woman. She loved being at the heart of the hustle and bustle of a big family and always welcomed any friends we brought round, whatever time of the day or night it was. She was tall and slim and beautiful and somehow always well-turned-out. I’ve no idea how she found the time.
Annie was fun and she was gregarious. She’d have these phone conversations that lasted for hours, and then whenever people called round, she would sit in the kitchen holding court. Locally, she was well known for doing that – and for her homemade biscuits that she dispensed to all-comers. There are probably still people in Dublin who drool like Pavlov’s dogs at the phrase ‘Annie’s cookies’.
For my family, money was fairly tight, but my mum was so skilled at budgeting and making do that I don’t remember ever having to really go without. Annie cut our cloth well and knew how to count pennies without making a meal of it. She would do her weekly grocery shop in one supermarket, then think nothing of crossing a busy road to go to a different store a few hundred yards down the road just because the butter was five pence cheaper there.
My mum was a voracious reader. She belonged to two libraries, the Royal Dublin Society and the Pembroke, and I am certain she was the best customer in both of them. She always had three or four books on the go at once – I can still picture them now, stacked up in a little pile on top of the radiator. Each of them invariably had one page with the top right-hand corner turned down, to remind her how far she’d got.
When she wasn’t reading, Annie was usually writing. She would sit down at her desk, take out her pad of Basildon Bond and compose these twenty-page letters to her friends. She had a lot of correspondents, but top of the list was Mrs Rohan, her lifelong friend who owned a chemist shop in Cork.
A lady called Mrs Mooney, known to me as Moo, came and helped my mum out a few times a week with whatever needed doing around the house. Because I was the youngest, she also looked after me and sometimes took me to her house, a lovely flower-covered cottage straight out of Beatrix Potter, opposite the Terisian school on the Stillorgan Road that is now the site of RTÉ’s admin building.
Moo’s husband, Mick, was the chief groundsman there. RTÉ – there was actually no ‘T’ in it at the time, as Ireland still didn’t have television – was moving from Henry Street in the centre of Dublin to its current location and the masts were going up ready for the launch of TV. It’s ironic that I spent so much time there when I was young, given how interwoven my life has since been with RTÉ.
My mum was a very religious woman. While, like most others, I was a good little Catholic boy, by the time I reached my later teens I had actively decided against the Church, but she never made it an issue between us. She just followed her own lights, which in her case meant walking to Mass every single morning for thirty-seven years. I guess it must have rubbed off on me a little in my impressionable early youth, because I spent a number of years as an altar boy in Mount Merrion Church.
I will never forget the trauma of my first day at school. It was such an intimidating experience. I remember standing inside the door of Mount Merrion National School, holding my mother’s hand, and staring in horror at scenes of bedlam. There were so many kids running around and screaming and throwing things, and I just wanted to turn around and run away back home.
Your first school day is extraordinary. I don’t remember one thing about being in the classroom, but I will never forget the chaos of the playground and cloakroom, with all the coats chucked on top of each other. I grew to not mind the school but it’s all a bit of a blur now, except for a couple of the teachers: Mrs O’Callaghan, who lived on our road, and Mrs Hughes. She was all about joined-up writing and I never took to her: she just seemed so very, very old and, more pertinently, old-fashioned.
I rubbed along OK at Mount Merrion School until the age of seven, then the next year it became girls-only, so I had to move on to Kilmacud National School, which was a mile further down the road. Again, what I remember most was the first day – or rather the first week, which must have been once of the worst weeks of my life.
After Mount Merrion, Kilmacud seemed pretty rough. It also looked it. As we waited for a new school to be built at the corner of the Upper and Lower Kilmacud Roads, the classes were held in makeshift prefabs where the Stillorgan Bowling Alley now stands. Soon after they built a shopping centre across the road from it, the first mall in Ireland, and it was considered such a big deal that we were all given a day off to celebrate.
I had thought break times at Mount Merrion School were mad; at Kilmacud it was Armageddon. At lunch break there would be hundreds of kids charging around the yard playing football, smashing into walls or lamping the ball as hard as they could and not caring who it hit or who they hit. Or there would be piggyback fights where you threw punches and tried to push the other guy off his mate’s back. This all happened on concrete: Health & Safety wasn’t such a major concern in those days.
There would always be two teachers patrolling the ground with their hands behind their backs, talking to each other, and every now and then shouting someone’s surname to make it look as if they were in charge. I don’t think I was a particularly delicate child but I really wasn’t into the massive rough-and-tumble and horseplay, so mainly I just tried to stay out of the way.
After the first week, as I grew used to the daily casual violence of the playground, I did OK at Kilmacud. That was the story of my whole academic career: OK. I wasn’t particularly good, bad or indifferent. The only subject I really did well in was English. A typical exercise came when our English teacher asked us to write a four-page essay and I wrote nine pages, which I ended up reading in front of the class. I was mad for James Bond, so my story was all about me being a spy and escaping the enemy by having a bomb hidden in a button in my coat, and pulling it off and throwing it at them. Stupid stuff, really, but it’s still amazing to me how, two generations on, 9-year-old boys still love James Bond.
In terms of discipline, I was fine in school: I never gave teachers a hard time and I always did my homework. This didn’t always protect you though. There was a definite downside to being in school in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s; while I didn’t suffer anything like the horrors of the poor kids who got abused or beaten in Church and industrial schools, there were some bad moments. Children being hit and caned in class was accepted – that was just how it was back then.
As I said, I was never great at Maths but I always did my best. In one lesson though, I dropped a howler. The teacher – and I don’t think I’ll shame him by saying his name, although it’s a close decision – had given us all a textbook with about a hundred pages in it, and on every page there were ten or twenty mental arithmetic questions. Every day he would give us a page of the book as homework, then the next day we had to tell him the answers we had worked out.
One day in class, the teacher started examining us on the sums we should have done the night before and said, ‘OK, let’s hear your answers to page 78.’ Disaster! I had done page 79. I must have had a brainstorm and written down the wrong page number. I thought I might as well come clean so I put my hand up and said, ‘Sorry, sir, but I did the wrong page.’
The teacher just lost it. He went absolutely mad. He pulled me out of my seat and got physical with me, shoving me around the room and screaming in my face, ‘Fanning! I TOLD you it was page bloody 78!’ Everybody in the class went quiet, because they knew it could just as easily be them the next time – this probably happened about three times per week.
Even today, thinking back, I’m staggered at the madness and inhumanity of it all. This grown man, a trained professional, was belittling and ridiculing me, psychologically and physically bullying me for no reason at all other than I had made an innocent mistake! How could a teacher think it was OK to treat a basically blameless child in this way, and did he really think it was educative?
For weeks
