As O-Level exam time
approached the pressure was on to perform well as pupils, and the pressure was
on for the Saint Malachy’s authorities to make sure that all the boys who left
the blue gates for the last time did well as men, too. They had to address sex,
and they did so in the last term of fifth year, before they lost that last
chance to teach purity of mind and body to hormonal Catholic schoolboys.
Besides them calling it, “a beautiful union of man and woman” in the old Church
of The Holy Plaster Shower, sex was never mentioned in the teachings that
Fathers McGarry, O’Hagan, and Patton made from on high. But in Saint Malachy’s
there was no escaping what needed to be taught.
My class, Senior 2B,
lined up outside the classroom in C Block, waiting for Mr. Ward to arrive for
the Religious Education class. A gentle man, he passed out sweets and threw
compliments like his brother, also a teacher, spat out venom and launched
desks. He was late, and we stood waiting, hoping for a free period, the
precious forty-minute periods that were becoming all the more welcome what with
the exams darkening our futures.
“Anyone see Ward today?”
shouted someone from the back of the line.
“I did, this morning.
Haven’t seen him since.”
“Anyone else see him?”
The crowd hushed as a priest walked up to the front of the line.
“Is this Senior 2B?” he
asked as he put down his briefcase, grasped the door handle, tried turning it,
then fumbled for a key that matched the lock. His fingers and his eyes knew
only some of those keys – on any ordinary day he should not have been here.
“Yes, Father.”
“Ah, good,” he said,
turning the right key in the right lock, “Okay, follow me.” He led us into the
classroom and seamlessly into an Our Father and a Hail Mary. In English.
Clasping his hands in
the Learned Man’s fashion behind his back – they must surely teach all priests
this stance during their years of instruction in the seminaries, I thought – he
stared at a point on the back wall, but no particular point. His hips thrust
forward and his clasped hands stretched behind him as he rolled heel to toe,
toe to heel, heel to toe.
“Gentlemen,
many of you will be leaving us this year and it is as important that you know
how to act in a Christian manner outside of these gates as you have been taught
how to be a Christian within these gates. Gloria ab Intus boys, remember? Glory
from within.” He pointed to the breast pockets of some boys closest to him
before pausing momentarily, rolling from heel to toe, toe to heel, belying a
certain discomfort.
“You’ll soon all be men,
soon, you boys, leaving here, and that means you’ll be doing things like
getting jobs, joining the world of work, marrying and maybe even having
children one day, if God spares you.” This was one of our Mum’s favourite expressions,
“If God spares you.” I began – around this time – to ponder on the petulant and
cavalier nature of this god of ours.
“And there are things to
learn about being a man in the outside world that can be taught like anything
else in this life. Like mathematics, or English, or Gaelic football.” He paused
again, rolled from heel to toe, toe to heel, cleared his throat, absently
considered the ageing and browning maps of the world adorning the walls, crisp
as old Uncle Arthur’s heavy plastic table-cloths.
By then we knew what was
coming. This was to be our first sex education class, and there were sniggers,
wry laughs, and whispers, and all around the room there were boys nudging each
other in the lets-see-what-we-can-teach-this-guy-’cos-he’s-a-fucking-priest style. The priest stared hard at those sniggering, but uttered not a word of
admonishment. The serene priestly gaze – the second thing taught in a seminary,
I thought – always was enough to quieten and redden the face of any Catholic,
regardless of age or life experience or cockiness.
“Okay then, boys.
There’s a lot of vulgarity about sex these days, gentlemen, and you will see it
on TV all the time, and that vulgarity demeans three of the most beautiful
gifts from God himself. Oh yes, you boys, the gift of sex, the gift of love,
and the gift of children. You boys have been here for five years now, and
you’ll have all heard the ways sex is described out there on that quad, or up
at the field, or up by those handball alleys and, God forbid, in the
lavatories, haven’t you?
Thirty heads nodded and
a few murmured, “Yes, Father.”
“Yes, well, I’m sure you
have, as there’re boys in this school with minds in the sewers, I can tell you,
with more muck up there than they have grey matter, boys, let me tell you all
now, boys lost to proper Catholic thought and teaching and practice and
living.” He stabbed the air at the four losses we suffered, ending wide-eyed in
a crouch beside his desk, his finger pointing extreme right. Then he swivelled,
following his finger extreme left.
“Now, they use the words
they hear on the street, boys, don’t they? Hmm? Don’t they?” He waited for an
answer that would never come from thirty boys guilty of exactly he same
thing.
“It’s not smart, you
know, and it impresses no one, does it? So... Here’s what we’ll do.” He cracked
open the tin in which he kept his chalks. “Go on then, tell me these words,
this slang you’ve all heard out there. Go on, don’t be embarrassed. Say
whatever you want.” He took the priestly stance, his chin up; heel to toe, toe
to heel.
