EUGENE O’BRIEN
The day I ran away from boarding school
MY mammy loves to follow the rugger, so she is in her element just now as the Rugby World Cup is in full swing. For Ireland, hope springs eternal. I hate hope in sport. It’s something to cling on to when really you know it’s a lost cause. But anyway, although rugby is not my number one sport, I love to watch the games with the Mammy. We have roared and cursed and screamed at the telly over the years. We were in Lansdowne Road at the famous quarter-final of 1991 when Gordon Hamilton’s try nearly gave us an impossible win over the Aussies.
Now there is a kind of role reversal in our house, as my father isn’t a sport billy at all. This dates back to his time in a well-known Jesuit rugby-obsessed boarding school where he dodged the rugger to engage with photography and pottery. And, truth be told, I was not always so keen on the sport either. Because I, too, was sent to the same school. They attempted to induct me into the rugby religion. But I resisted it. Indeed I never wanted to be at the school in the first place.
It was the last day of sixth class, running around the playground of St Joseph’s national school, Edenderry, Co Offaly; although feeling happy and excited and carefree, there was the first twinge of a butterfly in my tummy. Something loomed on the horizon. Something had to be faced. There was the whole summer to look forward to but I knew, no matter what, that time was running out — that life would change. I was to start boarding school.
My grandfather had gone there, and his brothers, and my father and his brothers, and my mother’s father — but still I could not deny the panic in my heart when my parents drove away that first day after dropping me off at my new school.
I was shown to my dormitory, I put up my Manchester United posters and tried to envisage my new surroundings as home, but it was useless. It was September 1979, I was 11 going on 12 and was about to break a family tradition. I was running away from boarding school.
Not the school’s fault. Good teachers for the most part. Good group of lads for the most part. If you could ignore the obsession with rugby and the whiff of entitlement, it was pretty OK, but I just knew that this whole boarding school gig was not for me. The upper lines, the lower lines, bad food, the pretentious names of Rudiments and Grammar instead of first year and second year. Life ruled by timetables and the constant presence of the peer group, night and day, no escape from it at 4pm. They say boarding school teaches you independence but I’m not so sure. I’ve a feeling it does the opposite and there was a tendency to run with the herd.
Anyway, all of the above and missing home and family caused an uncontrollable urge to start walking out the front gates and on to the road.
A kind of dream state took over and I was in another world. Like a movie. I walked along, taking refuge from the reality of what I was doing by disappearing into every western that I’d ever seen at the Edenderry cinema Saturday matinee. I wasn’t on a country road somewhere in Co Kildare; no, I was out in the wide open plains. I was the outlaw Josey Wales or John Wayne in True Grit — “Fill your hands you son of a b***h”. I was running with the Wild Bunch.
But slowly reality began to set in. I was hungry and thirsty and the movie world that had been a distraction was fading away, as was the light. I was now wondering about the reception I would receive at home. All I could do was explain how I felt and hope that my parents would understand. But I needed to get home first. Would I chance thumbing a lift? Very timidly I raised the thumb. Cars drove by. No one was stopping. I trudged on. I felt weak.
Then I passed a hedge of a bungalow with a man clipping away at it with shears. We nodded at each other and then he addressed me, saying that he’d passed me on the road earlier and asked if I had been walking for long. Not long, I replied, going into some yarn about visiting an aunt in Prosperous who had left me at the bus stop but I had missed the bus and she had gone out to play bridge, so I was making my own way home to Edenderry.
He didn’t buy this for a second but left the tale unchallenged, instead asking me in for refreshment. I checked behind him and saw a woman in the kitchen window looking out at us. He reassured me that it was OK, so I accepted his offer.
In their kitchen I drank 7Up — it tasted like no other mineral I ever had — and they gave me soup, which I devoured. His wife inquired about where I was going, so I repeated the yarn. The man told me he was a teacher and showed me a photo of a class of lads he had taught, and told me that one of them was a very famous sportsman. Could I pick him out? I scanned the photo, glad that the ‘question of sport’ session was a distraction from my made-up story of aunts and uncles and missed buses, and even more pleased when I recognised Eamonn Coghlan. Before the glory days of Jack’s army, he vied for the title of Ireland’s number one sporting hero.
The photo was put away as the man mentioned, out of the blue, the name of the boarding school and asked if I was aware of its existence. He afforded himself a knowing smile just to let me know he knew where I was coming from. They would drive me home. I mentioned the current oil strikes and how petrol was scarce but they insisted and half an hour later they dropped me outside my house. I thanked them profusely and I shook his hand. The kindness of strangers made me feel like crying but I managed to keep the tears in check and the car moved on.
My parents were a little taken aback to say the least; I should have just rung them but I suppose, in a way, I had been more calculating than I’d realised. I had wanted to make a big impression on them. A statement.
On my parents’ urging I did go back and give the boarding school another go, and kind of settled into it. I avoided rugby as best I could, listened to Radio Luxembourg under the covers, and we read the western Shane in English class which I thought was very cool. But all the time I knew that I was not staying. I knew that this was not for me. I simply did not belong there.
By mid-November I was off again. I even told some of the lads and said goodbye to them. This time I was better prepared, making the dash after lunch on a full stomach. I hitched two rides and was home by tea.
As always, my parents were unbelievably understanding. The local headmaster was called and I couldn’t wait to dash next door to my friend since senior infants, Kenneth, and give him the news that we’d be cycling to school together the following Monday.
All the lads were very welcoming and although the school was old and rundown, with prefabs out the back and an old stove heater and the occasional mouse making an appearance, I couldn’t have been happier.
I sometimes wonder where that couple are now, 40 years on. Are they still with us? Do they still live in the same bungalow, somewhere between Prosperous and Allenwood? Does he still trim the hedge on September evenings?
Eamonn Coghlan never won an Olympic medal but did us proud in 1983 in Helsinki, winning gold in the world championships. The boarding school is still churning out captains of industry and rugby teams. The cinema at home closed in 1996, having battled against the 1980s video boom and the multiplex in Tallaght. My mother will continue to hope and pray that at last Ireland can get past a World Cup quarter-final.
But as long as I live, I will never forget that feeling of walking on that empty country road pretending to be the Wild Bunch and knowing somehow that I was doing the right thing.