English - not the pit of suffering and doom I 'd been expecting; now c'mon maths, let's rumble

CARIN HUNT:IT ONLY struck me on the way home. Leaving Cert English is DONE. It's over!

Never again will I be required to spell onomatopoeia for “mechanics” marks. Never again will I wish that Shakespeare had given up halfway through and let Claudius just fall down a flight of stairs or something.

The paper wasn’t the pit of doom and suffering I had been expecting. The timing, as always, was difficult – and towards the end I probably frightened a fair few people around me with my frantic clock-watching and constant repositioning of my chair as some kind of misguided coping device.

I apologise in advance if my behaviour in the exam hall gets somewhat more erratic as the days progress – as I imagine it is likely to do; expect bouts of hysterical laughter followed by quiet weeping.

“You may now begin.

As soon as I heard those magic words from the invigilator I was gone, right to the poetry section.

And there they were. Boland, Dickinson AND Frost. It was five seconds of absolute, if peculiar, bliss.

I imagine that when Eavan Boland sat down to write Child of Our Timeshe wanted to reach out to readers, to invoke a response, to touch people in some way. She has no idea how many people she touched today. If the rest of the country was as happy as I was to see her name, she must be getting some very good vibes right now.

I was pleased to open my question with a Hamletquote, albeit a rather short one. And I thought the question was straightforward enough, no "discuss the character of the second gravedigger" that had been mockingly sprawled across Facebook a few nights before.

(The joke was lost on me, and I spent a good 10 minutes panicking about my lack of knowledge on that particular character).

I had only heard two predictions for Hamlet– Claudius and Revenge – and both of them were staring me in the face.

Result!

After the exam, people looked uncharacteristically happy. “What an epic paper!” I heard someone shout from behind me. It seemed that all our pre-exam hysteria had been unnecessary and on the whole people seemed far more coherent and calm on the way out of the exam than on the way in, a good sign.

Now for today. The gloves are off. C’mon maths. Let’s get ready to rumble.

Carin Hunt is a student at Wesley College, Dublin