by Michael Boyle
‘School teachers come and go. Many are totally forgotten and lost in the mists of time, but Mickey Boyle’s short tenure at St. Patrick’s College Maghera will forever be firmly established in the folklore of South Derry.’
This is how Paddy Collins, a former colleague, described my time at St. Patrick’s High School in Maghera, County Derry. In 1971, I finished a degree program at Memorial University of Newfoundland and then in the spring term I got a teaching position at Stephen’s High School, Stephenville. But now after spending four years in the province I was anxious to return to my homeland. Having had a B.A. degree from Memorial University, I had applied to do a Master’s degree in geography at the New University in Coleraine Northern Ireland. That July I attended a Memorial University geography Summer School in Gros Morne but left early to go back to Ireland to check on my University status.
So, late August, I found out that I was not accepted for the program at Coleraine, and I had no plan B to fall back on. However, a teacher went on sick leave at the local St. Patrick’s boys’ High School in Maghera and a replacement teacher was needed immediately, and seemingly I fitted the bill. I managed to buy a second hand green Ford Cortina car to drive the three miles to the school while I resided at the family home. After a couple of weeks, I was told I would be needed until Christmas and as a result the zealous Headmaster, Father Donnelly, insisted I show all my detailed lesson plans for him to sign each week. He signed his name in a red biro with his initials T.P.D. and occasionally he made suggestions and changes to my lesson plans.
My teaching responsibilities were the lower streams, namely 1D, 2D and 3C in the portable classroom section of the school. I taught Geography, History, Mathematics, and Religious Education. Also I somehow naively thought my pupils would be excited to have a local fellow and next-door neighbor teaching them. My students were full of energy, fun-loving and were certainly not vindictive or in any way mean, but they loved playing pranks, a couple of which I‘ll never forget and one that almost got me fired on the spot.
Most teachers had nicknames, even the venerable headmaster himself, the Reverend Thomas Patrick Donnelly, who was known as ‘The Pear’. I had mistakenly thought he was called this because of his large size, but I was later told he was the senior French teacher and his nickname was actually ‘le Pere’. Other teachers had monikers like Flash, Rat, Thunder, Spud, Deoch, and so on. In other schools in which I taught, I suffered from having the most vivid fire-engine-red hair, and as a result I was bestowed countless ‘ginger’ nicknames. After about two weeks at St Pat’s, I felt very really happy that I had not experienced any annoying catcalls or nicknames that echo along the corridors of the school. However, I did see the letters ‘CH’ scribbled on the blackboard and on my desk area. At first I wondered if there were a lot of Montreal Canadiens ice hockey fans in the school because CH was the short name of that hockey team. The mystery was soon solved—it seems the students were mimicking me, as I had used the words ‘clod hopper’ quite a few times, and as a runner, I used to have a distinctive hopping style in my warm-up exercises. So now for the rest of the school term I was known as ‘Clod Hopper’. In a way, I was sort of pleased, as this was a lot better than some of the names I had been called in the past.
In the early seventies, during the height of the IRA bombing campaign, pupils and teachers were extremely security-conscious. I found this very strange having to lock the cupboard to my press at all times and to make sure never to leave any classrooms unlocked. Another thing the Headmaster stressed was never ever to leave your class unattended. If you needed to go to the washroom then buzz the office or get another teacher to take your place.
I played for the local Lavey GAA club and I stored my football gear in a press at the back of the classroom, so that I could go to the school gym or help out with cross-country after school ended for the day.
‘Master, Master Boyle. Come quick’, shouted Paddy Lagan.
‘Big Johnnie Dunne is going to kill little Mickey Kearns.’ I dropped my clipboard on the floor and sprinted along the portable corridor to the gym door. All I could hear was ‘Fight! Fight! When I appeared, everyone seemed to scatter, and in fact I didn’t really see a fight at all. I was relieved to see Mickey Kearns’s smile and while we walked back the hundred yards back to the classroom he told me about his comic collection. I was really pleased how the boys would talk to me about their hobbies and sports teams. Somehow I knew this was going to be a good experience teaching at home for the first time ever after being abroad.
From what I remember of that historic November afternoon, Sean O’Sullivan, then a large but likeable boy from Slaughtneil, awoke from his sleep during my geometry class to raise the alarm.
‘Sur, sur. There is a strange kit bag at the back of the classroom.’
‘Does anyone in the classroom own this kit bag?’ I asked the class three times.
My forty-two pupils immediately answered by shaking their heads in unison.
‘No sur. No sur. It must have been put here during lunchtime’, said Michael O’Shea from Swatragh.
The school had carried out a number of bomb drills during the term and we all knew exactly what procedures needed to be followed. I asked Kevin McShane from Mayogall to raise the alarm by contacting the Headmaster, and then the alarm bell sounded throughout the school.
I was pleased with the military precision shown by my excited 13-year-old boys from Lavey, Slaughneil, Lisnamuck, Gulladuff and Swatragh as they marched out to their pre-arranged areas on the playing fields. Within approximately 60 seconds the whole school was evacuated. It was a pleasant day and the students were all happy to get a respite from the classroom. I have been told that some optimists in the group kept their fingers crossed that the school would be blown up, and indeed some extreme optimists hoped that the Headmaster, a couple of policemen, and three or four teachers would go up in smoke as well. My heart was in my mouth during all this commotion, yet I was pleased that one of my homeroom pupils had raised the alarm.
