Wicked Little Joe by Joseph Hone

Author:Joseph Hone [Joseph Hone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843512431
Publisher: The Lilliput Press
Published: 2011-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

Because it so strenuously aimed for conformism in all things St Columba’s was a fine breeding ground for rebels. They could sharpen (I was going to say ‘hone’) their rebellion there, as I suppose I did. I say ‘I suppose’ because I didn’t consciously rebel. I just simply kept on getting caught, smoking with Nick Fitzsimon behind the cricket pavilion or whatever. I was a poor rebel in that way. Certainly I was way behind the elderly irascible science teacher, George Large, a Catholic who had been a senior member of the old IRA and had used his metallurgic skills to forge a prison key taken from a wax impression, and so, with a few other desperadoes, had sprung Éamon de Valera from Lincoln jail – imprisoned there by the hated British after the Easter Rising of 1916. What George Large was doing at this Protestant imperial school, a symbol of the oppressor in Ireland for many centuries, I never found out.

But it shows how St Columba’s did have an Irish side to it. Ireland was lurking in the bushes groping with a skivvy, or up at Lamb Doyle’s pub – or, spectacularly, right there in the science lab in the shape of tough little arch-IRA rebel George Large. He and I didn’t hit it off. The sadist Dudgeon had been science master at Sandford Park. Anything to do with test tubes upset me, renewed painful memories. George had a habit of suddenly shouting at me. ‘Hone! Will you just do one thing for me? Stand right away from the equipment, back of the class. And stay there.’

Well, that made two rebels, George and me. And there were a few others; Nick and the fine cricketer ‘Crooked’ Lee, the three of us with our little Woodbine-smoking school behind the cricket pavilion – and particularly Dan Brownlow, carelessly and much more daringly rebellious, an older, elegant and sophisticated Dubliner, a senior who had refused to be considered as a house captain or a prefect and just laughed quietly at school prohibitions. But unlike laughing Charlie Seltzer he was far too clever ever to get caught. Dan led a charmed life at the school. With the connivance of Fred the boiler man he kept a Fiat in the garage next to the boiler room, left the dorm after lights out and drove into town, to The Green Rooster in O’Connell Street – a daring place in the Dublin of the time, since it was open until midnight, and you could meet a girl there and get a mixed grill. What thrills! We few who were in the know admired Dan Brownlow. But for us there were no girls and mixed grills in The Green Rooster – it was Florence under the Medicis and cold spaghetti.

One of the benefits of the school was the fact that the teaching was generally excellent, if you availed yourself of it. The teachers were paid more than in other schools in Ireland, so St Columba’s could take the pick of the pedagogic crop from Trinity College.

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