Silence fell. As I
looked about me I could see that there were boys whose lips had pursed because
in their full mouths they were hiding laughs, or they were hiding one of the
quad or lavatorial vulgarities behind their tongues and their teeth. The priest
put his open hand to his ear and leaned forward in the I-can’t-hear-you stance.
A second, maybe two, passed.
“Come on now, boys,” the
priest encouraged gently, “Don’t tell me that the cat’s got your tongue now.
Say whatever you want. Pretend, even, pretend that I’m not a priest, that I’m
one of your friends. What about that?” More silence.
“Boys! Come on!”
“Cunt! Sorry, cunt,
Father!” shouted Keith McMahon from the back of the room, shattering the
stillness with a word powerful enough to mark forever this incredible moment, a
word so powerful that it let laughs break free from behind clenched teeth.
Keith was the type to relish being the first to say the word cunt to a priest,
and there was something about him that hinted at the possibility that he had
been waiting on this moment all his life. This one moment most probably would be
the only time a priest would invite him to do so. In that moment Keith may have
become the only person in the whole of Irish Catholic Ireland ever to say that word
– the swear word – to a man of the
cloth. It was a moment he could be proud of, a first in our lives, a moment for
us all to remember. Keith’s name was etched deeply into memories at that moment
as the man who dared say cunt to a priest.
“Okay boys, okay. That’s
enough.” The priest calmed the class with his hands, allowing us a glimpse up
his wide sleeves, to the darkness of his armpits. “Good. Thank you. Thank you,
Mr. McMahon. Always a popular one that, and usually one of the first words
offered.” As he spoke he wrote the
word on the blackboard.
“Next?”
“Fanny, Father,” shouted
Brendy Lynch, also from the back of the room. Brendy offered a wide and very
cheeky smile, his wiry, tallish, and short-and-tight-haired presence the very personification of a
controlled mischief.
“Father, boobs is one,”
added someone excitedly.
“Cock, Father,” said
Keith.
“Father, tits, Father,”
said Brendy.
The vulgarities came
thicker and faster from the boys as they became comfortable with being as
honest as they had ever been told they could be without being punished for it.
“Clit, Father,” shouted
Brendy, refusing to let Keith eclipse his own lavatorial vulgarities. Brendy
was good: in our first year he was the owner and user of a word I never knew
existed, and he let the young, blonde temp teacher, Miss McGuckian, know that,
strictly speaking, shit was, in fact, excreta, you know. She agreed,
congratulating him on his expansive scatological vocabulary. It certainly was
impressive. We all knew urine, and felt proud of that knowledge, but only
Brendy Lynch had technical knowledge of number twos.
“Well, now, it’s
actually called a clitoris, a clit-O-ris, -O-ris, young man, and we’ll be using
the proper term so that the whole class knows what we’re talking about, okay?
Okay then, any more?” The three syllables of clitoris he said slowly as he
wrote the word on the board, and he pronounced the middle syllable twice into
the air, the shape of his lips ensuring that we knew even how to spell the
word.
“Do you know what a
clit-O-ris is, by the way?” Silence. A gland in the brain, I thought, or a
machine of some sort, something devilish, dark and hidden from all mankind. I
knew nothing of the whereabouts of mine, and that concerned me. Not only did I
not know the word but I was unable also to reach my hand to feel if my
clit-O-ris was okay, and clean, able to be taken into public without
embarrassment. In fact, I didn't even know if I could touch it. It was a mystery then, something I knew was maybe part of me, but something unknown, like my middle ear, with all its hammers and anvils.
“Well? You can’t use the
word without knowing what it means now, boys, can you?” Silence.
“The clit-O-ris, boys,
is part of the female body, and you might be well advised to remember what
words mean before you consider using them. You would be well advised of that,
wouldn’t you?” He paused, looked at his watch, sighed. I paused, thought about
this clit-O-ris thing, sighed.
“Okay, anybody else?”
The priest began to sound exasperated, we could all tell: he spoke as only
exasperated people alone do, stretching their coming-up-to-my-final-words, like
he stretched his “anybody.” He knew there were more words coming his way.
“Is fuck one, Father?
Like saying 'fuck me' or 'let’s fuck' or 'do you fancy a fuck big girl?' or…”
“Thank you! Thank you!
That’s quite enough young man! You’re only embarrassing yourself, not me, so
just you calm yourself down there. But thank you, and well done that man!” He
pointed to the wag in the game show host’s exaggerated congratulatory style,
all pizzazz and bent-kneed, and I waited for him to announce a prize for that
one word, the game’s Magic Word.
“Yes! Thank you! I
thought that was never going to show its face today. That’s usually one of the
first ones out too, you might be surprised to know, or not...” His voice faded
to a sly, comic understatement, and he looked to the class, expecting us to
laugh. No-one graced his expectation.
“It took you boys a
little time, but you got there eventually.” More finger pointing and failed
lightening of the mood. “Anyway, well done that man! Anyone else? Any more? Mr.
McMahon? Have you any more for us?”
Keith stayed silent.
