APHFreda McGough
The gentle Sr. Leo (Patricia Hackett from Headford) was my lucky introduction in 1950. to Presentation Convent, Athenry. Having come from a small, two-teacher country school in Belclare, Co. Galway (class size about 12!) and never having seen a nun before, I was just a tiny bit anxious (and at the same time excited) about how this new experience would work out. Sr. Leo taught 3rd class and, while I remember very little about general studies, apart from having constantly inky fingers from learning to write with a pen. I cherished the time spent with her when we adjourned to “the old cookery room” attached to the back of the convent. It contained a huge black range and had a sort of glassed in/conservatory-type area as an entrance from the yard. There she taught us nature studies and encouraged us to bring in leaves and nuts from the various trees around us. It didn’t seem like work and was the perfect introduction for a child who grew up on a farm. We all loved Sr. Leo.
FOURTH AND FIFTH CLASSES
These were taught by Sr. Columbanus (Nora Noone, from Shrule, Co. Galway, who was already a qualified primary teacher before she entered the convent) in a large classroom – 4th on the left and 5th on the right. She became a dear friend for many years after I left Athenry. She had the air of a woman who was happy in her chosen vocation and was quite an independent spirit and always spoke out for what she believed in. And she had a most engaging personality and laughed a lot. She had come from the convent in Keel, Achill Island, and often told us stories about how impoverished some households were there when she first arrived. Many families had fathers who had to emigrate for work and times were really tough. Strong on Irish history, art and choir and English grammar (for which I will always be in her debt) she was very much a Republican and I distinctly remember an incident in which two sisters were sent home from school from her class on the day of Princess Elizabeth’s Coronation Day (1952 I think) for daring to appear with red, white and blue ribbons in their pigtails. They were asked not to come back until the ribbons had been removed. That quietened us all for the day. But the interesting thing about those times was that parents didn’t question the authority of the nuns. Imagine if that happened today?
HAPPY SCHOOL DAYS?
It strikes me, as I look back over my school days that we were all very respectful towards the nuns and very serious in their presence and we were, I suppose, afraid of making a wrong move that might upset them or show us up in an unfavourable light. In a sense we were “goody goodies”, which must have been a bit boring for the poor nuns! It was the era of being “seen and not heard” and we would have been the same with adults around the town or neighbours. But that said, there were one or two cases in the school where pupils who might have had difficulties in their family lives were a bit giddy and “wild” and broke the rules now and again and the nuns showed enormous compassion and understanding and we could tell that they actually liked the spiritedness and honesty of the girls in question and they always made clear their love for them. And, far from being resentful of this or interpreting it as favouritism, the rest of us understood perfectly the dynamics of the relationships and the issues involved, Towards the end of my first year in secondary school, my mother was extremely ill in hospital and was not expected to live. One bright Summer’s day, the school principal, Sr. Rita, was to show enormous compassion to me. She called me aside and told me that she knew that Mum was in hospital and that my step-father had to work and said “why don’t you bring the little ones (my sisters, who were then 4 and 2) up here in the afternoons and they can play around the school yard and we can keep an eye on them from here?”. I was so touched – we all were. And to this day, I am dumbfounded that anyone, much less a nun and the head of the school, could have read a family situation so well and been so thoughtful. In the event, we found help with the child-minding, but I will never forget Sr. Rita’s thoughtfulness,
Because I only joined the school in third class, I escaped the attention of the legendary Sr. Dominick, a small, rotund woman with beady eyes and a fine strong voice, who taught First Class and prepared the children for First Holy Communion (including boys, who only went to the Boy’s School after that event). My youngest sister, Fionnuala Cleary, clearly remembers Sr. Dominick keeping a bit of soap in a mustard tin and rubbing the soap on the tongue of any child who told a lie, Apparently, the soap washed the sin away. She also ran the Children of Mary (for secondary school students and adults). They participated as a group in all church processions, wearing a white veil on their heads and a blue cloak and a big Child of Mary medal hanging from a wide blue petersham ribbon around the neck. Sr. Dominick had eyes everywhere, all over town, and there were plenty of “oul wans” as we would have called them, who ate the toes of the statues for breakfast and delighted in “reporting” the alleged misconduct of some of her Children of Mary … dreadful behaviour such as climbing, with the boys, the tower along the town wall – opposite the ‘pump house’ and near where the silos are now …. AFTER DARK, or worse, on long bright Summer’s evenings, giving scandal to all who could see them. Oh, the disgrace of it. And you could forfeit your Child of Mary medal – and some did. And it mattered to those who did. All of that said, I still liked her with her twinkling, beady eyes
Sr. Columbanus’s Choir
All the “town children” who could sing were in her church choir and Sr. Teresa (Conway) played the organ. Devotions consisted of the rosary and, at the end, Benediction, with the swaying thurible wafting clouds of heavenly incense from the altar as we sang “Tantum Ergo sacramentum …. “. Most of the church hymns were in Latin then and, while we didn’t always know what they meant, we knew them by heart. We always walked the two nuns back to the side gate of the convent after evening devotions and Sr. Columbanus told us all about the night sky … the Plough, Orion, etc. That was all before light pollution hid the stars.
NOT ENCLOSED
The sisters wore the full “habit” then – the square white, starched headpiece across the forehead and the stiff white guimp (which they pronounced “gamp”) in front of the chest with a full-length gabardine-style dress and light black veil to the waist and which partly overlapped the front of the headpiece. The habit was completed with a very long leather strap which hung down in front and a large wooden rosary beads, and you could always hear them coming as the beads clicked as they hit off each other. Oh, and they wore a silver ring with an oval shape stamped, I think, with an image of a (sacred) heart and a cross. My little sisters loved to dress up as nuns with these attachments.
