![]() ![]() There was no one else from my class and indeed there was only one other girl from my primary school who went there. My two sisters had gone there but the year I started the younger of the two left, so I was very much on my own. When I went to secondary it was the school my older sisters had gone to, the Dominican College in Eccles Street, and that was a real wrenching from the bosom of one's community. We lived on each others' roads and I would have been known up and down the street, so it was very much going to school in your own community. In primary school I knew almost all the kids in the class. Of course in those days if I went home and said I'd been slapped, my parents were quite likely to say, "well you must have done something to deserve it". Even then I thought there was a kind of unjustness about using corporal punishment. It certainly marked me in terms of how I would view authority. We were caned, we were slapped and I can still remember the childhood terror of knowing that because you were running in the yard and had been spotted, you were going to get six of the best. The school was run by the Sisters of Charity and they really ran a very tough regime. I can't do long division though, so I reckon I was out gardening when she did long division. As a result, I actually have a love of gardening and I'm a keen gardener. I do think it was to do with my chatterbox tendencies. Each class had a patch of the garden so we would go out once a week and dig it up and plant bulbs - and I remember I spent more time out in the garden patch than any other child in the class. She had certain classroom management skills, however. The teacher I had, a woman called Miss Byrne, was almost at retirement age and with 46 to 48 kids in the class, I'm sure there were times when she found me very trying. I couldn't sew in a straight line and I couldn't knit anything that didn't turn out to be as tight as anything and I can remember having to unravel my scarves so we could start on the next knitting expedition.Īt that age I know I would have been a chatterbox. ![]() I was never any good at those things and that was really the only aspect of school that I really didn't like. Because there were always other members of my family in the school, it was never a worrying place - except for when we did sewing and knitting. Starting school was never an issue for me because I had older brothers and sisters who were already going, so I have no recollection of traumatic first days. It was quite a big school and in the junior years there would have been anything from 42 to 48 kids in our classes. I'm right in the middle - I have four brothers and two sisters so a clatter of the Healys walked up Griffith avenue every morning for many years. There are seven children in my family and we all went to the same primary school, St Vincent de Paul's on Griffith Avenue in Dublin. ![]()
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