Stefanie Preissner

My memories of Irish college —

Ialways knew Irish college was something I would hate. So why did I go? I’m not writing that last question as the introduction to an answer. I’m actually asking myself the question. I’ve been asking myself the question for the last 15 years or so. Here were the facts I had before I went: − You have to speak Irish − You have to share bunk beds in a room with other girls − Some girls from school are going − There are boys there − You have to do Irish dancing − You have to do Irish dancing with boys − Mass on Sundays is non-negotiable − There is no menu. You are handed your meals − You can only see your family twice in three weeks − There is only one sweet shop − There is a massive hill on Cape Clear Island which you have to walk up every day − You have to play ‘beat the slapper’ and try to kiss more boys than anyone else.

It’s possible I didn’t know about the sweet shop and I probably didn’t know about ‘beat the slapper’. I’d like to think that if I had had those two pieces of information they would have been the final nails in the ‘I’m staying on the mainland’ coffin.

My mam didn’t spend her time looking for ways to get rid of me for extended periods of time. I was already a fairly good Irish student, so I’m not sure how I ended up on that benighted island. But I did. I think it was because my ‘yardstick friend’ was doing it. It was an MDI. I’ll explain...

Everyone has a ‘yardstick friend’ in the eyes of their parents. Maria was mine. My mother had decided, for whatever reason, that Maria O’Sullivan was a good influence on my life. Maria and I were best pals all through primary and secondary school. My mam and hers were friends, and I guess Mam felt they had similar morals, values and ideas about what was best for their kids. Unlike Blythe’s mother (who once booked her kids into a B&B and then left for Spain for a week without telling anyone), Maria’s mam insisted we had a bedtime at sleepovers, made us eat vegetables and always communicated to other parents if we were going to be late home.

Keeping up

My mam’s respect for Maria’s parents meant that anything Maria did, I was allowed and usually encouraged to do. If it was a party, or some activity, I wouldn’t meet resistance if Maria was doing it. When it was anything to do with school or education, if Maria was doing it, I had to do it. Maybe it was like Keeping Up With The O’Sullivan’s. When the talk of Irish college started, I didn’t have strong feelings either way. I said it to Mam and I followed it with the three words that sealed my fate — MDI. Maria’s Doing It. And I was signed up before teatime.

Cape Clear Island is three miles long and one mile wide. It’s on the south-west coast of Ireland. Floating there like a football waiting to be kicked across the Atlantic by the mainland. It’s Ireland’s southernmost island and its population of fewer than 140 people speak Irish as their first language. In my day, there were two Irish colleges on the island. Each year, gaggles of students sailed from the mainland, unencumbered by parents or the labels they’ve accrued in their hometowns, to become students of either Colaiste Pobail Chleire or Colaiste Chiarain. There was endless rivalry between the two colleges and I can’t even remember which one I went to. I think it was CPC. In one of them, you lived in a big boarding-school-type building. In my one, you were scattered around the island, living with the natives. The woman of the house, or bean an ti, was in charge of your house, your meals, your bedtimes, etc.

The island is a gorgeous place to visit. For a day trip or maybe a night or two. In 2001, I spent three weeks on this three-by-one-mile island. I walked about 10 miles a day; I lived on a diet of boiled potatoes and meat of unknown provenance. My only respite was buying freshly made ice-cream off a blind man who made it from goats’ milk. I pretended to kiss ‘boys from the other college’.

I was in a house with two friends and eight strangers. Maria was in a different house to me. I was gutted, but I didn’t have the vocabulary to ask to be changed, and also, I didn’t want to be that girl. Our house was a time warp. It had that curve where the walls meet the floor — you know the one you still see in old hospitals or convents. I’ve never been in an orphanage but every time you see one on TV, they have that floor with the curve.

The house had those walls that were kind of speckled to make them look like marble. Again, it just screamed institution, which was weird because this was a woman’s home. Once you got out of the hallway, that’s when her personality came through. Oh yes. In the rooms, the high, echoing ceilings and the old two-pin sockets in the walls really gave a sense of this woman. As did the endless pictures of the bleeding Sacred Heart of Jesus. Each of the photos had a red lightbulb underneath it. There were no less than three in our room and we weren’t allowed to switch them off. It made our room, with its three rows of bunks, look like a brothel after lights out.

There was no hot water. Ever. Breakfast was a bowl of greasy sausages and three toasters with three sliced-pans lined up next to the TV. There were also generic-brand cornflakes and porridge with a skin over it. I had brought some chocolate with me in my suitcase, but it was gone after I saw what was on offer for dinner on the first day. The Irish for pig is muc. On the pig’s back is ar mhuin na

muice. That’s how I worked out that what was being served was pork slices, boiled potatoes and broccoli which had been boiled since St Patrick roamed the island banishing snakes.

The classes were manageable; after all, I was not bad at Irish. It was all the social stuff and the threat of malnourishment which kept me up at night; the sad eyes of the Sacred Heart pleading with me through the hazy red glow.

