of the convent for years - jumping across the desks in the typing room singing show tunes.

And putting the heart crossways in gentle lady Sr Vera, whose class she had been marked absent from at the beginning - only to jump out of a wardrobe filled with wet gaberdines half way through - and begin taking notes in shorthand which consisted entirely of the only 2 words she ever learnt – “Dear Sir”

Vera noticed her.

Last school photo of The Scourge. 1983.

And notices her still on a daily basis. 

6 months ago Sr. Margaret gave her the  old school desk she sat at as a child,  to write her new book on.

3 months ago Margaret was taken from the Convent she has spent her life in to retire to a Nursing Home outside town where she longs for visitors and misses her community, only being driven home now on feast days and for special masses. 

The Scourge's  baby sister joined the school as a first year while she was inciting riots and mayhem downstairs. In her innocence the younger Mahon leaned on a fire alarm which broke instantly and over the pealing of the bells was asked what her name was to have her cards marked.

It is believed the unfortunate teacher clutched her heart, temples and brow and ran shrieking up the corridor.

The Scourge failed maths.

But she did write  hundreds of thousands of words about her life and put a cover on it and it’s on the library shelves............

 AND the convent tables.  

And she still wears a hat every day.

40 years since she entered the convent as a student she lives across the road from it.

From an army of Nuns, there are 5 left in the building. 

Sister May - "Nun Left"© MDM

They offered the Scourge a white room to work in when she mentioned the house she inhabits is so small "one couldn't turn a sweet in ones mouth inside it"......

Rumours abound she is one step away from taking the veil if they would forgive the occasional eff word and let her smoke at the back kitchen door while her dogs drench the roses.    

Rumours persist they gave her a key.

MDM September 2017

www.shellshock.ie 

MDM is an Author, Playwright, and Performer who created the © "Mindless"course which she used to deal with her Bi-Polarity without medication. 
She uses the old Convent community room overlooking the white crosses to shout at people in a trance while she is burning sage and playing Ac/Dc turned up to 11. 

The Memoir "Scourged", about her Mother, Siobhán  has now been adapted by the author  into a stageplay called "The Scourge" for performance in 2018.