Firemen, policemen and the caretaker began a complete search outside the school and around the car park and garden. The assembled school students were relatively quiet, but they got a little restless standing on the all-weather football pitches. My students were really quiet and on their best behaviour, but I could hear two pupils from another class speaking.
‘If this goes on much longer we’ll miss our gym class.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll also miss old Nolan’s math class. Listen, I hear a strange sound somewhere.’
‘You’re imagining things, Quigley. Oh you’re right, everyone is looking up at the sky.’
‘It sounds like some kind of airplane, Mac Sweeney. Quiet, Mr. Clodhopper is looking our way.’
Suddenly, we heard the whirling of helicopter propellers coming closer and closer to the school and a short time later a British Army helicopter swooped down noisily on the far end of the playing field and a highly trained bomb squad team emerged with a sniffer dog. Our school caretaker, John Murray, was dressed in a red flak jacket and he pointed the soldiers towards the portable classrooms where the kit bag was first seen.
At the school gates a BBC Northern Ireland TV van set up cameras to get a panoramic view of the school, knowing they needed a clip for the 6 o’clock news. From the other end of the school a police jeep patrol started blocking the school entrances and then advanced forward with the army personnel to coordinate a complete search of the school and the surrounding town streets of Maghera.
The Headmaster and the teaching staff who didn’t have an assigned homeroom patrolled the excited but nervous school students assembled on the playing fields. There was now a real sense that this was no ordinary school evacuation.
Paddy Collins, the safety officer, had on his flak jacket and was carrying an emergency bullhorn microphone with him. He had a stern look on his face and he reported back to the Headmaster.
‘The Army thinks this could be a big operation for the rest of the afternoon.’
‘We’ll know in a little while if we’ll have to evacuate everybody to the town centre. There is a possibility that there are explosives in the storage areas of the portables.’
We all waited anxiously because this was clearly no longer a regular drill. After some forty minutes, which seemed like two hours, a burly soldier emerged towing the offending kit bag on a small trolley along with a small explosives-detecting robot. When he reached the assembled area in the presence of the headmaster he stopped and slowly extracted a dirty black and orange Lavey G.A.A. football jersey and raised it high in the air with an army pointer so the crowd could see it. The entire assembly erupted in hysterical fits of uncontrollable laughter. Lieutenant Colonel Simpson Jones then began to read the name sewn on the inside of the jersey and he yelled out in a deep Lancashire accent.
‘Gentlemen. Is there an individual here in this school assembly who answers to the name Boyle?’
Some teachers were tempted to say in my defense that they did not know this man.
The entire assembly laughed, roared, and joked at my predicament, while many were relieved that this emergency had been resolved after being out of class for almost an hour.
So in the midst of the jovial crowd I gingerly (pardon the pun) stepped forward to claim my football bag, which somehow unknownst to me had been put into the larger offending kit bag. I looked for a hole on the playground to swallow me up as the headmaster muttered at me, and the Lieutenant Colonel scowled. I walked between them as I was marched like a criminal to the school office. When I got there I tried to explain that my homeroom class had tricked me. Paddy Lagan had told me that there was a big fight in the lower portables and I must have left the classroom unlocked, which gave students the opportunity to put my kit bag in the large holdall bag.
‘But you, sir. Yes, you, sir.’ The headmaster’s face fumed and he pointed his finger towards me.
‘You left your classroom door open and your cupboard door open as well. So don’t ever blame any of your pupils for your own stupidity.’
I felt that I was going to be fired on the spot or even worse that I would be taken into custody by the army to nearby Ballykelly R.A.F. station for further questioning or even to be arrested, possibly. The previous month internment had been introduced, and the British Army could detain any suspect for 48 hours without any reason. The Colonel then asked me to produce some identification and I gave him my driver’s license. He paused for a while and I waited for another dressing down.
‘Look at it here, blimey what the heck is this Sir. A New– Found- Land driver’s license. You don’t say. You know my dad was in the merchant navy and he did convoy runs from Halifax and he really loved his stay in St. John’s. They are jolly good people there.’ Then he quickly changed the subject.
‘Oh, by the way, Mister Boyle, I don’t know why you would want to stay in this bloody forsaken country. But if you do, then one had better get a proper UK driver’s license, because there is no photo on this Newfoundland license.’
I was dismissed from the office and I skulked back to my classroom like a drowned rat.
But I will leave the last word on this to Paddy Collins, the Health and Safety teacher at the school:
‘I don’t know what the pupils learned that day, but we all agreed that it was the best bit of teaching Michael had done in his time at St. Pat’s. And we were right, because anyone who was there will never forget the Oscar winning expression on his face as he was being cautioned by the Headmaster and Lieutenant Colonel Simpson Jones and then escorted by them to the main school office.’
Michael Boyle is a native of Lavey, Derry, Ireland and is a regular contributor of original poetry to Tinteán. His poems have appeared in the The Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Tinteán and New Ulster Writing. He was awarded ‘The Arts and Letters’ prize for poetry in 2014 by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador. He currently lives in St John’s Newfoundland where he conducts a historical walking tour, see www.boyletours.com
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