Every day I went to the only shop on the island. I didn’t ask for anything in either Irish or English. I just pointed to what I wanted: a packet of Nice biscuits, four packets of Hot Lips, a bag of Maltesers, a bag of Emeralds, a six-pack of 7UP, eight Freddo, a Tangle Twister, a packet of cream crackers, a half-pound of butter, three tomatoes and a packet of salt.

At tea-time, I’d sit with the others and eat the bare minimum, then as soon as I could I’d go to my bunk and spread out the food I had bought. Buttering one cracker with another, I’d lie among my haul and the flavours would remind me of home. I was like a ridiculous refugee, full of sugar and homesickness.

But the other girls seemed to be having a great time. Maria and the Mallow girls were doing cartwheels and being carried on piggy-back by the boys. I had some friends, but I wasn’t making an effort really. I just wanted to be done. That summer was filled with so many ‘nos’ I felt I couldn’t say. We had to kayak around the head of the island on one of the days. I was terrified. I didn’t feel like I was allowed to say no; I wasn’t allowed to feel safe. I went along with the group, fell behind, toppled over, nearly drowned, and everyone was angry with me for being the cause of the activity being cancelled for the next group.

Feet and sweat

I thought people would thank me — after all, everyone was constantly complaining about the smell of the wetsuits. They were eternally damp, always cold, and they smelled like the feet and sweat of a thousand teenage boys — because that’s pretty much what they were made of.

The bathroom was nowhere near the boat house where we got into the wetsuits, so you can be sure people were peeing in them, too. One urban myth that went around like a spliff was about a girl who peed in the wetsuit and it turned pink because of this chemical they sprayed on it and she never lived it down. No one believed it, but I wasn’t going to test it. I was in enough negative equity with my popularity without adding ‘incontinent’ to the list.

Wetsuits are not great for the body conscious. Other girls looked like they could run on to the set of Baywatch. I chose the biggest one they had and felt like a sausage under a grill, about to burst out of the neoprene. I didn’t want to wear it, but I didn’t feel like I could say no.

I had to wear my hair in plaits because one girl in our house was ‘soooo good at doing plaits’ and she was really popular, and if I didn’t let her do it I’d be offending her and she’d exclude me from her in-jokes. I can’t even remember her name, but I still remember her in-jokes. She had little buzzwords, little nudges, and recalls of moments with specific friends that made them feel treasured, and made other people know that they weren’t part of the memories being made.

One of the inside jokes was the phrase, ‘Never, ever question the broccoli’. This phrase would send a group of four of the girls into hysterical, side-holding laughter. I reckon they were all forcing their laughter and none of them actually found it funny. They laughed so hard it

became an armour around the joke. No one could ever find out what the story behind the phrase was because, on hearing it, they’d all burst into this mad Pavlovian laughter until they had to walk away ‘to get some air’.

They excessively used the phrase when there were loads of us around; it was pointed and decisive and awful. I regret not being confident enough to say no to it, to put a stop to the tacit bullying. But I didn’t. Instead, I just question broccoli all the time now, to spite them.

At the nightly ceili, the walls sweat, it drips down their bumpy texture, and the windows are so thick with condensation, it streams down them like rain. The Sony ghetto blaster is plugged in on the stage. The CD track moves from one diddly-eye track to the next. During the brief but terrible silence in between songs, the ceannaire shouts, “Rogha na mbuachailli!”. Boys’ choice. That meant for this song, the choice was for the boys — they could approach any girl they wanted to dance with. When the choice was the girls’, it was a much slower process of getting couples on the floor. The boys were just so much less inhibited.

Even when it was ‘girls’ choice’, it still wasn’t. The boys had no problem saying no, walking away, giggling at the request or pushing their friends forward. I watch the first confident few march to their new flames, who politely accept even if they’re mortified, and take tiny steps out on to the floor. There aren’t enough boys for all the girls, this we’ve already figured out.

I make it easier for everyone by bouncing on the balls of my feet, feigning a need to pee, and then after I’m sure my one hope at an invitation is already mid-jig, I leg it to the toilet. I run fast because the route to the bathrooms was a catwalk of shame. Everyone knew you hadn’t been chosen. None of us knew why. I sat on the lid of the toilet trying to figure it out. The rules in Irish college were different. Weird girls had boyfriends; girls with acne, or braces or speech impediments had boyfriends. You couldn’t say for sure what it was? Was I overly shy? Overly cocky? Too fat? Too tall? Too Cork? I was definitely too something... Maybe it was sweaty. I remember telling myself I was better off because the sweat on my hands would have turned any boy’s stomach and you have to grab hands for the Walls of Limerick.

In the break, the Walls of Limerick crumbled and the walls of shifting built. Teenagers huddled behind sheds, oil tanks and rocks. Designated, less attractive friends stood as outliers keeping sketch, in case the principal came to pull apart couples who were getting too close.

The warm, dark, summer air, the lilt of the traditional music floating out of the open windows, the smell of the sea, the stir of the goats in the next field, the faint smell of someone smoking and me, wondering if I would ever be anyone’s rogha na mbuachailli.