Our recurring dreams about school exams!

Going back to school in September is a Throwback Thursday theme that has resonated with many of you.

Reader Ger Fitzgibbon re the fuss and bother about new pencils and pens, the new geometry sets in their tin boxes (do tell us, anyone reading this, did you or anyone else ever make full use of every single item in that smart tin box before you gave it a more useful life as a receptacle for priceless treasures like fishing hooks, ball bearings, odd screws, or your favourite toffees?), and the apparently endless search for school books.

Ger recalls some of the Cork places where the books were obtained.

“Brown and Nolan’s, Liam Russell’s, occasionally the Lee Bookstore on Lavitt’s Quay (which was run part-time by an army officer who was later a neighbour of mine). And - naturally - your Da’s place on Washington Street!” Ger tells me.

I those September days well, Ger, when my sister and I had the job of holding the door against the queues, trying to limit the number of people in the shop at any one time.

To put the record straight, The Book Mart was actually my mother’s shop, and she was helped out by a lady called Mary O’Connell. My father, Joey, came in at times of pressure (like early September) to lend a hand, but otherwise his full-time teaching job at the Tech kept him fairly busy.

I can recall the shelves behind the counter piled with any edition available of William Shakespeare, for example, hastily labelled Julius, Dick 3 (that was Richard III), Merchant, etc.

Back then any printed version would do, and hard-pressed parents were grateful to be able to save a few pennies by buying a well-thumbed (and often well-scribbled) copy instead of a shiny new one.

I say ‘parents’, but it was almost always the mothers who came with their kids, not the fathers, who presumably were hard at work until closing time.

Another Throwback Thursday reader, Tim Morley, chimes in on the buying of schoolbooks at this time of year too.

“Hallo Jo,” greets Tim, “surely this is your story! Going back to school (secondary school, Cork city) had no significant meaning of its own, but in my first time back I learned of the existence of Joey Kerrigan’s bookshop (mainly for second-hand ones).

The big question for you is, how did your father keep his temper steady when the students from all over the city poured into his shop for about two weeks at the beginning of the school year bringing a chaos with them which he had to sort out?

“Every one of our lot knew Joey Kerrigan,” adds Tim. “There was another similar institution on the quay between Patrick Street and the Opera House, but the people running it were nameless for me. (That would be the Lee Book Stores, Tim, mentioned by Ger Fitzgibbon above).

“And, oh yes, I also visited the pawn shop on Sullivan’s Quay (only time) to buy a slide rule... not to be had in book shops.”

Well, in response to you, Tim, my father kept his temper partly because he was well used to it at the Tech, but also because he was only there at these times of high demand.

Both he and my mother could see the tension as all those lists were hopefully proffered over the counter, and went out of their way to do what they could to fill the gaps.

Some teachers, recalls Ger Fitzgibbon, were very set in their ways and insisted on very specific books, often ones that were out of print.

“Mr Duggan - our Latin teacher in Pres - had an obsessive attachment to Allen’s Latin Grammar,” said Ger.

“This was a book of rhymes to help people the intricacies of things like noun genders in Latin (‘masculine re fons, and mons, ruddens, torrens, dens and pons...’ ).

It had been out of print for years and so, every autumn, when boys were faced with going into Mr Duggan’s Latin class, there was a fierce scramble to get a copy of this - no matter how tattered, battered, inscribed, marked or torn - because life in his class would be unbearable without it.

“Fragments of that book still haunt my addled brain!”

That reminds me of Professor O’Kelly, Head of Archaeology at UCC - he who excavated Newgrange - who would tell all of his students without fail every single year that what they really needed was the classic work by Movius. “And you won’t find a copy, because the only known one is at the bottom of the Atlantic!”

Of course, I immediately went home and demanded that my parents find it, but this was well before the days of online searching and I had to make do with what was readily available, like everyone else.

Did you carefully cover your treasured school texts? Ger Fitzgibbon certainly did. “Because I came from a large family, the habit of preserving books so they could be ed on or sold back into the second-hand market was strongly ingrained,” he recalled.

Hours were spent putting brown-paper covers on the new books, and putting your name and class and address on them (right down to the obligatory ‘Cork, Munster, Ireland, The World, The Universe...’).

Ger continued: “I don’t think I ever had a school uniform, so I don’t recall any of that. I may have had a school cap at some point, but I never had to go through the palaver my older sisters faced, involving gymslips and berets and special shoes and all the rest.

“I did love the smell of new leather (the school satchel) but then the first job with that was to scuff it up so that it looked tough and had some street cred.”

Yes, this was the practice also adopted by Hoorah Henries and Sloane Rangers over in the England of the 1960s with smart new Barbour waxed jackets. The newness had to be taken out immediately, by throwing them on the floor and walking over them with muddy wellies (which had to be Hunter of course).

