There’s no getting away from the fact that I did some bad things when I was young. And sometimes they were not intentional. And sometimes they had consequences that I never expected.
For example, the president of the college where I went to school was a devout priest with a dry powdery face and a bald head apart from two tufts of white hair above his ears. He was not a worldly man, and might have been more at peace in a contemplative monastery rather than enduring life as president of a secondary school. And when the troubles in the North began to bubble in the late 1960s, his fear of modernity was exposed.
He became convinced that the most immediate dangers to western civilisation were the prospect of communist agitators and drug pushers infiltrating the quiet little secondary school of which he was president. He only had to look at Top of the Pops on Thursday nights to convince himself of the world’s depravity. Although he couldn’t quite distinguish between communists, drug pushers and young boys with long hair. He just knew that the world was falling apart.
In fact, nobody knew exactly what was happening in the North at that time. The riots and car burnings, the bombs and bullets had not yet established a clear pattern that could be called “the struggle against British oppression”.
No one had yet invented the story to fit the violence.
But the president knew what was going on. It was a communist plot to undo the fabric of society, and his school stood on the frontline; so it required vigilance and frequent body searches of the day students in the bicycle shed as they arrived in the morning for classes; although the only thing he ever found were a few cigarette butts in the socks of the sad boys.
I don’t ignore the fact that he was a saintly man of enormous integrity, but he was also our religion teacher, which made him a target of much ridicule.
God works in mysterious ways. The missile struck the little head with a fierce wallop, leaving a red mark on his cheek, and the missile fell on to his prayerbook
One day I was fiddling with an elastic band under the desk while the president was asleep on his chair. This was a common method of teaching in those days. He would instruct the boys to read from their text books and then he would open his prayerbook on the lap of his soutane and whisper the words of the Psalms to himself with an expression of ecstatic joy until he eventually fell asleep.
I was folding a piece of silver paper from a cigarette box to make a missile for my elastic band.
But the boy in the desk beside me, a rascal who later ended up in prison, passed me a tightly rolled piece of cardboard. Silver paper made harmless missiles but the cardboard could take someone’s eye out. I accepted his offer and then the rascal said: “Why don’t you hit your man?”
He meant the sleeping teacher. The rest of the class was watching closely. I could have shot the missile into the air and hit the ceiling, which would not waken the president and I would have been hailed as a hero. But the rascal’s challenge had left me in a predicament.
“Aim at the blackboard,” the cunning rascal said, and everyone in the class chanted: “Yes, yes, aim at the blackboard.”
So I did. After all it was a big blackboard and the president’s head was tiny.
But God works in mysterious ways. The missile struck the little head with a fierce wallop, leaving a red mark on his cheek, and the missile fell on to his prayerbook. The president was on his feet in a terrible fury. And I ended up that afternoon on the carpet of his office facing questions as to whether I was a terrorist, a communist or just a depraved drug pusher.
I protested that I was none of the above, and that I had fired under provocation from evil rascals and I more or less convinced the president of my innocence.
And to lighten the atmosphere just before I left his office he asked me what I intended to do after the Leaving Certificate. At the time I had been thinking of dropping out and becoming a poet, but I was mindful that I was speaking to a man of enormous devotion and I certainly wanted to get into his good books.
“Actually, I was thinking of becoming a priest,” said I, casually. But it’s amazing how such insignificant moments can accidentally shape an entire life.