I botched my Leaving 50 years ago, but it put me on right path
As Yeats used say long ago ‘All’s changed, utterly changed’, and you know t’wouldnt be as bad if we put it down to advancing old age or something like that - but no, it’s not that, whatever it is at all!
Ah yes, the times surely are a changing and it seems like we have no control over it. Fifty years ago this very month, I finished my schooling with the Leaving Certificate Exam. Now, I know I wasn’t the brightest student, or maybe I simply didn’t study enough - one way or another, I was very disappointed when the results came out.
Back in 1972, I got eight or nine Honours in what we then called the Inter Cert and I kinda thought for the Leaving I might surely get four. It never happened and my confidence that I’d do well in English and History was shattered on the morning of the results in August.
Yes, I got Honours in Irish - I think it was an A1 - but that was it. It came as no surprise at all that I failed Pass Maths. My Maths result showed I got NG, which was the equivalent of less than 13% - half a century later, I still can’t do division or multiplication, I can add and subtract reasonably well but it takes time.
Going to university or any third level college was not high on my priority list back in 1974 and failing Maths was a guarantee that a lot of ‘doors’ were closed to me.
I enjoyed school in so far as I liked reading and writing and loved Irish and History. In the world of today, nearly everyone that does the Leaving goes on to Third level but it wasn’t that way half a century ago and a few lads that started with me in St Colman’s in 1969 dropped out of education after a few months - and got on fine in life.
Sometimes, I reflect on my grandfather and my father - neither of whom I knew. They both got very basic education. My grandfather died in 1951, the year before my parents married. Ten years later, my father was dead. Neither of them had a brother so I suppose it was more or less kind of pre-ordained that they would end up farming.
By all accounts, my grandfather Batt was a great farmer, though he never liked self-praise and tended to downplay his agricultural achieve-ments. He also seemed to be a fairly shy man - he never allowed a photograph, or ‘picture’ as they called it, of himself be taken!
My father then had a brilliant mind, and as so many people told me ‘he was great with his hands’ - a trait that I haven’t inherited!
Leaving five young children behind when he sadly died at the age of just 48 in 1961, it sometimes saddens me that I have no memories whatsoever of him.
Growing up, I was lucky to have met so many relations, friends and neighbours who told me so much about Dada. As a child, I often wondered were people exaggerating about his skills and mechanical ability, but apparently not.
Just this week, his oldest surviving cousin Nora O’Brien, nee Sheehan, died in her 96th year. I loved to listen to Nora tell of her young days in the 1940s when she’d cycle from her home in Glentrasna, Ballynoe, to Bartlemy to visit my grandmother. She spoke of my father and Auntie Jo in a manner which told me she was very close to her Arnold cousins.
Nora was of that generation that valued kith and kin in a special way. She was a fount of knowledge and I will miss her memories and her wisdom.
You know, growing up I felt we had a happy childhood, despite not having a father figure.
She seemed to take it in her stride and her Twomey brothers were great to her. Then we had Paddy Geary as our work man. He started here in the late 1940s in my grandfather’s time and toiled on our farm until 1981.
Neighbours were good too and there was and still is great ‘nature’ in people in the countryside. It might have been bringing in the hay with rain coming, calving a cow, dehorning cattle, or giving a hand with fencing.
I think as a child in the 1960s that money wasn’t the be all and end all of life back then. We certainly weren’t well off but we had enough to eat and grew most of our own food.
They used to say that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and how true that was, and a policy of waste not, want not was always practised on our farm.
They say time can play tricks on the mind, and maybe we do tend to look back through rose-tinted glasses sometimes. One thing is certain though, that years back, when the summer came, you knew it - and there would be no need for a fire in the room in June!
Of a normal June or July day 50 or 60 years ago as children, we would be out playing this time of year ’til close to 10pm most nights. It might be hide and seek or Cowboys and Indians but this much I know - the stones in the ditches would be hot from the day’s sun and you could feel that warmth coming from the ditches.
The vagaries of climate change and global warming are many and varied and in some cases simply inexplicable. There were a few nights last week that would perish the Danes, and then in places like Mecca it’s over 50C, so where’s it all going to end - no-one knows anymore.
We have Tipp ‘bate’ alright in the hurling but no hay made yet, not to worry as most of the old-timers wouldn’t even dream of cutting a meadow before the first of July.
I suppose I was never destined to go farming and certainly had no ambition in that direction, but sometimes fate intervenes in the strangest manner.
Five decades later, I have grown closer to the land.
Was it John F. Kennedy quoting JK Chesterton when saying ‘Don’t ever knock down a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place’?
Sure, I know every stone, I recall every tree, and in truth I’m glad I didn’t get great Leaving results in 1974.
If I did, God only knows where I’d be now!
App?
