A window of opportunity

The first school I went to was St Eugene's primary, a small school in the shadow of St Eugene's Cathedral on the edge of the Bogside in Derry. I went there when I was five years of age in 1955. I think on the first day I might have blubbered for a moment or two - nothing more than that - then I caught myself on.

It was a school in a working-class area and in Derry at that time there was a lot of social deprivation, poor housing and unemployment, and the school was very cramped. But all those deficiencies were made up for by the fact that the teachers were very good. The principal of the school was Sr Xavier, a great nun from Co Leitrim, and most of the teachers were lay teachers.

At that time the Eleven Plus was just in its infancy. Like everyone else, I was taken from our school and marched to a school several miles away to do the exam. It was almost like being on another planet. I was one of those designated by the Eleven Plus a failure at age 10 or 11.

I really enjoyed primary school, though. I had no problem at all in school and no difficulty with the schoolwork, so I enjoyed the experience. But for some reason I found this one exam on this one day something I wasn't able to deal with. I've always put that down to the fact that we were taken out of our own school to do it. I thought it was a very strange, disconcerting experience.

Your future vis-a-vis whether you went to a grammar school or to secondary school was effectively decided by one examination. I went from St Eugene's primary to the Christian Brothers, Brow of the Hill, in the Bogside area. It was a large secondary school sandwiched between Bishop Street and the Leckey Road, adjacent to St Columb's College. The successes in the Eleven Plus went to the college and those of us who were designated failures went to the Brow of the Hill, Christian Brothers.

I found it an absolutely dreadful experience. The vast majority of the teachers at the school were decent, kindly people and there was quite a number of Christian Brothers who were very good, but there were three or four, brothers and lay teachers, who made going to school a terrible experience because of their approach to teaching and their dependence on corporal punishment.

In mathematics, English, chemistry and possibly also art, there was an oppressive atmosphere. I found it very demotivating and I know many classmates lived in fear of going into some of these classes. What was really damaging was a number of these people were involved in key subjects like mathematics and English. My strongest memories of school were occasions when pupils were being beaten by teachers who, in my view, were not psychologically suited to teaching at all. My feeling going into their classes was one of dread - and I know I wasn't the only one.

We liked anything in school that took us out of the classroom. That's why we had a great love of sports. Myself and my two brothers won something like 12 medals for Gaelic games in Celtic Park. Of course, we would have played anything. We played soccer, we liked swimming, athletics. We were very sporting in our outlook and some of the Brothers encouraged that tremendously.

I was very quiet and well-behaved and never ever got into trouble in school. I never took days off or, as they say in Derry, "dobbed" school. I was interested in the academic side. I liked geography and I had a very good teacher, a man called Paddy Cannon who was really, really nice, someone who didn't resort to the use of corporal punishment. I liked English as a subject, though I didn't like the English teacher at all. I liked reading and still read a lot, but I actually found the whole school experience not conducive towards a proper education. It had a big psychological effect on me as an individual.

I couldn't get away from school quickly enough. I left when I was 15 years of age with no qualifications. I've always put myself down as a late developer. I graduated from the Brow of the Hill to the "Open University of the Bogside" and the whole civil rights movement. I had a much better education on the streets than I had within the confines of four walls.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly