Eddie goes to school

Eddie is shown in the above photograph at the age he would have been when attending Muckross Park Dominican Primary School.

My father, myself, Geraldine and Anne from left to right on holidays in Rush, Co Dublin in the early 1950s or late 1940s.
 

Is  cuimhin liom go maith nuair a bhíos óg. I remember well when I was young. My youngest brother Edmond Martin Kent would have celebrated his 62nd birthday two days ago on April 3rd. It is hard to believe it has been almost two years since Eddie as he was known to all and sundry passed on. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis. He was a generous and kindly soul with a touch of the poet in him. Which gets me back to what I wanted to write about in this particular piece: Muckross Park Dominican Convent School in Donnybrook, Dublin,  where both of my younger brothers John and Eddie started their academic pursuits in the 1950s. Today it is an all girls non fee paying secondary school with high academic requirements. Girls have to be 11 years  of age to start now. Both of my sisters Anne and Geraldine attended the school back in the 1950s aged 8 and 6 respectively before completing their secondary education elsewhere. My father's job was such that we moved around Ireland for several years. I also had the dubious pleasure of attending this school for a year circa 1952. It was here that I made my First Confession and First Communion. Back then the Muckross Dominicans accepted primary school age children including Junior Infants, Senior Infants and First Grade for boys. Senior Infants sounds  like an oxymoron upon reflection.No doubt the Senior Infants lorded it over the Junior Infants. From memory the girls in the primary school wore blue uniforms and the secondary school girls wore green. The ethos of the school was Catholic/Dominican then as it is now. A denizen of the convent where the young Kents learned their three "Rs" was a first cousin three times removed Mother Alphonses OP,  a daughter of Parnell's right hand man Andrew Kettle , a North County Dublin progressive farmer, father of 12 and  a founder of the Irish Land League  and his wife Margaret McCourt. Margaret's sister Catherine was our great great grandmother. Mother Alphonses was a sister of Tom Kettle, a man of many accomplishments, who was killed fighting in the Battle of the Somme  in 1916. Here is a poem he wrote to his infant daughter Elizabeth, a daughter he was never destined to meet:


"THE GIFT OF LOVE
In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your mother's prime -
In that desired, delayed incredible time
You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear breast that was your baby's throne
To dice with death, and, oh! They'll give you rhyme
And reason; one will call the thing sublime,
And one decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the Secret Scripture of the poor.
Tom Kettle wrote this poem for his infant daughter Betty whom he had never seen. Two days later he was struck by a German bullet and died."

Mother Alphonses would summon her young cousins to her room from time to time for a chat. I don't remember much about the chats but recall getting some candy or "sweets" as we call them in Ireland on these visits. She seemed pretty ancient to young ones like us but nice. I recall she wore black knitted gloves with the fingers cut off. With the title of  Mother I imagine she had held an important position within the Dominican community before old age came upon her. Come to think of it she was probably the reason all of us gained admission to the school .Anne, Geraldine and I  had transferred from the St. Louis nuns in Rathmines and I was going in to the First Grade having completed what was called Senior Infants. Back then if you were below the age for First Grade you were an infant. It is laughable looking back that this terminology was used.

I remember Catechism sessions supervised by a stern Sister Bernadette in preparation for receiving the first sacraments after Baptism. I remember making Christmas cribs out of shoe boxes, cotton wool, and cut out nativity figures from books glued to cardboard  with the Baby Jesus taking pride of place.I remember being a fan of a Miss Kennedy, one of the teachers. I would walk with her to the bus stop at times chatting all the way. I remember having to tell our sins to a nun during a practice "confession" which I can recall being a mite daunting and less preferable than the real thing. When the day came to making our Confession to a priest I remember entering the darkened confessional. There was nothing happening as I knelt down but I noticed a crucifix in the corner and since it had been stressed that we would be confessing our transgressions to God I stood up on the kneeler in the confessional and started telling my sins to the crucifix. Shortly thereafter the priest opened the sliding screen and addressed me whereupon I made my First Confession in the manner which had been drilled into us.. A week later I received my First Eucharist wearing a new grey suit . The school provided my parents and I with a nice breakfast after the Mass: sausage, rashers of bacon, and an egg. The rest of the day was spent parading around to the neighbors and getting three penny or six penny coins or bits as we called them. Some neighbors gave out holy pictures of the saints in lieu of cash. I was happy with whatever was given. Holy pictures were like baseball cards to us back then. A Protestant neighbor, Mrs Cord, gave me a holy picture. She must have been expecting my visit. At the end of that school year I "graduated" from Muckross Park School and bid a fond adieu to the Dominican nuns. Later my young brother Eddie would attend there. As has been told to me since,  he was taken there on his first day as a Junior Infant by my father who had a day off work. My father dropped him off in the Junior Infants classroom with his teacher and departed to catch a bus into the Dublin City Center. As he approached the bus stop he heard little footsteps behind him. Lo and behold it was Eddie who decided he was already tired of school after a minute or so and made his escape. My father laughed and rather than bundle him back to "academia" took him into Dublin on the bus where no doubt Eddie got to drink Club Orange and eat Tayto Crisps while my father "skulled" a few pints of stout and perhaps put a few shillings on the nags in a bookie shop as he was wont to do like many Irishmen of his day. The next day Eddie did go to school.

                                 
                     Aungier Street in Dublin in the 1950s. Bicycles and Double Deckers.

 I am initiating my new blog spot on this Holy Thursday 2012 as an exercise in my Computer Basics 2 class. 'Tis hard to teach an old dog new tricks but this old dog has learned a new trick or two thanks to good instruction. Now you can expect me to expound on anything and everything under the Sun in due course. For to-day I am content to be brief. Watch out tomorrow.