Story 32: Running with the Wild Bunch

Eugene O’Brien

I had a very fortunate, happy childhood. Let me say that up front. We were loved and felt safe and were afforded great opportunity which a lot of children were not. But on the last day of sixth class, running around the playground of St Joseph’s National School, Edenderry, County Offaly, although feeling happy and excited and carefree, there was the first twinge of a butterfly in my tummy. Something loomed on the horizon. Something that would have to be faced. I tried to put it out of my head. There was the whole summer to look forward to but I knew, no matter what, that time runs out, and that life would change. I was to start boarding school.

My grandfather had gone there, and his brothers, and my father and his brothers, and my mother’s father, but still I could not deny the panic in my heart when my parents drove away that first day after dropping me off at my new school. I was shown to my dormitory, I put up my Man U posters and tried to envisage my new surroundings as home, but it was useless.

It was September 1979, I was eleven going on twelve and was about to break a family tradition. I was running away from boarding school. Not the school’s fault: good teachers, grand group of lads. If you could ignore the obsession with rugby, and a slight whiff of entitlement, it was pretty okay, but I just knew that the whole boarding gig was not for me. The upper lines, the lower lines, bad food, first year being called “Rudiments”, life ruled by timetables and the constant presence of a peer group, night and day – no escaping from it at 4 p.m. All of the above and, of course, missing home and family, caused an uncontrollable urge to start walking out the front gates and onto the road. A kind of dream state took over and I was in another world, a world of uncertainty, an adventure, like a movie. I was breaking one family tradition, and kept thinking of another.

The local cinema was bought by my grandfather in the 1950s. Situated in the town square, it was the place where I’d spent every childhood Saturday at matinees. We were served up Disney and other kids’ flicks but also adult fare like the spaghetti westerns. We were upset when John Wayne was butchered by Bruce Dern in The Cowboys. We were Kung Fu experts after seeing Bruce Lee, practising our moves afterwards, high on minerals and Captain Hurricane bars.

But the abiding image, and one that came back to me on the road home that evening was the opening images of The Wild Bunch. A group of children torture a scorpion in a nest of red ants, eventually setting it on fire, intercut with the Wild Bunch riding into town, the screen freezing on each member as their names popped up on the screen . . . William Holden, Ernest Borgnine et al. I saw the movie when I was nine or ten and the kids had always haunted me.

Walking along the road I started to trot as on a horse. I was the Wild Bunch, trying to decide whether to chance thumbing a lift, aware that the light was fading, and wondering what kind of reception I would receive at home. I’d just explain how I felt and hope that my parents would understand. Reality was beginning to kick in because of hunger and thirst, and the movie world that had been a distraction was fading.

Then I passed a hedge in front of a bungalow with a man clipping away at it with shears. We nodded at each other and then he addressed me, saying that he’d passed me on the road earlier and asking if I had been walking for long. Not long, I replied, going into some yarn about visiting an aunt in Prosperous who had left me at the bus stop but I had missed the bus and she had gone out to play bridge, so I was making my own way home to Edenderry. He didn’t buy this for a second but left the tale unchallenged, instead asking me in for refreshment. I checked behind him and saw a woman in the kitchen window looking out at us. He reassured me that it was okay, so I accepted the offer.

In their kitchen I drank 7Up – it tasted like no other mineral ever had – and they gave me soup, which I devoured. His wife enquired about where I was going, so I repeated the yarn. The man then told me he was a teacher and showed me a class of lads he had taught, and told me that one of them was a very famous sportsman – could I pick him out? I scanned the photo, glad that this question-of-sport session was a distraction from my made-up story of aunts and missed buses, and even more pleased when I recognised Eamonn Coghlan. Before the glory days of Jack’s army, he vied with the show-jumpers as Ireland’s number-one sporting hero.

The photo was put away as the man mentioned, out of the blue, the name of my boarding school and asked if I was aware of its existence, and he afforded himself a knowing smile just to let me know he knew where I was coming from.

They would drive me home. I mentioned the current oil strikes and how petrol was scarce but they insisted and half an hour later they dropped me outside my house. I thanked them profusely and I shook his hand, the kindness of strangers encouraging tears which were welling but not showing themselves until the car had moved on.

My parents were a little taken aback: I should have just rung them but I suppose, in a way, I had been more calculating than I’d realised. I had wanted to make a big impression on them. A statement.

I didn’t start in the local school on Monday, as I’d planned. On my parents’ urging I did go back and give the boarding school another go, but by mid-November I was off again. This time I was better prepared, making the dash after lunch on a full stomach. I hitched two rides and was home by tea. As always, my parents were very understanding. The local headmaster was called and I couldn’t wait to dash next door to my friend since High Infants, Kenneth, and give him the news that we’d be cycling to school together the following Monday.

The lads were very welcoming and although the school was old and rundown with prefabs out the back and an old stove heater in the classroom, with the occasional mouse making an appearance, I couldn’t have been happier.

I sometimes wonder where that couple is now. Is he still teaching or retired by now? Do they still live in the same bungalow, and does he still trim his hedge on September evenings? I suppose he would be in his late sixties now, but that’s only a guess, as is the location of their home, which was somewhere between Prosperous and Allenwood.

Eamonn Coghlan never won an Olympic medal but did us proud in 1983 in Helsinki, winning Gold in the world championships. The boarding school is still churning out captains of industry and rugby teams. The cinema closed in 1996, having battled against the 1980s video boom and a new multiplex in Tallaght. But the feelings it aroused in me and the stories my dad tells me of its heyday when people queued round the square to get in will stay with me, as will that feeling of walking on the road pretending to be the Wild Bunch and knowing somehow that I was doing the right thing.

Eugene O’Brien wrote the play Eden, first performed in the Abbey Theatre in 2001. It won the Stewart Parker award, the Rooney prize for literature and the Irish Times/ESB Award for best new play, and has been performed in many countries and London’s West End. His second play Savoy debuted in the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, in 2004. He has written three plays for RTÉ radio drama: The Nest, Sloth, and Numb (nominated for the Writers’ Guild Zebbie Award). He wrote the screenplay for the film Eden, which played at many festivals including New York’s Tribeca festival (winning Best Actress for Eileen Walsh) and secured an American release with Liberation films. His critically acclaimed television series Pure Mule and the two-part follow-up Pure Mule – The Last Weekend were nominated for fourteen IFTAS.