The Children of a lost Generation

 Katie Mc Laughlin reading her own poetry at a recent open Mic night In the Alley Theatre Strabane Co Tyrone N Ireland

The Children of a Lost Generation

Clady school, when I first started it, was by today’s standards primitive. It consisted of two rooms covered with maps of the five continents and an outside dry toilet. It atmosphere was not conductive to learning but then as the master used to say.”What good was education to poor people?”The only place anyone would go was to cut bracken in the Highlands of Scotland. What good a fancy education would be here, he reasoned. It would only have an unsettling effect on the children.

Perhaps he was right!

When I reached the age of six I started school. I could already bless myself and say my prayers. I remember my father (RIP) teaching me to make the letter ‘A’.

“Draw something like a spud,” he would say, “and hang on two arms.” This worked, so the rest of the alphabet was easy.

Sums, never my strong point, were dismissed. So, by the age of six and a half, I was cleaning the range and tidying the classroom along with the other children.

I hated cleaning the black range so I learned to knit. When the teacher found I could knit I was transferred to the knitting corner. There, along with a few other girls I knitted industriously for the Foreign Missions. The teacher had a son out in the missions so we knitted for him and presumably for any other savages that wore socks.

I made my First Holy Communion when I was seven. Again, my father taught me the Catechism because when I was at school I was too busy knitting to bother about learning. I never got past the first class in that room. My mother was always asking was I moving up a class.

I remember the Master stopping me one day and asking me my name.

“Katie Nelis” I answered. He wanted to know why I hadn’t moved into his room. So, I explained that between cleaning and knitting I didn’t have time; and anyway I wasn’t ‘fit’ to move classes.

He was perplexed by my answer.”Child, I’m sure you are not that bad,”

I assured I was. He said he’d give me a ‘test’ and if I passed it I would move into his room. I was both delighted and apprehensive at this turn of events.

It would be fun to change classes. But there was the worry about where the money would come from for new books. There were no freebies in those days (1940s) and money was scarce at home.

I needn’t have worried because I didn’t pass the test.

Here was the test question. – If a farmer saw ten crows on a tree and he shot two of them how many would be left?

I counted laboriously on my fingers. “Eight,” I answered.

“Wrong,” he bellowed. “There would be none because they would all fly away when they heard the shot!”

When Mrs Dwyer heard I was talking to the Master she nearly killed me. I suppose she thought I was grassing her up about the knitting. I assured her I was very happy in her room and went back to the peace and tranquillity of the knitting corner.

When I was eleven I moved into Master Browne’s room.

It was heaven. We sang and sang; when our young voices were raised in song the Master’s eyes would fill up with tears. He loved us to sing ‘The Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon’. ‘The Old Rustic Bridge by the Mill’ and ‘Mother Machree’ was his favourite arias.

There was no formal education as such; if you did your homework fine but if you didn’t it was OK too.

My mother wondered one time if my brother was learning at school and so she set out to visit the Master. When she arrived at the school most of the class were over at the wee burn washing jam jars for the master to sell. I suppose, looking back it was an entrepreneurial enough project. Needless to say, my mother was not amused. She decided my brother would be better carrying “Shoves” so his education came to an end.

Life was happy in those days. No eleven-plus loomed over us – we sang and played and the sun seemed to shine continually.

That I anticipated I would move from one state of bliss to another was summed up in a remark I made to a woman who lived near the school. As I was passing her door one evening she asked me what I was going to do when I left school. I didn’t even have to think.

“I’ll get my hair permed and get married,” I told her.

Yes, the Master was right! I was stupid.

 

My thanks to Katie Mc Laughlin for allowing me to reprint this short story which was first published in ‘The Scribbler” 1997