All of These People: A Memoir. Fergal Keane

newspapers. Many were social outcasts. Perhaps they had a drink problem, or depression, or maybe they had no living relatives or had lost contact with their families – they were all Jerome’s people. Through his example he made them ours. Jerome visited them and listened to their problems. Then he asked the schoolboys if they would volunteer for a visiting roster. At the very least the elderly poor would have someone to talk with.

      Once the visits were running he suggested an annual collection to raise money for the elderly. Jerome’s idea was that he would raise a large sum of money and then challenge the city corporation to match it. Between them they would build new homes for the elderly poor. He used a mixture of flattery and relentless pressure to get his way. Jerome was a force of nature. He worked the phones, went to endless meetings at City Hall and used the local media to highlight the crisis of the elderly. City officials who helped were sure of generous praise when Jerome outlined his plans to the Cork Examine.. As for those who didn’t help him? Nobody dared refuse. ‘You just keep at them, boy,’ he would say.

      By the time I arrived at Pres the annual collection was an established success. New housing projects went up all over the city. But there was another success for Jerome. By using schoolboys to manage the project he gave us an early taste of responsibility and, just as important, a sense of social justice. I came to love the man for his bustling energy and because he cared about me. Jerome Kelly ensured I didn’t become an educational casualty. I look back at secondary school and feel blessed. Jerome and I stayed friends after I left school. He would occasionally call and ask me to do something in relation to SHARE or Pres – as astute a manipulator of the old boy network as always. I could never refuse him.

      Jerome was ahead of his time. But the country was starting to catch up with him. We were exploding out of the concrete overcoat lovingly tailored for us by Éamonn de Valera. Despite the best efforts of the bishops and the politicians we were having fun. On television we had brave current affairs programmes where we could watch our politicians being grilled by tough interviewers; a journalist called Vincent Browne had emerged as the scourge of a lying, swindling political class; Senator Mary Robinson, a future President, emerged as a powerful advocate of women’s rights; government ministers were ruthlessly satirised on television on a programme called Hall’s Pictorial Weekly.

      The Ireland of myth and reverence was being dismantled in front of our eyes. There were also the first stirrings of a sexual revolution. Ireland being Ireland it was pretty tentative. But there was enough happening to provoke parish priests into apoplectic sermons on a weekly basis. The Capitol cinema on Patrick Street introduced jumbo seats for courting couples; on the weekends it screened films like Virgins on the Verge and Rosie Dixon Night Nurse as late shows.

      Contraceptives were still officially banned, however. Our Prime Minister even voted against legislation being introduced by his own Minister for Health. But an Irish schoolboy could get a supply of ‘rubber Johnnies’ if he was determined enough. Most of the condoms bought on the black market by teenage boys were never used. They were blown up as balloons, furtively shown to friends at the back of the class, sold on to other boys, occasionally shown to girls in the hope they’d get the hint.

      Pornography was also starting to appear in Ireland. I went to England with the Catholic Boy Scouts once in the mid-1970s. A gang of the older boys went from the campsite in Chingford into Soho and came back with ‘dirty’ magazines. ‘Dirty’ was the word given to anything which had a sexual content, however vague. There was a troop leader whom we called ‘Stab the Rasher’ because of his skinny frame and sneaky nature.

      ‘Come here and look at this, Keane,’ he shouted from the tent door.

      I was eager to be wanted and ran over. He showed me a photograph. There was a woman and a man doing something, but I wasn’t sure what. The man was standing over the woman holding his langer (the Cork word) and she was looking up at him smiling. I felt ill and started to walk backwards. This caused Stab to explode with laughter. ‘Come here, lads,’ he shouted to his friends. ‘Come here and look at the fucking face on Keane, will ye!’

      I ran off but when I came back an hour or so later they gathered around me laughing.

      I hadn’t even the vaguest clue about girls. My mother taught in a Protestant school in Cork. The Protestant girls of Cork had names like Bronwyn, Paula, Penny, Susan, Stella. They were children from the outlying farms and old Cork businesses, the remnants of a much larger Protestant population driven from the country after the Troubles of 1921-2.

      I thought those girls exotic. It was widely said among my counterparts that Protestant girls were the best because they let you go all the way. That turned out to be nonsense. But they were different. They had not endured the grim piety of the nuns, and so they were more at ease around boys, they could joke and laugh with us, they treated us as humans rather than some predatory species sent by the Devil to torment them. And then a girl named Penny took the initiative and kissed me at the Cork Grammar School disco in the spring of 1975. I walked around on air for days. Not because I loved the girl, but because I had discovered I was not a toad. On the other side of the world Saigon was falling. Cambodia was succumbing to the Khmer Rouge. A few hours up the road hundreds of people were dying in the Troubles. None of it touched us.

      In the summer of 1976 I fell in love with a girl whose brothers went to Pres. I first met her in a cafe where schoolboys and girls spent hours sitting over a single Coke. But it took me months to become bold enough to ask her out. And then at the end of a warm July night she found my courage for me, and drew me into a spearminty kiss.

      My girl. The pride I felt in walking with her. My girl had fair hair and green eyes, she smelled of shampoo and fresh clothes, and she was not afraid; this I remember about her best, the energy and hope in her, the laughter which drew me out of the long mourning for my absent father.

      Those evenings of summer lingered forever, a deep blue that held its breath before the dark. My girl was the daughter of a sea captain and this added to her mystery; he had travelled to the places I dreamed of and she, by association, carried their exotic promise with her. Our love affair was intimately tied to the city we both loved.

      We walked all over Cork together, up its steep hills and out to the Lee Fields, across the ‘Shaky Bridge’ over the river and all the way south to the marina where ships glided past, ludicrously large on the narrow waterway. Outside the city, on the coast, we cycled to the seaside villages dotted along the harbour mouth – Crosshaven, Myrtleville and Fountainstown, Roches Point – the last of the Irish mainland seen by hundreds of thousands of emigrants taking the boat to America. We would set our bikes down on the sand and swim. Even at a distance of nearly thirty years I remember the clear lines she cut through the water, the emphatic expression on her face as she headed out from shore, the water beads on her shoulders as she sat on the sand afterwards, and later the two of us stopping to catch our breath at the top of the hill leading back into the city and seeing all the twinkling lights of evening strung out like stars across the valley.

      In winter I remember walking past the Lough on the way to her house, past the moorhens and swans, and stopping to look at my reflection in the water, wondering if I would ever feel so happy again. I had come to that love affair as a boy without confidence, who believed himself ugly and unworthy, and was pining for a father in a distant city. The girl and her family welcomed me into their hearts and home. And though the love affair ended, I remember those days as among the most precious I’ve ever known.

      A former classmate recently reminded me of something Jerome had said in our last few weeks at school. He had taken us for our regular religious instruction class. ‘You’ll be heading out into the world soon,’ he said. How much would we take with us of what we had learned in Pres? he asked. ‘The thing to remember, boys, is that the world out there seems to operate on the principle of people walking all over each other. That is not the way you learned here. Don’t walk over people.’

      I met Jerome for the last time shortly before the new millennium. By then I was a well-established journalist. He was already seriously ill with leukaemia but still busy with building houses for the elderly poor. It was an August afternoon in the garden of my cottage in Ardmore, a few yards from the sea on one of those rare Irish summer days when the action