All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

wind and rain belted in from the coast. I went with an uncle and stayed at the back of the church. Then we followed in the procession to Ballyphehane graveyard where Michael was buried next to his father and his younger brother Ben. I have no memories of my grandmother on that day. She was surrounded by people and I could not catch a glimpse of her. I remember my mother dressed in the black of mourning with a veil covering her face. Underneath she glistened with tears.

      May Hassett’s house had been a place of ease and security. I was afraid now that grief would take her away from me. It was an inchoate fear, spurred by the utter change I was witnessing in somebody I had always known to be strong. She retreated, slept during the daytime, and wept when she did not think I could see her. But I was by then attuned to the secret strategies of adults. I could always tell.

      Then, after several weeks my grandmother emerged from mourning. She struggled to take her place again at the centre of the family. It wasn’t a swift transformation. But May knew we were all watching her, and slowly she found a way to laugh again. It was only years later that I understood how much she fought to prevent grief from overwhelming her. By then I’d started work on a newspaper and bought my first car. I was taking my grandmother on a long drive through the countryside on a Sunday afternoon when she began to talk about Michael.

      She talked about what he had been like as a child, mischiefloving and easygoing, how heartsick she’d been when he took the ship to America, and how the break-up of his marriage had been a relief to her: ‘They weren’t suited to each other at all, you know.’ May talked about the letters he’d sent describing his successes at Columbia and then off-Broadway. He’d sent her a book on the American theatre in which his production of a Strindberg play had been analysed and praised. Then my grandmother began to sob. I hadn’t seen her cry in years. ‘He was so young,’ she said. And she repeated this several times. We drove on in silence for several miles. Then she asked me if I believed in heaven.

      ‘What makes you ask that?’ I asked.

      ‘Because I wonder if I’ll see him again,’ she replied. ‘I would give anything to see him just once more.’

      In those days I did not know what I believed in, if anything, but I told her I was sure there was a heaven. Then this devout woman told me that when Michael had been killed she wondered if there was any God. She said she’d kept on going to Mass but she struggled with faith, asking how her child could have been taken in such a way. When I asked her why she didn’t crack up, go under, become a heart-broken recluse, her explanation was that she hadn’t any choice but to keep going. ‘What else was I going to do?’

      Love carried her through. The love for her children, the love she gave in taking care of myself and my siblings. The light of my grandmother’s life was my younger sister, Niamh. Barely two years my junior she was born with coeliac disease and was seriously ill as a baby. Given the troubled state of things in our home May H offered to look after Niamh in Cork. Niamh was effectively reared by my grandmother and her presence helped May H greatly as she fought to emerge from her grief over Michael.

      Though she would have abjured such a notion herself, I believe my grandmother was the first heroic person I knew.

       CHAPTER SIX ‘Pres’ Boy

       …Yet he was kind; or if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault.

      The Village Schoolmaster’,

      OLIVER GOLDSMITH

      I didn’t like the look of the place. St Joseph’s National School was a grim, grey edifice built in 1913 on the banks of the River Lee about a mile from Cork city centre. Directly opposite, on the far bank of the river, were the suburbs of Sundays Well and Shanakiel, terraced and grand with the mansions of the merchant princes. But St Joseph’s drew the bulk of its pupils from an area known as the Marsh. Poor and neglected, it was a mix of old tenements and new council flats. Other boys travelled down from estates on the city’s north side or from farming areas to the west. I arrived at St Joseph’s fresh from a private school in Dublin, a place which had its own swimming pool and rugby pitches and where we wore uniforms and caps in the manner of English public schoolboys.

      My school career had been troubled. I’d started out in an all-Irish speaking ‘scoil’ and had been moved on because my teacher was an old viper; after that I went to a prep school called Miss Carr’s, run by a genial old lady and filled with the children of the Dublin middle class. I thrived there but on reaching the age of seven I had to move up to a senior school. This was St Mary’s in Rathmines, another citadel of the middle classes, where I struggled to settle. By now things at home were becoming more fraught and every raised voice from a teacher had me jumping.

      I was taken out of St Mary’s and sent to the more easygoing Terenure College where I was a happy pupil until my parents’ separation forced another move. By the time my primary education was complete I had been to five different schools. A child who was not so frightened and troubled might have fared better, been more resilient in the face of aggressive teachers. I was simply scared.

      Yet until I reached Cork my education had been exceptionally privileged. All private schools and middle-class children. At St Joseph’s I was immersed in the reality of Irish primary education for the majority. On my first day at St Joseph’s we were lined up in the yard and marched up a steel staircase into the school building. Ahead of us was a long, dark corridor that smelt of polish and chalk, and at the very end of that, on the left-hand side, was the Brother’s class.

      The Brother belonged to the ‘hard-but-fair’ variety of headmaster. In his younger days he’d been a promising Gaelic footballer, and he was still fitter and tougher than the largest of his pupils. His school was not one of the hell-holes, similar to some run by the Christian Brothers and other religious orders, where the leather strap ruled. This was also the early 1970s and the nationalistic element of our education was receding. Ireland joined the EU in 1973, a year after I started school at St Joseph’s. The word was out that we needed to be more European, if we were going to benefit from all the jobs and money on offer from Brussels. The Brother belonged to the Presentation Brothers, who were always seen as one of the more politically moderate outfits, certainly by comparison with the ardent nationalism of the Christian Brothers.

      To a little Dublin boy fresh from a broken home and with a strange accent, St Joseph’s was a mighty challenge. My first encounter was with a farmer’s son whom I will call Lonergan. The boy looked like a mountain man with broad shoulders and big shovels of hands. Lonergan came to school each day with his hair standing on end as if he had only that moment rolled out of bed; he had buck teeth which advanced with each month and he smelled of fried food. On my first day in class Lonergan turned around and asked if I was ‘handy’. Not knowing what the word meant, I said yes. Yes. Yes, always anxious to please. Whatever you want me to be, I will say ‘Yes’.

      No sooner had the teacher left the room to get some books than Lonergan turned around and punched me hard in the chest. I was thrown backwards. There was laughter around the class. The others waited to see what I would do. Tears came to my eyes. I did nothing. There was more laughter. ‘Handy my hole,’said Lonergan.

      In this way I discovered that ‘handy’ meant hard, tough, able to fight your corner, and I was about as tough as butter. The atmosphere was feral. Every weakness was noted. Our teachers were good men and women. But physical violence was often the preferred method of control and chastisement. Hardly a day went by when somebody wasn’t given a few lashes of the cane. You stood at the top of the class, watched by eyes that were both fearful and relieved that it wasn’t happening to them.

      The Brother would produce his bamboo cane and tell you to hold out your hand. Sometimes boys were so frightened they pulled their hand back at the last minute. He waited until their hands were steady and then brought the cane thrashing down on the open palm. All at once you were assaulted by sharp stinging agony. Your hands were hot as if someone had poured molten metal on them. Blood rushed to your cheeks and you blushed with shame. After the first couple of strokes your hand started