whereas my class should – if I remember aright – have been starting our third year of it, she had to start us off and speed us ahead to catch up. Which she did. She was good at her job and, now that Ireland has had two successful women presidents, it strikes me frequently that in the years when women like her had few opportunities to use their talents, there must have been many mute inglorious Mary Robinsons hidden away in convents. Our Mistress of Studies was one of them. Her name was Mother Hogan and she could have run the country.
She impressed my mother and, more surprisingly, Seán, who had till then taken no interest in my education. Now, however, he wrote Mother Hogan a letter saying, among other things, that hehoped the new school would have some lay teachers, since girls of my age might need access to women with some experience of the world to whom they could turn for advice.
Mother Hogan invited him to tea. I don’t know what they said to each other, but the meeting seemed to have been a success. They must have amused and challenged each other, for I think there were subsequent teas. She wanted him to know that nuns were less unworldly than he thought, but may have been hampered in her argument by convent etiquette. If she stuck to the rules, she would not have had tea herself, but would have sat there watching him drink his. The tray, unless she countermanded the usual arrangement, would have arrived with a single cup and saucer, and departing from custom might have been tricky. I wonder if she did arrange for a second cup. I should have asked him.
Since he was in and out of trouble over libel, and had acquired a reputation as an anticlerical who didn’t hesitate to assail the pillars of Church and State, it may seem odd that I was being taught by nuns at all, let alone by those belonging to an order which – as they would proudly inform us – had been founded to prepare the mothers of France to teach their sons to resist revolutionary thinking.
It was not odd, though, in the Forties.
I had to go to a convent because in those days schools in Ireland were denominational; almost none were mixed; and if you went to the wrong one, as my small brother did when a Protestant kindergarten opened across the road from our house, a priest appeared on the doorstep to protest. Religion was a tribal badge, and my parents wanted neither to leave the real Ireland, nor to relinquish their feeling for the ideal one whose image had animated the nationalist struggle.
Yet it is fair to say that Sacred Heart schools were less nationalistic than others. The order’s Mother House was in Rome, and the curriculum approved there could probably not find much spacefor Gaelic. This context is unlikely to have been mentioned over the tea cup – or cups. But I could tell that the conversation had been enjoyable. I could tell it by Mother Hogan’s brightening when she mentioned meeting Seán, and his doing the same when he mentioned her. He always liked clever women.
*
Patrick, you chatter too loud
And lift your crozier too high,
Your stick would be kindling soon
If my son Osgar were by.
If my son Osgar and God
Wrestled it out on the hill
And I saw Osgar go down
I would say your God fought well.
Frank O’Connor,
Three Old Brothers and Other Poems,
1936.
Was
St Patrick, Ireland’s first bishop, arrogant, and did he, like many of his successors, lift his crozier too high? My guess is that, as he was more myth than man, nobody knows, especially as I recall my father’s great friend, the Celtic scholar D. A. Binchy, telling us that colleagues of his had come to think that there could have been two or even three St Patricks. Of more immediate interest here is the likelihood that O’Connor’s poem about the pagan Oisín (pronounced Usheen) defying the saint may have been fuelled by anger against recent Irish bishops.
Politically, their lordships were often autocratic. They had condemned the Fenians in the 1860s and
She impressed my mother and, more surprisingly, Seán, who had till then taken no interest in my education. Now, however, he wrote Mother Hogan a letter saying, among other things, that hehoped the new school would have some lay teachers, since girls of my age might need access to women with some experience of the world to whom they could turn for advice.
Mother Hogan invited him to tea. I don’t know what they said to each other, but the meeting seemed to have been a success. They must have amused and challenged each other, for I think there were subsequent teas. She wanted him to know that nuns were less unworldly than he thought, but may have been hampered in her argument by convent etiquette. If she stuck to the rules, she would not have had tea herself, but would have sat there watching him drink his. The tray, unless she countermanded the usual arrangement, would have arrived with a single cup and saucer, and departing from custom might have been tricky. I wonder if she did arrange for a second cup. I should have asked him.
Since he was in and out of trouble over libel, and had acquired a reputation as an anticlerical who didn’t hesitate to assail the pillars of Church and State, it may seem odd that I was being taught by nuns at all, let alone by those belonging to an order which – as they would proudly inform us – had been founded to prepare the mothers of France to teach their sons to resist revolutionary thinking.
It was not odd, though, in the Forties.
I had to go to a convent because in those days schools in Ireland were denominational; almost none were mixed; and if you went to the wrong one, as my small brother did when a Protestant kindergarten opened across the road from our house, a priest appeared on the doorstep to protest. Religion was a tribal badge, and my parents wanted neither to leave the real Ireland, nor to relinquish their feeling for the ideal one whose image had animated the nationalist struggle.
Yet it is fair to say that Sacred Heart schools were less nationalistic than others. The order’s Mother House was in Rome, and the curriculum approved there could probably not find much spacefor Gaelic. This context is unlikely to have been mentioned over the tea cup – or cups. But I could tell that the conversation had been enjoyable. I could tell it by Mother Hogan’s brightening when she mentioned meeting Seán, and his doing the same when he mentioned her. He always liked clever women.
*
Patrick, you chatter too loud
And lift your crozier too high,
Your stick would be kindling soon
If my son Osgar were by.
If my son Osgar and God
Wrestled it out on the hill
And I saw Osgar go down
I would say your God fought well.
Frank O’Connor,
Three Old Brothers and Other Poems,
1936.
Was
St Patrick, Ireland’s first bishop, arrogant, and did he, like many of his successors, lift his crozier too high? My guess is that, as he was more myth than man, nobody knows, especially as I recall my father’s great friend, the Celtic scholar D. A. Binchy, telling us that colleagues of his had come to think that there could have been two or even three St Patricks. Of more immediate interest here is the likelihood that O’Connor’s poem about the pagan Oisín (pronounced Usheen) defying the saint may have been fuelled by anger against recent Irish bishops.
Politically, their lordships were often autocratic. They had condemned the Fenians in the 1860s and
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