When I was
ten years old we moved from Wicklow, on the east coast of Ireland , to Sligo
on the north-west coast. It was quite a long distance, which meant for us
children leaving friends and familiar places definitively behind us. It also
meant going to a new school – and that shortly before the end of a school year.
There is a
strong tradition of segregated education in
I was
placed in the class of Thomas Mooney, joining around fifty other ten-year-old
boys in our own peculiar blackboard jungle. We were a mixed bunch, mirroring
the town in which we lived; one or two kids from wealthier families, a spread
of middle and working class youngsters and around seven or eight
representatives of what would be called “poor white trash” in parts of the USA
A group of
over fifty ten-year-old boys is a pretty unruly, often savage mob. A teacher in
control of such a group needs an unconscious, all-encompassing, completely
confident sense of his own authority, otherwise he is lost before he begins. And
Thomas Mooney did not have that authority.
He may have
had it previously and he may have achieved it subsequently, but my classmates
and I encountered him at a particularly vulnerable stage in his life. When I
met him he was around forty years old and had come to St. Antony’s only
recently, after the small country school in which he had worked had been
closed, a victim of rationalisation. The contrast between dealing with a small
number of country children of both sexes, spread over a number of classes all
taught by the same teacher in the same room, and a large class of harder, more
sophisticated town boys must have been considerable for him. But there were
deeper reasons for his debilitating lack of confidence than just this.
Thomas
Mooney was married to a woman he loved deeply. They had no children and his
wife was seriously ill, suffering (as I am now fairly certain) from chronic
deep depression. How do I know this? Because, in his despair, Mr. Mooney told
us of it, frequently, at some length.
Was he
trying to win our sympathy? At the time I thought so and – along with my
classmates, with the callous cruelty of ten-year-olds in a mob – I despised him
for it. With the infinite wisdom accrued through a whole decade of life, I
judged that he had realised that he lacked that control which was the basic
prerequisite for his job and was trying to substitute it by appealing to our
better natures. If such was the case, he had miscalculated very badly.
It is not
that ten-year-olds don’t have better natures; they do, but they are also in the
process of moral development and are subject to many other powerful
motivations, one of the strongest being peer pressure. Add to this the fact
that children from a very young age have a finely developed sense of the
security with which adults perceive their own authority and you can understand
why Thomas Mooney never had a chance with us.
He was, at
the time, a deeply unhappy man, a subtle, sensitive person questioning many of
the fundamental certainties on which his life had been based, and this had
fatal consequences for his control over the mob we were. He was the teacher,
the enemy, and we sensed his
weakness, judged him accordingly, and there was little he could do to reverse
this instinctive implacable judgement of failure. He was like a poker player
holding a pair of deuces whose opponents were well aware of what he held in his
hand – bluffing was useless.
There was an alternative available to him, one
hallowed by tradition, and in general accepted use in the school; that of
violence and pain. Corporal punishment was, at that time, still legally
permitted in Irish schools and most teachers still used a bamboo cane as a
disciplinary and pedagogical instrument. At the end of every pause and lunch
break a queue of boys could be seen waiting apprehensively before the
principal’s office; waiting for the cold, impersonal administration of “six of
the best,” to be endured as a consequence for misbehaviour. You presented the flat
of the palm of each hand alternatively, open at arms length, anticipating the
whish, the crack, and the burning pain. We did not question this – it was an
inherent component of the general culture of school – but it reinforced our
general feeling of education as a state of low-level warfare between pupils and
teachers, a fundamental division between us
and them, where they had nearly all the power.
Thomas
Mooney refused to use the cane in his classroom. Instead of respecting him for
this, we judged it as a further sign of weakness and despised him all the more
for it. As a result, his class was generally unruly, undisciplined and loud. He
frequently left us for long periods to our own devices, setting us work to do
while he sat at his desk, doing I no longer remember what. Maybe nothing at
all. It didn’t really concern me.
Though the
work he set us to do was sometimes
interesting. In Fifth Class, he told us we should begin a project of writing
our own books and occasionally showed interest in what we were producing. Most
of my classmates took these long periods for personal creativity as an
opportunity for goofing off, but I became involved in a complex Buck Rogers-type
science fiction epic, heavily influenced by the style of Leslie Charteris’ Saint series (I had discovered the books
around that time and they served to increase my admiration for Simon Templar,
initially awakened by Roger Moore’s TV depiction of him). However, at a certain
stage he lost interest in it and my masterpiece was never finished.
When he
applied himself to it, he could be an excellent teacher. He encouraged my
interest in history and tried to instil in us a sense of the importance of
politics and debate. It was a classroom in which debate was frequent; given his
lack of fundamental authority, those of us with rhetorical ability could engage
him in endless discussions, or encourage him to hold forth on themes which
interested him. But, more often than not, he was listless and unmotivated and
frequently avoided teaching subjects, like the Irish which (following the
official national ethos of independent Ireland should one day resume its
long-lost position as first language of the country) was compulsory and
generally hated by a majority of the pupils. Thomas Mooney spoke fluent Irish
himself, but seemed to find the effort of pounding it into our thick reluctant
skulls too much. Our lack of progress here would cause a number of my fellow
pupils serious problems later on (Irish remained compulsory as a major subject
right up to the end of secondary school), but, fortunately for me, my parents
spotted my deficits pretty quickly and arranged for me to get extra tuition
outside school.
When we
left him at the end of Sixth Class to move on to secondary education, he took
over another group of eight-year-olds in Third Class, but a number of years
later I heard he subsequently left to take over a position in a rural school. I
suspect that he was very glad of the change and hope that things worked out
better for him away from St. Antony’s.
For there
was something fundamentally very evil going on in that school, though my
brothers and I were fortunately, miraculously untouched by it. During the years
I was there, five of the ten teachers (three brothers and two laymen) were
sexually abusing many of the boys entrusted to their care. One of them was the
tall young brother teaching the class parallel to ours, a class in which I was
often a guest on the (not infrequent) occasions when Mr. Mooney called in sick.
His ready use of the cane ensured that he
had no discipline problems. He also had the custom of having boys sit on
his lap for long periods of time – fortunately, he had his particular pets and
we guests were not selected for this “special” treatment.
In the many
court cases which have taken place since the whistle was finally blown a little
more than a decade ago, a number of other teachers gave testimony that they
were unaware of what was going on. As far as I can ascertain, Thomas Mooney was
not called to testify. Even if he had been, given his detachment and
preoccupation with his own problems, I would guess that he would also say that
he didn’t know anything. And yet, that visceral part of me which does not
always comply with my rational world-view wonders whether the underlying miasma
of evil and misery in the school didn’t contribute somehow to his obvious
unhappiness.
Those of us
who were pupils there – apart from the unfortunates who were the victims of
abuse – didn’t realise that there was something fundamentally wrong, but then,
of course, kids usually don’t have the comparative apparatus to judge such
things. We knew that it was a cold, hard, unloving sort of place, but it was school and we didn’t expect anything
else. One of the effects it did have on me was that casual brutalisation which
led to my harsh boyish judgement of Mr. Mooney. Under different circumstances I
might have learned much more from him and today I regret that I didn’t. If he
is still alive today and, by some remote chance, happens to read this, I would
like to say to him that I now cherish him retrospectively much more than I did
at the time.
(“St. Antony’s”
and “Thomas Mooney” are pseudonyms. For those whose stomachs can take it, this link leads to an account of the abuse cases in the school and contains a
laudation of the exceptional brother I mentioned in this piece who was my
brother’s teacher)
Pictures retrieved from:
