Letter to Erp. Going to the Convent.

It has finally stopped raining. Sod's Law has prevailed. When people have time off from school and work on Saturday and Sunday, it rains. Then the weather clears up for a sunny, warm week. I don't remember this happening when I was a child. Perhaps it doesn't matter to children anyway. Playing in the rain and splashing in puddles can be as much fun as skipping in the sun.

In 1951, when we finally settled into a permanent home, I started at the nearest school which was St Joseph's Catholic School, a primary school for children aged from five years to twelve or thirteen, from whence they moved to St Catherine's College next door, a secondary school, both institutions run by the Dominican nuns. The huge basilica overshadowed both schools - we all spent a lot of time in the basilica - singing and praying. The nuns lived in the adjacent convent and there were about thirty of them. Boys went to St Joseph's until they turned seven, then they went to the Marist Brothers' School, boys only. St Joseph's was ten minutes walk (or half an hour's dawdle) from home and all children walked to school. As we left our respective homes in a trickle, so as we got closer to the school the trickle turned into a stream of children, then a flood, then a veritable deluge. Four extra classrooms were built whilst I was there which now are unused, as is the whole primary school. St Catherine's has been turned into both primary and secondary and caters for both boys and girls. The school I attended for seven years is now derelict. The Marist Brothers' school disappeared twenty years ago.

The street we lived in had thirty houses with ten of them holding forty children. At least ten houses were inhabited by older people whose children had grown up and moved away. The other ten I cannot remember. Possibly they held some more children but older, in their teens and of no interest to me at six. Now I live in a street of thirty houses where there are six children. Three of these children belong to a single mother and this little family arrived lately, so they could move on again at any time. This is population control observed in microcosm, a phenomenon I can see and measure within my own little area. I am not saying it is a bad thing, this not having too many children. Being Catholic and having witnessed the end result of uninterrupted breeding by order of the Pope and his 'celibate' minions and also being a woman, I am wholeheartedly in favour of a woman deciding how many children her health (mental and physical) can bear. I went to school with children who had built up boots, leg irons, health problems from a bread and jam diet, cleft palates and hare lips, sickly (or dead) mothers, children who slept three to a bed, who coughed throughout the year, (as I did), and children who, when I look back with the knowledge, were obviously suffering from sheer neglect, having been lost in the crowd of other siblings.

Nevertheless, the Dominican nuns did their best. They were wonderful women. They wore the same garments they had worn in the 18th century. A starched head dress with flaring wings each side of their faces, a veil attached which flowed down past their shoulders, a full length habit with sleeves loose enough at the wrists to put their hands into, and a huge set of rosary beads attached to a broad leather belt at their waists. They were immaculate and smelt always of soap. The classrooms were always polished and clean with flowers in vases (you could always get a smile and genuine pleasure by taking a bunch of flowers to the teacher, at the risk of the other kids nudging each other and hissing at you) and all children at the convent changed from street shoes into slippers for wear in the classrooms. This was quite a good idea - it made the place quieter.

My first teacher when I was six was a fat old nun named Sister Hoffbar. I thought she was about a hundred, but she was probably just on the right side of sixty. She had the five and six year olds (the primers) and taught the alphabet and printing. We had to come out literate but not much else as the real hard grind would begin at seven years of age. Anyway, there was an enormous amount of religion to be got through in the form of stories, praying (prayers to be learned) and attendance at the basilica which we could all see out the window - the House of God! In the middle of the classroom was a huge potbellied oven with a square fire guard around it and every morning when we arrived this was red hot. This was the only classroom to be so equipped, but primers were considered just out of babyhood and were a privileged little lot. We put on our slippers and warmed ourselves as we wished. Sister Hoffbar was rather like a black and white version of Mrs Santa and the children were cuddled and smiled at quite a lot. Every one of us was made to feel we were her special little child, no mean feat when there must have been thirty of us. There was never a raised voice, never impatience, never anger from her. The end result was that we were all, without exception, happier to be at school than to be at home and this delight lasted most of us until puberty.

But, ah well, we must all grow older and at seven years of age we moved into a more academic environment. The boys disappeared thank goodness. They were inclined to be loose cannons on the deck. Colin Klein wet his pants one day and disgusted and horrified all the little girls. Simon and Richmond Low were Chinese brothers. Simon was the older but a bit slow, and he had been kept back a year. They sat together. Simon always had the runny nose, (two great, thick candles which stopped at his upper lip and which he never seemed to notice, not even to sniff them back in) and Richmond always had the handkerchief. John Horan showing off got stuck in the lift up seat of the double desk and Sister Hoffbar had to call in Old Frank to unscrew the seat. Old Frank was the handyman around the school, a somewhat daft old pensioner but still capable of doing little jobs, including lighting the big fat stove in the primers room every morning at about seven a.m. I can still see him in my mind's eye, as I saw him when I was six and seven, and I remember how I dismissed him completely as being anything other than - well - something like a slave. What little autocrats small children can be. Old Frank moved like a ghost around and through the school doing the menial tasks until he disappears from my memory when I was about ten.

Now the nuns did something which most pupils in schools will not see. I have heard of 'Renaissance Men', but every one of my teachers was a'Renaissance Woman'. They were educated (some of them had two degrees and a vocational qualification), spoke Latin as a matter of course, possibly French, knew about diet, art, literature, current affairs, music, and handcrafts - most of them embroidered, gardened, or sang.