A bag of nerves not helped by Dad's friendly advice

My Leaving Cert: Fair City's Claudia Carroll."It wasn't as though I hadn't tried. I had even gone on aschool trip to Dingle so we could all visit Peig Sayers' grave, although howI ever figured this would improve my Irish, I couldn't tell you. All I canremember is that it was covered in graffiti, a bit like JimMorrison's in Père Lachaise in Paris, but slightly lessrespectful."

We'd all worked so hard, practically sweated blood, and were so fraught with nerves that the nuns should have doled out Valium to everyone in my year.

But, curiously, the morning of my first Leaving Cert exam was like something out of a sit com.

In those far-off days, the first exam was always bloody Irish. Two papers in one day. Cruel. Never a natural linguist, I was a complete bag of nerves having made a right mess of the oral exam. I had been asked what I wanted to do when I left school and coolly replied that I wanted to be a bangharda. A complete lie, of course, but it was the only spiel I'd actually gone to the bother of learning off by heart.

"And why do you want to be a bangharda?" the tester had asked politely, as Gaeilge. I beamed back at him, confident of my rehearsed reply.

"Because," I answered, trying very hard to put on a west of Ireland accent, "I've always wanted to walk the streets at night."

The walk back to the door was one of the longest of my life.

And it wasn't as though I hadn't tried. I had even gone on a school field-trip to Dingle so we could all visit Peig Sayers' grave, although how I ever figured this would improve my Irish, I couldn't tell you. Other schools went on skiing trips to Austria; we went to a grave in Dingle. All I can remember is that it was covered in graffiti, a bit like Jim Morrison's in Père Lachaise in Paris, but slightly less respectful. "Die bitch Peig" was one aerosol eulogy I do remember.

Coached by my best friend, who now, surprise surprise runs a successful language school, I thought phrases like "Sean mála is ea Peig". (Peig is an old bag) "Agus bhí sí briste" (And she was broke) were enough to get me that elusive pass, but in the countdown to the exam, even my teacher, a woman with the patience of a Tibetan monk, despaired of me. "Write down the exact, polar opposite to what you think is the correct answer," she would shriek in total exasperation, "and you'll be right."

Eventually, she gave even this up as a bad job (I thought the Modh Coinníollach was a TV show) and we reached a compromise of sorts. She'd send me out to feed the meter on Stephen's Green where her car was parked, during Irish grammar. The very act of sitting in her classroom listening to it being spoken, she reckoned, was confusing me.

Then there was my Dad. Knowing I was a bag of nerves, he had volunteered to drive me into the first exam and I gratefully clambered into the passenger seat, with a clutch of Irish notes in my sweating hands, always a great believer that sometimes you could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, even at this eleventh hour. I was frantically trying to learn off last minute phrases in the vain hope that some of it might just stick as Dad launched into, "The Pep Talk".

"Now, no one knows better that me how hard you worked," he began, sounding like one of those motivational speakers, the 'you-can-change-your-life-in-seven-days' type. "I'd see you studying away, night after night, till well after ten, sometimes eleven o'clock" I looked at him in that "your point being?" way that only teenagers can really carry off.

"And all that matters to your Mother and I is that you put in the spadework. And sure, the way I look on it, isn't the Inter Cert only really a sort of dress rehearsal for the Leaving? A trial run, sort of thing. So you just take the pressure off yourself and relax in that exam hall today, we won't mind how you do at all. If you fail everything, at least you'll have got in a good practice run for the Big one. Now if you fail the Leaving in two years time, that's another story altogether. We'd kill you."

I looked at him in disbelief.

"Dad," I said, trying to keep calm. "This is my Leaving."

Claudia Carroll's debut novel, He Loves Me Not..He Loves Me will be published by Transworld in September.