over what I would have liked to do to him. In my imagination, I answered him with a string of cutting, Oscar Wilde-style bon mots and told him to take out his frustrations on some other poor victim, not on me. I picked up his cane, snapped it over my knee, told him, ‘If you need this to be a teacher, then get another job,’ picked up my bag, and strode manfully out of the classroom. Of course, the reality was I did what any other terrified 10-year-old would have done: cowered, stayed silent and then slunk back to my seat.
Another time, I was caned for mixing up two words when I recited the Catechism – a question-and-answer book with simple illustrations that we had to learn off by heart. There were no ambiguities, no grey areas: you either knew the answers word-perfect or you were in big trouble. The Catechism started off:
Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is our Father in Heaven, the creator of all things.
Then there was some pretty odd stuff about God the Father, God the Son and the third member of the Holy Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, at which point it got really weird. When I accidentally said two words the wrong way round, the meaning of what I had said was 100 per cent the same, yet still I was caned for my mistake.
I never told my mum and dad about incidents like these, and to be honest, although they were loving parents, I think they would have just shrugged if I had. That was how things were back then. You had no choice but to deal with it.
Television had launched in Ireland in the early 1960s and one of the big programmes was Tolka Row, our weekly soap opera. An early series ended with a cliff-hanger as Sean, the decent but rebellious son played by Jim Bartley, crashed his car and sat motionless in the driver’s seat as the credits rolled. They filmed the scene at the top of Foster Avenue, about a hundred yards from my house, and hordes of us excited kids swarmed over the set all day.
On another occasion, they filmed an ad for crisps at the 64A bus stop by our house. A man crunched into a crisp and suddenly a bowler hat-wearing, brolly-carrying businessman who had been walking past him was clinging to the top of the bus stop. The idea was that the crisps were that crispy the noise had frightened the guy and propelled him skywards, but nobody making the ad seemed to be having fun and the actor spat the crisps out as soon as he heard the word ‘Cut!’ I saw the ad on TV months later. It looked really stupid.
When I turned 11, it came time to leave Kilmacud and start secondary school. John, Peter and Dermot had gone to Oatlands School, which was run by the Christian Brothers, but my mum had decided the education there was barbaric so Gerard and I were packed off to Blackrock College, another mile down the road from Kilmacud.
That was typical of Annie. She was absolutely determined that all of her children would get a good education, and it is to her credit that nearly all of us eventually went on to get a college degree. John and Peter were the first to head off to University College Dublin. John later went to London to work in advertising, then came back to McConnell’s, which became Ireland’s largest marketing communications business. In later years, he became chairman of McConnell’s Advertising, adjunct professor of marketing at Trinity College, a non-executive director of the Irish Times and, for a while, a board member of the Abbey Theatre. He’s an expert on branding and in 2006 wrote a very well-received book, The Importance of Being Branded. Having also written a doctoral thesis, he is now Dr Fanning.
Peter and I had occasional rows as boys but mostly got on just fine. He now lives in Canada, where he has taught English in Vancouver for the last twenty-five years. My next brother, Gerard, has always been huge into literature and has published four books of poetry to date. There was sometimes a degree of one-upmanship between him and John. One family Christmas, Gerard proudly produced a not-yet-published anthology of new Seamus Heaney poems – then John trumped him by flourishing a signed version of the same book!
As for me, I have never bought into the cliché that your schooldays are the best days of your life but I had a fantastic time at Blackrock. It is the best-known rugby school in Ireland, with alumni including Brian O’Driscoll, Luke Fitzgerald, Leo Cullen and Bob Casey, but neither Gerard nor I ever played rugby or were put under any pressure to do so, for which I remain hugely grateful.
Gerard was two years ahead of me at Blackrock and spent five years in the same class as a lanky kid called Bob Geldof with a mass of bouffant hair and an intense manner. Geldof always stood out a little: he just looked different from everybody else, and was the first boy around our way to ride a BMX bike. He and Gerard were mates and one year they went off to England together to do a summer holiday job shelling peas at a factory in Peterborough.
Academically, I again did OK at Blackrock while never setting the world alight. There were five graded classes, from A to E, and I was happy to be in B for a few but mostly in C, which was where I felt I belonged. I didn’t struggle but nor was I in the academic A-league.
Actually, this may be just my self-serving twist on things, but I’m glad that I was middling as a student. There are definitely downsides to being an academic over-achiever. Just last year I watched a documentary about prodigies who went on University Challenge years ago, and most of them seem to be fucked-up and crazy nowadays. You wouldn’t want to be one of them: the cleverest of all was drinking nine pints every day. At least that is one life I managed to escape by not being too brainy.
I was even happier in Class C because my two best friends were also there, middle-achievers like me. They were called Jerry Coyle and Mel Reilly, and throughout our teenage years at Blackrock, and beyond, the three of us were inseparable. We hung out together every day, and, remarkable as it may seem, forty years on Jerry and Mel remain my two best friends in the world.
I met Jerry on my very first day in Blackrock. He told me he lived in Mount Merrion at 42 Wilson Road, right round the corner from my house in Foster Avenue. I scornfully took him to task and explained he was mistaken: ‘That’s ridiculous, I know everybody on Wilson Road, and I don’t know you!’ I even reeled off a list of people I knew on the street, but he stuck to his story.
After school we walked home together and I still thought he was having me on. When he walked up the path of No. 42 and rang the bell I expected him to run away, but his mother answered the bell and asked him how his first day had gone. I couldn’t believe I had lived so close to the guy my whole life and never noticed him. We then made up for it by being virtually inseparable for the next twenty years, until he emigrated to America.
Mel Reilly came to Blackrock a year later than Gerry and me when he transferred from the college’s junior school called Willow Park. He lived in a huge house on Cross Avenue and was the oldest of five boys. Mel is now a teacher in Dundrum and even today there is hardly a day goes by that I don’t hook up with him.
Jerry and Mel weren’t much into football yet that was what occupied most of our spare time in a jumpers-for-goalposts kind of way. Sometimes we would play on the hockey pitches at Belfield, over the road from us at University College Dublin, or in the car park of the Stella cinema, despite the fact that it was a steep slope.
Mostly, though, we would play three-and-in on Foster Avenue itself. The gateway of my friend Gary Byrne’s house served as perfect goalposts. For a more elaborate and arguably somewhat grisly ball game called ‘Sick, dying and dead’ we used a wall on Owenstown Park at the entrance to UCD. Nowadays Foster Avenue is one long car park, but back then it saw hardly any traffic. After the game we would sit by Teevan’s newsagent and eat Cowboy bars and drink Kool Pops or, if we had a little more money to spare, lavish 2d on a Trigger, a Flash bar or, the tastiest of them all, a Macaroon bar.
Dermot Morgan would sometimes join in our kick-abouts. He lived five doors down from Jerry on Wilson Road and in later life starred as Father Ted on TV. Dermot was a couple of years older than us and was in my brother Gerard’s class. We
