Beyond the Breakwater by Catherine Foley

Author:Catherine Foley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mercier Press

The Great Wide World

38

My First Interview

Some weeks ago I came across a few dog-eared pages on Blue Basildon Bond paper covered in my own youthful writing. It was an account I had written of my first adult job interview a long time ago in Kilkenny. I read it and the memory of when my younger self had applied for different teaching jobs slowly returned.

Reading this material was like meeting a separate version of me, a person who was familiar but completely forgotten. I read with wonder to know what I had been like at twenty-one. The writing was crystal clear and spikey. The first two pages were written in ink with a fountain pen and after running dry I continued in Biro for the last two. My punctuation is all there, with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation and question marks.

I described how I left home that morning at 9.30 a.m., my mother standing at the door to wave me off. I was thumbing to town because our car was out of action. Dressed in my mother’s suit, I walked behind Sean Harty’s cows until they turned off into a field. I continued straight on along the road, my canvas bag bulging with a balled up mack and a scarf in case it rained, a pair of high-heeled sandals for the interview and a jumper to change into afterwards.

From Dungarvan I took the bus. CIÉ Express: two pounds. No return fare for students. When we pulled into Plunkett Station in Kilkenny, I got off the bus and with all my hurrying bumped into a little girl. ‘Mind the lady,’ her mother said. Me, I have written with a question mark, a lady?

Yes, I remember that incident now and how grown-up I felt in the beige-belted suit. How I smiled to myself because I felt sophisticated, like my mother, or like an adult in a film. I also remember how I slid on a slab of stone on my way out of the station and how the jolt of it almost caused me to lose my balance. The near-fall made me nervous and caused a lump to form in my throat as I walked towards my interview.

I reached the county hall without any more complications and I made my way up to the ninth floor. I write that the elevator’s upward surge didn’t help to calm me down. Sitting on her own at the end of the corridor was another Powlett-Jones, I wrote. This was the character in a television series, which was about a shell-shocked young man’s first teaching job after serving in the trenches during the First World War.

I joined this other candidate, who was also all decked out for the interview. I describe how she wore flesh-coloured tights, whereas my legs were bare. I was in a quandary as to whether I should go away and change into the pair of tights which were in my bag. No, I reasoned. Be yourself.

That decision may make or break me, I wrote.

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