Over here, in less advanced Ireland, we contented ourselves with wearing our new jeans in the bath, and then shuffling up and down a gravel path on our knees to wear them into an acceptable state. The thought of actually buying pre-torn jeans, as happens today, would have seemed a very odd idea indeed. To our minds back then, new clothes were just that - new, and expected to look every bit of it.

Ger continued with his school memories.

“Just after I’d left school, I do having a very clear, vivid dream about going back there at the end of the hols. The school was there in the distance, and moving towards me steadily and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I knew if I arrived, I’d have to go back to that deadly classroom.

“But part of my brain said, ‘Hold on, this is only a dream. If I can wake myself up before I get there, I won’t have to go to school’. I knew that falling would make me wake up, so I threw myself over a convenient cliff, only to find I didn’t hit the ground at all but still glided steadily onwards to the school gate.

“Just at the last second, as I was going through the door (Abandon hope, all ye who enter here?), a teacher snapped ‘You’re late!’ and gave me a clatter on the head - which woke me up just in time. And so I didn’t have to go back to school!”

Another reader, Katie O’Brien, its that she has had a recurring dream many times over the years, of going into an exam and realising she has not even attended classes on the subject, let alone studied or revised it.

I wake up in a panic every time, and oh, the relief when I that it isn’t true, and that I am not going to be exposed as a total failure!

“I wonder what caused it? Some otherwise forgotten trauma before a school exam?”

Yes, agrees Ger Fitzgibbon, that’s one of his own classic dreams at what he describes as ‘mid-stress level’.

“Usually, the exam paper is in a language I can’t understand. Or it is in a language I do understand perfectly, AND I know how to respond, but NOBODY WILL GIVE ME A PEN AND PAPER!”

This is interesting. There may be many of you reading this who have recurring dreams (nightmares?) about going back to school or sitting frightening exams. If so, do let us hear them. A nightmare shared is a nightmare halved. Or something like that.

Mary Holly conjures up quite different images from the phrase ‘back to school’.

“Jo, did your father go a bit silent when back to school loomed? I know my dad, Joe Holly, did. I think going to town to buy blackboard paint (with his own money, I would add) would be the confirmation for us that the dreaded day was imminent when our freedom was about to come to an end.

“In the early 1950s, I accompanied him on a few occasions to the old boys’ school in Glasheen to watch him paint the blackboards in preparation for the new school year. Then he would take down the container of bluey-green ink powder and mix some with water, after which he would fill the inkwells in each desk. There was no such thing as a school caretaker in those days.”

Mary continued: “When they moved to the new premises on School Avenue in 1955, the facilities had a fairly large field, now the site of another building needed for further expansion of both boys’ and girls’ schools. The grass on this field needed cutting on a fairly regular basis so that the children could enjoy playing there, but the parish priest was notoriously tight-fisted with the purse strings.

On one occasion, I recall my father’s exasperation when the priest suggested that dad should Jimmy Keogh from Sheares Park and have him graze his horse in the field to keep the grass down. The problem of horse dung didn’t occur to the priest!

“The new school had the luxury of central heating, and boilers need maintenance. My aunt was collecting her grandchildren from the school one day and was astounded to see my father head across the yard trundling a wheelbarrow. When she asked him what in heaven he was up to, he explained that he was off to clean the boiler!

“This is a glimpse behind the scenes in the life of one schoolteacher in the 1950s.”

Meanwhile, reader Anne Watt has written in to voice her pleasure at reading last week’s article.

“Loved the school day memories in today’s Throwback Thursday. I particularly enjoyed the reminiscences about St Angela’s, as I am an ‘old girl’ myself!

“I started in the mid-1960s. The nuns were just changing from being called ‘Mother’ to ‘Sister’ then, and I particularly Sr. Rosario- a lovely lady, very kind to a nervous First Year.

“I had some great teachers there: Miss Connolly, Miss Deegan, Mrs. Griffin, Miss Lyons and Miss Shaw.

I also recall the berets; not worn at a jaunty, Parisian angle but straight with the crest in the middle. That was important.

“Thank you, St Angela’s, for an excellent education and wonderful memories!”

Let’s hear some school memories from the rest of you, whether it’s the scent of those new books from Brown & Nolan’s, or the frantic search for a clean shirt and tie on a Monday morning.

Do you still dream of wandering those long corridors and trying to find your own classroom? Or being discovered drawing in the back of your copybook during a particularly boring class?

Can you learning (or being taught) one important thing that has stayed with you ever since?

Share your memories with us. Email [email protected]. Or leave a comment on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/echolivecork