FORTY years ago this week I did my Leaving Certificate. The biggest, laziest, youngest girl in the class, my head was full of lilepop music that summer. I think my whole must have related to it since I have no other memories at all of the time all my revision was done to the tune of The Man from Laramie, and Hernando's Hideaway. If I kept the record player really low in the bedroom I was allowed to play it but they could apparently hear it everywhere so I used to sit on the floor beside it reading my North and Hilliard and rapping out the words.
"With ask, command, advise and strive. But translate infinitive." It went almost magically to the Johnston Brothers version of Hernando. Try it. And you could sing the prime ministers of Britain to Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White too, if you had a mind to.
It was too late to put anything to the tune of Rock Around the Clock, because we knew the real words too well and it wouldn't work trying to put in the French verbs that were conjugated with etre or whatever had to be sealed into the brain in those last weeks and days.
There was a thing in trigonometry, the proof of a sine or a cosine I think, it went beautifully to It's Almost Tomorrow, and in fact I liked it better at the time than the Dreamweavers' version. But some songs were sacred. There were a lot of things I could have sung to Memories are Made of This but I didn't want to destroy the sound of Dean Martin's lovely velvet voice by listing the terms of the various Land Acts or Home Rule bills. And of all the songs that summer, it was the one I loved best.
I was terrified that somehow I mightn't have any memories. That life would pass by and I wouldn't have enough fresh and tender kisses to look back on, not to mention stolen nights of bliss. I was dying for a stolen night of bliss. It was the only thing that kept my head down to do any study at all. Whatever chances there might be of getting together a stolen night of bliss if you had the Leaving, if you hadn't, then there wouldn't be any chance whatsoever.
I remember that I got a small piece of steak with my tea when the others would just have sausages. My father and I, the workers, would get steak. It was meant to give me great energy for all the studying I was doing but in fact, of course, it only made me feel guilty.
The great surge of energy only went into dancing Mambo Italiano round the bedroom to myself wondering did I look like Rosemary Clooney and singing Rock and Roll Waltz in what I thought was a terrific take off of Kay Starr. The steak fed my delusions that I would in fact be a performer and that the Leaving Cert was not only not essential, it might even hold me back.
But I was the eldest of the family so there was more than usual depending on this result. They would get some kind of inkling from my score whether the show was on the mad, or if they had been fooling themselves and we were all as thick as planks.
SO I decided regretfully that I would have to get it to keep the peace, and to reassure them. And once it was got I could go off on stolen nights of bliss and be "discovered".
I would be an Educated Rock Star and when Dickie Valentine would lead me on stage with, him to do a reprise of The Finger of Suspicion.. pointing at me all the while, no one need ever know that I had got my Leaving Cert, I could just keep quiet about it.
I suppose it all proves I wasn't nearly old enough to leave school or indeed to be allowed out anywhere if these were my views. I am trying to be honest but "discovery" is definitely what must have been uppermost in my mind that May and June. Suez hadn't happened, Hungary hadn't happened, Ronnie Delaney's Olympics were later. I sure as hell wasn't thinking about knowledge for the sake of it or an academic career, just scrape in, do Law, be a judge or something until I was discovered. I thought a lot about Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier and a bit about Krushchev and atheistic communism, but much, much more about someone, hopefully Tony Bennett, who was going to Take My Hand because I was a Stranger in Paradise.
I remember the first day of the Leaving Cert and there being some idiotic row at school about whether we should wear our uniforms or not. There was a View that said we should, it would sort of straighten us up, make us realise that this was all work and part of the studying process. There was another more liberal View which won in the end that it didn't matter if we went in our vests and knickers as long as we tried to write down what we had been learning for over a decade.
We would meet girls and even fellows from other schools on the way home and compare the questions. You didn't really want to talk to anyone who hadn't done it. We all hated showing the papers to the teachers and our parents.
The poor teachers would say. "Well at least you knew that didn't you?" stabbing at something and you wouldn't remember whether you had known it or not.
And at home the exam papers were always spread out on the kitchen table and studied by everyone. Even Smokey the disdainful cat used to come and look at them as if he could have got through them with no worries. And they assumed I would have done brilliantly in English.
"Aren't you always telling long rambling stories about things, the essay would have been no trouble, to you," my mother said proudly.
"And those are grand straightforward questions about Shakespeare," my father said approvingly. They were indeed but only for people like himself who had read and understood it all. Not so straightforward for those who had tried desperately to set the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech to the tune of she wears red feathers and a hula hula skirt. And none of them were any good at Maths or Irish so that had to be an unknown quantity, and I did a lot of dealing with the Almighty about good behaviour and putting Stolen Nights of Bliss on hold for the foreseeable future if I got the exam.
And then there was an endless endless summer waiting. I think the sun shone every day but Met Eireann, of course, will tell me that it never came out at all.
And then there was the day the results came. We were in Ballybunion, and we had a Fuller's cake for tea and I was allowed to eat two of the four solid chocolate drops on top myself. And compared to all the Einsteins in Kerry, of course, my Two Honours were a poor thing. And only a Pass in English. Imagine!
Still it was worthy of being celebrated. And it was. In style.
I wish they knew that of all their children, I was to be the least educated of all. But Two Honours in those days served fine to start me off for the rest of my life.
And of course if I had it all over again I would have worked harder, read more, opened my mind, made them prouder of me. But that's only what I think now as I look back on a summer that seems like the other day.