When I joined the school in 1947 most of the staff were Irish Christian Brothers, a religious teaching order founded in Ireland by Edmund Rice in 1802: ‘To help young people to stand on their own two feet and to change the society that caused and allowed them to be poor’. There were masters, particularly in the upper school, and, apart from the dinner ladies, only two females: a librarian and Miss Allen. The Brothers wore white starched dog collars that irritated their necks, and long black soutanes, or cassocks with wide cummerbund-type sashes. They were imposing, they ruled the roost and there were good Brothers of whom Edmund Rice would have been proud, fine men who worked hard with little reward and no kudos outside the walls of the college. But there were men too, who answered the siren call of a vocation when they should have left school at fifteen, run away over the potato fields and raised a bevy of copper-haired kids by Mavorneen.
Although the CBs may have invented the long-sharp-shock treatment, I was never subject to sexual abuse at school; nor, as far as I know, were any of my contemporaries. I’ve read about dreadful things that happened over the years and watched interviews on television with men who suffered at the hands of paedophiles wearing cassocks, but, thank God, we were never aware of it. What loomed large, however, was the strap. The straps that made a man out of me (nervous, cringing, stammering, but a man nonetheless) came in various weights and sizes. Usually they were about fourteen inches long, one and a quarter inches wide and less than half an inch thick, and consisted of four lengths of leather stitched together. As I write this, I wonder who made them? Catholic convicts, I suppose, or nuns. The Little Sisters of the Good Hiding? And where did the staff buy them? No Internet in those days. Perhaps that old lady in the sweetshop on Crosby Road kept a boxful under the counter?
Some schools had one Brother who was responsible for dishing it out, but at St Mary’s all the masters and Brothers had straps, but not all used them. If you were in luck, it would be Mr Donovan who would punish you. He taught English, was a kind and sensitive guy who didn’t like corporal punishment, but – ‘Well, hey, putting a plastic turd in my desk?’ – his strap was light and fluffy, and a beating from him was the equivalent of having your hair ruffled. On the other hand several of the Brothers were practised in the evil art and, although the rumour that some straps had whalebone running through them may not have been true, they were certainly heavier and looked like flattened coshes. And what I hated about the whole scary business was that the strap wasn’t used only to punish misbehaviour, but also as a teaching aid.
It’s break time and everybody is in the playground. You can tell which class is about to have a French lesson with Brother O’Shea. We are not the ones running around playing tick. We are not the ones heading the tennis ball. We are the ones huddled against the wall in the corner by the milk crates, pale faces stuck in books, or eyes closed to heaven lisping French declensions. O’Shea’s teaching method was so simple and effective that to this day I don’t know why his name isn’t up there with Piaget, Montessori, A. S. Neill, all the great educationalists. We are told in the previous day’s lesson which thirty nouns we must learn by heart, paying particular attention to gender, or which six verbs we must decline in the future tense.
‘Morning, boys.’
‘Morning, sir.’
‘Right, close your books. Connor!’ (Connor stands.)
‘Horse?’
‘Un cheval, sir.’
‘Correct, Batty!’ (Connor sits wiping brow, Batty stands.)
‘Bear?’
‘Er … er …’ (Batty bursts into tears.)
‘Remain standing. McDonnell?
‘Un ours, sir?’
‘Very good, sit down. Lynch?’
And so on, all round the class. Get it wrong and you remain standing. Get it wrong again and it’s two whacks of the strap. As well as being cruel and nerve-racking, it encouraged feelings of guilt and betrayal, because if you knew the answer you sat there hoping that your best mate would get it wrong. Any hint of prompting and you got six. Throughout the whole proceedings he maintained a Bruce Forsyth kind of playfulness, rarely losing his temper, because the O’Shea method was simply the quickest way to get thirty-five lazy boys to learn a foreign language. Or to think they are learning a foreign language.
At some point during the late fifties the Irish Christian Brothers became surplus to requirements. They had served a need in providing an education and instilling a sense of worth into working-class Catholic boys at a time when to be Catholic, and Irish at that, was to be discriminated against. Times had changed. Religion became less of an issue and the post-war Education Acts provided better opportunities for the children of poor working-class families. When I was invited back to St Mary’s in 1995 to read some of my poems to the sixth form it had changed, but not beyond recognition. In my day it had been a Direct Grant Grammar school, but when they were abolished in the seventies, St Mary’s had the choice of either going comprehensive or independent. It chose the latter. The most significant change I noticed was not the absence of the Brothers, and with them the smell of fear and strap oil, but the presence of girls. The sixth form is happily mixed.
The only outsiders ever to visit and address the school when I was there were the Dominican Friars or the Redemptorist Fathers, who came to fire us with tales of martyrdom and missionary zeal. To a twelve-or thirteen-year-old the idea of leaving boring old Liverpool and moving to Africa, converting the black pagans (savage, until you really got to know them) was seductive. As long as they promised not to hurt me, I would offer myself up for martyrdom after a tragically short, but nevertheless meaningful life, bringing lost souls to the bosom of Christ Our Lord. Consequently, I would always join the small queue at the end of the session to put my name down for the seminary and could never understand why so few of my schoolmates (savage, until you really got to know them) signed up as well. Luckily, we would-be Christian martyrs weren’t immediately herded into cattle trucks and shipped out to the Congo, but were given leaflets about life in the Order and advised to go away, discuss the matter with our parents and pray. No doubt we meant well, but by the end of the day it became clear that the only conversions we would be making would be leaflets into paper aeroplanes.
Even when I was in the sixth form the idea of a poet being let loose in the school was unthinkable. Not that we had contemporary poets in those days, you understand, they were all dead and safely tucked up in the library. So it was a strange out-of-body experience I felt as I read to these young men and women. In listening to me, would they sense a link with the past? Their past? I chose poems I thought might take on a special significance for them, ones with religious or geographical references that in other schools I might have to explain. But to be honest, even though they seemed to enjoy the reading, I don’t think it was particularly special for them. If they were poetry pagans, I don’t believe I converted them.