Asking For Trouble by Patricia Craig

Author:Patricia Craig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
Published: 2011-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Up until this point, the year after our expulsion, it has been utterly taken for granted, by both of us, that school will be followed by university: no other possible course of events has ever entered our heads. We can’t pass Queen’s, which we do quite often, on our walks about the city, without one or other of us remarking smugly, ‘That’s where we are going to be –’ in three years’ time, or two, or whatever. It’s not that we mean to kill ourselves with work; we simply assume that, somehow, at the right moment, the transfer to a highly desirable, heady kind of student life will be effected easily. We are good, or at least better than average, at passing exams. (It’s true that I have one spectacular failure to my credit, failure in an exam regarded by everyone else as a pushover. Not a public affair: an inner-school test of religious knowledge known as the Bishop’s Exam. I am so resentful at having to sit this footling test at all that I do no preparation and consequently end up with something like fifteen marks out of a possible hundred. This is not to be wondered at. Church history induces agonies of boredom in me – even now, a dimly remembered phrase like ‘the Edict of Nantes’ or ‘the Albigensian Heresy’ – what is that? – causes my spirits to wilt. I am proud of the notoriety this unprecedented failure confers on me – but of course, in the eyes of the nuns, it’s another black mark against me, when my future at the school, or out of it, comes up for discussion.)

What gives us such confidence in our academic abilities? It’s not the school, that’s for sure; it isn’t a good school, its priorities are askew. I remember an occasion when four or five of us, fifth-formers, are positively keen to relinquish most of the free periods we get in a week, in order to sit in at the back of a class which is learning German. We’ve consulted the timetables and worked out that it can be done. However, when we turn up clutching pens and exercise books, and wearing eager expressions on our faces, we are scolded for presumptiousness – ‘How dare you come uninvited into my class, I never heard the like of it’ – made to look foolish in front of a lower form and sent away with a flea in our ear. There are only two teachers, sisters, Miss Casement Senior and Miss Casement Junior, in all the years I spent at that school, whose attitude is humane and positive, whom I can recall without flinching. (Instead of watching the clock and trying not to yawn, the state most lessons reduce one to, I hate it when Miss Casement Senior’s English classes end.)

No, whatever encouragement I get, I get at home. I am lucky enough to have parents who have never once, throughout my life, withheld approval, complained, or criticised any action

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