The sisters were not ‘enclosed’ as we know it, but it seemed to us that they were all but that. Their recreation was to walk around the edge of the big lawn in front of the convent and I never remember seeing them in the town in those days, except when they went to the dentist, who had a part-time surgery attached to Browne’s shop in Bridge St. – always in twos and not looking to left or to right – via the school gate by the Arch and down Court Lane, by the side of the castle. We always heard (but maybe it was a myth) that they weren’t even allowed home for a parent’s funeral, which we thought really sad. And for bank business, one of the secondary school students was sent to the bank for bank drafts and to the post office for stamps.
PRIMARY SCHOOL: Feast of the Sacred Heart
This is one of my fondest memories when our Convent of the Sacred Heart celebrated
MONTH OF JUNE: SACRED HEART
In what we then called National School, the month of June was dedicated to the Sacred Heart …. which meant June Altars in a classroom window, and a procession. For the altars we brought in flowers from our gardens and made red and white “ribbons” from plaited crepe paper and draped them around a statue of the Sacred Heart (For May Altars, the ribbons were blue and white around a statue of Our Lady). The Sacred Heart procession took place around the front lawn of the Convent, under the splendid, tall chestnut trees which all sported pinkish, upright blossoms which we called “candles” because they reminded us of candles on a Christmas Tree. The path was often strewn with blossoms which had fallen, which all added to the magic, and I remember the delicate perfume of the flowerbeds and us singing “Sweet Heart of Jesus, fount of love and mercy …… ” with great fervour as we walked around in procession, two by two. Quite apart from our fervour, we were so delighted to have time out from our classes.
We just loved this day in national school because the nuns treated us to big fat sticky, raisin buns with loads of sugar on the top (which arrived on huge bakery trays from Lydons in Galway). We all brought a cup or mug to school that day, which the nuns filled with delicious, already-milked tea out of huge teapots. Such excitement! And we sat around having fun on the low school wall looking on to the secondary school yard enjoying this bountiful feast. God bless the Sacred Heart! I genuinely do not ever remember it raining on our annual party. But there was more to come … I thought I would burst with sheer joy when the can-sweets or boiled sweets came around – one for each child – out of big silver cans with lids. It was a big logistical undertaking for the nuns and even then we thought “they didn’t have to but wasn’t it so kind of them)”. And there was no question then of insurance worries about the possible danger of a child being scalded by tea or a can-sweet sticking in a child’s throat (the sweet didn’t last long enough for that anyway). Our parents were full of common sense and their only concern was that we had a good time.
SPORT
For recreation at break time, we walked in groups round and round the school building. And a really inspired lay teacher, Mary Heneghan, who came out from Galway every day on the train, taught us drill (in the yard) which we hated with a vengeance. For one thing we didn’t particularly like cold, fresh air and we certainly didn’t like the formality of drill where we all stood in lines as if on a barrack square trying to touch our toes with straight legs! But, apart from drill, we adored Miss Heneghan who taught us French and also read us English poetry as if she really loved it – which she did. She also read us Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and told us magical stories about Paris and the
At about second year, the nuns decided that we should play camogie. This we all loved but for some reason which I can’t remember our interest waned or the field was not suitable, but it gradually petered out.
- BERCHMANS
For most of my school days, the Rev. Mother of the Convent was Sr. Berchmans, who came from Co. Kilkenny (Freshford, I think). She seemed very old to me then, though she probably wasn’t, but extremely gentle and kind to us when we met her in the convent grounds. I don’t remember anything else about her because our paths would not normally cross in day-to-day school life.
MICK MANNION
The nuns kept cows in the field then and a kindly man called Mick Mannion who wore a soft grey hat and who cycled in every day from the country (was it Gloves?) looked after the cows, milked them and generally maintained the place. We all liked Mick and we often envied him his apparent freedom, as we trudged up and down the path to school, worrying about Algebra or History or whatever.
SIXTH CLASS – BIG GIRLS
St. Agnes, had the unenviable task of preparing us for our next big move – secondary school or where? The majority would have gone on to secondary school – most to just across the school yard, some to boarding school – but a very few did not go beyond sixth class. Sr. Agnes was agreat classical buildings such as Notre Dame Cathedral, with its flying buttresses. It was there, in her classroom, that my lifelong love affair with France began. tall, stout woman with a very high colouring. She was calm, kind and an excellent teacher and loved to teach us rousing ballads with gutsy choruses, such as ‘Ireland Boys Hurrah’ which began with the words “Deep in Canadian woods we’ve met from one bright island flown … “. The chorus ended, I seem to remember with the words ” … we toast old Ireland, dear old Ireland, Ireland boys hurrah”. Blood curdling stuff. Another favourite of hers was ‘The West’s Awake’, I can still hear this lovely woman with a high-pitched strong voice as clear as a bell, beating out the time. We loved all that. But that was ‘in class’ and Sr. Columbanus still came in to teach Choral singing and singing in harmony. This I adored. She had a beautiful contralto voice herself.
We now had to learn to sew. And this involved cutting out a pattern of “lady’s knickers” – double gusset, with long legs almost to the knees and elastic on the ends of the legs and at the waist. Mine was made from a lurid green cotton material with a scattering of flowers (it was NEVER going to be worn). There was great mirth when we all (but not in the presence of Sr. Agnes) put the knickers – pre-elastic – up against the bottom half of the classroom windows … a perfect fit.
To this day, if I smell paraffin oil, I’m transported back to the last day of term – the beginning of the rest of our lives really when classes finished and Sr. Agnes handed out sheets of newspaper and jam jars of paraffin oil for the annual cleaning of the windows – 12 panes, I think, in each … such laughter, such fun.
