Terry Prone is an author, communications expert and chairwoman of the Communications Clinic. She sat the Leaving Cert at Holy Faith Convent, Clontarf, Dublin.
What is your most vivid Leaving Cert memory?
The sense of absolute freedom and the knowledge that having been cordially loathed by many of the teachers in the school, they had no power. In this situation I had all the power. I could have predicted what marks I would get in all eight subjects.
My most vivid memory is of fellow sixth years crying in the corridors before they went in and me thinking yeah, that’s to impress your parents. I didn’t believe it for a minute.
Who was your most influential teacher and why?
My English teacher. She spotted something that I wrote and made me read it out to the class and told me that it was fine writing and that I would be a writer. And I never got over it and never got over the gratitude that I felt to her.
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What was your most difficult subject?
Maths. I am and was innumerate. And though I was very good at geometry because it was images and logic, algebra reduced me to pulp.
My father and my older sister, who was the first computer programmer in the Civil Service, used to try to teach me. And my sister would get blind with fury at me because she thought I was pretending to be stupid. I was the real thing.
And your favourite?
Art. I was a wonderful painter – Texaco art competition and all that sort of stuff.
Can you recall what grades or points you received?
I got As in English and Art. My best subjects, weirdly, were geography and history. I passed maths, got 60 per cent in Latin. And I did better than I deserved in Irish because I aced the oral. I had to because I wanted to get into the Abbey Theatre. The artistic director insisted that you had to have Irish that sounded like you were a native speaker.
How important were the results for you ultimately?
They were completely unimportant. It has been the biggest regret in my life that no human being has ever – up to now – asked me about my Leaving Cert. I’ve got through life without reference to it.
What did you go on to do after secondary school?
I went into the Abbey and I became a member of the Abbey Theatre company at 16. And I toured. I went to London, to the West End in a show called The Shaughraun, by Dion Boucicault.
What would you change about the Leaving Cert?
I’m not sure I would change much. I think that the capacity to go into a room and analyse incoming questions, order your thoughts to answer them and produce the evidence that has accreted over the previous few years is a brilliant way to prove what you’re competent at. That’s why I didn’t have much time for the criers. Because it seemed to me to be the most objective test of what the previous few years had been about.
What advice would you give to your Leaving Cert self?
Get over yourself. Get in there. Answer the questions. Move on.
-In conversation with Jen Hogan
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