`The brothers made us. For better or worse'

You want to know what the leather was like? It was pain. Bad, bad, pain. Then paralysis. Then kudos. What was it like? The leather was theatre.

- Give me your hand Mister.

You supplied a hand.

- Not that one. The other one.

Heh heh. Little victory. You knew he was going to say that. Now he has hold of your strongest hand, the one you froze under the tap on the way across the yard. Sucker. Swoosh. Smack. Aahhhhg!

- Be quiet or you'll get more.

Swoosh! Smack! Nnnnnng.

The thing I remember about the brothers, even the ones I liked, was how amazingly capable of rage they were. They could snap quicker than the weather and suddenly the leather or a butty piece of bamboo would be cutting the air above your head.

I am thinking now of being in The Office with two friends on a punctuality misdemeanour. It is early afternoon and the sun is shining. The man with the leather is suddenly in a lather. Red faced and about to act.

Swoosh. Smack. Aaaahhhhg.

Six times. Then. Unsated.

- Give me you other hand now. Bastard. Six on each? For being late? He grabs the unfrozen, untreated hand. And so it went. Thirty-six broadshouldered, rage-venting slaps administered. The sunlight catching the chalk dust flying up off his soutane and holding the motes hanging there in the light. I went first (being last was worst, the torture of anticipation) and reeled around with my hands buried under my armpits as the final 24 swooshes descended on Mono and Clarkey. We were 12. Because there were three of us nobody cried.

Afterwards we ran to the jacks and kept our hands under cold water for five minutes and said the f-word over and over again. Pain turned to a numbness which lasted for the whole afternoon. We got back to the class and showed the red welts on our hands to other badasses. We wore them like stigmata. Six on each!

- What was it like?

Bleedin hurt.

- Nah, the leather.

Whatsit look like?

It was a foot long with a handle cut into one end. Two stout pieces of leather sewn together with, it was rumoured, a row of old pennies sandwiched in between. The leather. That was as bad as it got for me. I'd say, like generations did, that it did me no harm, but the thought of a child of mine having his or her hands numbed for a day fills me with rage. Worse. Writing this revives the sick-in-the-stomach fear which visited me when the possibility of punishment loomed. Things float back into view. I remember sitting in a car one evening a few years ago interviewing a sportsman whose time in the school had overlapped with mine somewhat. We were reminiscing and I mentioned a specific brother and suddenly this man was pleading with me and urging me not to mention that brother's name in any article concerning him.

That in microcosm is the Christian Brothers' problem. Five years shared with them within the walls of a grey austere building in Fairview left me with mostly good memories and an abiding affection for the school and many of the teachers. St Joseph's in Fairview is a thriving, wonderful school today, with an extraordinarily fine headmaster. I'm glad to have gone there. And yet and yet. Those unimaginable furies. The suspicion that some guys had it worse. The brothers have almost vanished now, but back then they patrolled Joey's with such silent efficiency that we often wondered if they had wheels rather than feet under their skirts. Of all the teaching staff, we feared them the most. They were the crack troops. To a man they believed in corporal punishment and to a man they carried their hair-trigger tempers with the safety catch off. A couple of them too carried reputations for being "bent".

In our small world they were "bennies" or "benders" and fearing the derision of our peers more than anything else on earth, we avoided being alone with them. Looking back, the real world of actual sexual abuse seemed beyond our imagining; we steered clear of those men like we'd steer clear of jellyfish on Dollymount Strand. We never knew anyone who'd been stung. It was just something we did.

These days I have no confidence in my past. I look back all these years later and there are a couple of incidents and a couple of men I wonder about. To me we were all tough, raucous and fearless kids, and for most of us avoiding hurt was a matter of being able to run or being able to fight or being able to squeal. I took that for granted and moved on. Now I've seen so many brothers who once had nicknames and reputations leaving courtrooms with anoraks on their heads and cuffs on their wrists that I wonder. I search the reports for familiar names. I take care with the jokes I make. I thought until recently that my schooling experience was almost universal. In the 20 years since Joey's, I've never had a conversation with a Christian Brothers graduate from any school who didn't remember one or two of his erstwhile mentors as having a reputation for being dangerous to be alone with. I know now that these hilarious reminiscences must have been more painful for some than others.

Until recently, we remembered it all with reflex humour and some affection. From Joey's I remember one brother and the high comedy of his chemistry experiments - afternoons when we would evacuate to the yard as he dashed around inside opening the sash windows and we took bets on whether or not the fumes would kill him this time. I remember how easy it was to nick his potassium permanganate or whatever that substance was which fizzed around so brilliantly when we tossed it into a toilet bowl. I remember the industrial-strength republican views of one brother and the endless days spent parsing sentences for him. I recall the intensity of the Irish classes, given by another brother, the sheer struggle to keep up.

The years go by, however, and the bad corrodes the good. So few things in the Ireland of the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies were as they seemed to be then. I know a woman who found out that the priest who married her had been convicted on multiple counts of child abuse and she felt a stain on her entire happy marriage. Those hands had presided over her union.

The Brothers, as the song says, made us, for better or worse. Most of us came out with an education and a chance we didn't have before we went in. Our lives with them weren't dark. They were just schooldays. Yet each of us is braced, waiting to discover that some sick man cast a stain on our memories. Waiting to know that this went on and that went on many years ago in our little world.

A world before the invention of public relations, in a world beyond the repair of public relations.