THIS LIFE Rachael English

THE ROLL BOOK WAS discoloured with age, its spine cracked. But the names were as clear as the day they’d been written, almost 40 years before. ‘There you all are now,’ said Seán Cleary, who was the principal of St Conaire’s National School when I was pupil in the 1970s and 1980s. We’d returned on a big day for the school. After decades of making-do, an extension to the original building had finally been finished.

I began to recite the names on the roll, half expecting to hear a small voice replying ‘anseo’ or a group bellowing out ‘as láthair’. Despite the passage of time, most of them were familiar. ‘Reemagh McEvoy,’ I read, ‘Niall Doyle, Martin Russell, Claudia Diaz.’ The smell of lunch boxes and damp coats came back to me. I could hear the thump of Mrs Foley’s piano and see the mayhem in the yard as skippers competed for space with games of tig, elastics and red rover.

As I read, one of the school’s current teachers joined us. She was taken aback by the number of children on the roll, our names snaking down the page. There were at least 40 pupils in every class, more in some.

I was seven when we moved to Shannon, Ireland’s newest town. Before that, we’d lived in the countryside. My mother says she can still hear the noise: the squealing and whooping and laughing of children at play. In those days, Shannon teemed with children.

Like quite a few of my classmates, I started at St Conaire’s in the middle of the school year. I remember my first day. The class were learning ‘magic squares’, something we’d already covered in my previous school. To my shame, I didn’t own up. I’m sure the teacher was wise to my game, but all the same she rewarded me with a star.

So overcrowded was my new school that classes were taught in the principal’s office, in a store-room, in a pair of drafty prefabs, even in the community hall which was 20 minutes walk away. The modern tables and chairs were supplemented by gnarled wooden desks handed down from who knew where.

And the pupils? We were from everywhere. Many of us were the children of returned emigrants, drawn to Shannon by the promise of work at the airport or the adjacent industrial estate. There were London and Birmingham accents galore. A sizeable number of boys and girls were from Belfast. Others were from Lisburn and Derry. All had been brought south by parents desperate to escape the Troubles.

There were two girls from Chile in our class. Claudia and Jenny were refugees, their families forced to flee after the military coup. Not that we understood any of this. Neither did we properly appreciate the achievements of children who’d arrived with barely a word of English yet managed to become an integral part of school life.

I remember The Sunday Press doing a story about the unusual school with the children who’d come from all over the world. Scores of us poured into the yard to have our photo taken, delighted to get an unexpected break.

Shannon was a good place to be a child. Almost every housing estate had its own playground with a row of swings, a set of iron monkey bars and a clanking see-saw. If you fell – and most of us did – you landed with a crunch on the tarmac. There was a swimming pool, a rare phenomenon in the 1970s. And, in a small flat near the airport, there was a library. We lived on the other side of the town and on Saturdays, a group of us would walk there and back, a mission that took most of the day. The best games were played in the building sites. In those years, houses were popping up everywhere. A new church was built and three new schools. Youngsters would clamber up and down half-formed staircases and launch themselves from walls in a way that seems unimaginable now.

The town wasn’t without problems. Some families arrived with very little. Others had difficulty adapting to their new home. As a child you take a lot on board but don’t necessarily understand. Years later you realise how poor some people must have been, how fractured their families, how difficult their lives.

Back in the present, I put away the roll book and went to see the prized new classrooms. A small party was taking place. There was a cupcake for everyone, their name iced on top. The teacher explained that one of the class, a little girl, was returning to Croatia and her mother wanted to thank her friends. She’d gone about the task with great care, getting the correct spelling for every Irish name.

Around me a hum of young voices spoke about their departing classmate and their spotless new desks. As I listened, I could hear the sound of more memories being formed.

I remember The Sunday Press doing a story about the unusual school with the children who’d come from all over the world