School day memories as a new academic year begins

It’s funny how – even more than 40 years after exiting the gates for the final time – the return to school for tens of thousands of students can still trigger a sense of anticipation or foreboding for those of us for whom that phenomenon should be a distant memory at best.

We try to paint it, of course, as a time of excitement as we reflect back on our own time though rose-tinted glasses – but that’s a hard sell to someone who has just enjoyed a relaxing couple of months lying on the couch playing PlayStation.

Even the more active ones set their own agenda, whether it was getting themselves a job to make some money or playing sport or fishing or just staying up late and getting up even later.

Now it’s back in the old routine – new uniforms, a couple of stone-weight of books, and a daily grind that begins at home with either silence around the kitchen table or a row over something that should have been done the night before.

Like the first day of the Leaving Cert, the memories of your own time are so engrained in the memory that you involuntarily shudder at the mere thought of it. And yet, as time goes by, you tend to agree just a little more that your schooldays were the happiest days of your life.

Not for everyone of course – not for those who were bullied or made to feel small; not for some of those who were educated in the era of corporal punishment and were beaten within an inch of their lives.

Thankfully that latter phenomenon is consigned to history, but it must be said I don’t think I was ever disciplined when I didn’t have coming to me – and if that seems like condoning corporal punishment, it’s not.

But it was allowed back then, and from my own experience it was used sparingly – although clearly now we know it should never have been used at all.

This month marks 48 years since I first entered through the gates of St Mary’s College as a boarder. I wasn’t knee-high to a grasshopper but the Oughterard contingent gave us, if not a strength in numbers, at least a security that those with less from the parish didn’t enjoy.