The Vasectomy Doctor (6 page)

You turn the first two sods upside down on the ground about a
foot apart at their centres. The next two sods also get turned
groundside skywards and are placed horizontally across the two on the ground, noughts and crosses fashion. Thus you build the foot up until it is five sods high and therefore contains ten sods of turf in all. Now you move along in a straight line and repeat the performance and then repeat it about 300 more times that day. The dried surface of the turf is hard and abrasive and wears down the skin of your fingers. Only cissies wore gloves in those days. A good footer would only take thirty seconds per foot. It would be much easier and quicker if you did not have to turn each sod as you proceeded but then Con Burke is only about six plots up to your left and is reported to be in a particularly bad humour today. Con was actually a patient of mine twenty-five years later and I got to know him as an absolute gentleman and not at all like the feared ganger he appeared to be to us.

After about a week of this we had to concede defeat. In order to foot turf in the way that some of the people around us were doing it, I think you would want for more than a new bicycle.

* * *

In the autumn of 1956 I started to board in the Dominican College, Newbridge for what was to be a five-year stint. Situated on a bend of the river Liffey and with a decent view of the Dublin and Wicklow mountains in the distance, Newbridge College first opened its doors to students in 1852. My first day there was a cool, bright and breezy autumn day. There was a lot to get used to. Qualifying as a ‘local boarder' I was to be allowed go home on all bank holiday weekends and, later, on most Sundays. This took away a lot of the tedium and loneliness of being a boarder, that and the fact that I already had a taste of boarding in Ring College. During those first few days many of my fellows students were homesick and displaced but after a few days most people more or less settled down and accepted their lot.

At that time the college was divided into two separate sections – a junior school for first, second and third-year students and a senior school for fourth, fifth and sixth-year boys. I was to spend two years in junior school and three years in the senior house across the courtyard. This actually was a sensible arrangement because it tended to reduce the bullying and other nasty ancilliary activities not unusual to boarding schools of the day. Each year then in turn was divided up into an A class and a B class for the less academically endowed. Throughout my five years in Newbridge College I never made an A class but it didn't bother me all that much.

There were far more priests than lay teachers there at this time. Many of them carried colourful if not always flattering nicknames. There was the religious teacher, Fr Cassidy, who was called Hopi as in Hop-Along Cassidy. There was Fr Curtin, who we called the Gimlet, because of his piercing eyes. There was a nasty little Corkman who taught mathematics and who was given the nickname Snitch which suited him nicely. There was the French teacher, Fr O'Donovan, who was named Ghostie because, in his white habit and with his gaunt expression, he looked like your quintessential ghost. There was an unfortunate and very elderly little lay teacher called Snotters. Poor old Snotters would stand on the threshold of the classroom with his fingers clasped together in front of him under his chin and he would kind of sway backwards and forwards as if not knowing whether to come in or go out of the room. There was a fellow in my class called Fergal McAuliffe and he could do a great take off of Snotters' way of coming into a classroom.

And then of course there was the Coot, Fr Henry Flanagan, the best teacher that I ever had in my life. If I am ever asked for just one thing to justify my five years spent in Dominican College, Newbridge, paid for by my hard-pressed and far-from-well-off parents, then I would cite the Coot. But then of course he taught my best subjects. He taught and conducted the choir, something I served in every year, first as an alto, later a tenor, not because I was a goody-two-shoes but simply because I enjoyed singing. Then he directed the annual Gilbert & Sullivan opera, something I was also very much involved in every year –
Patience,
The Mikado, The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore
and
The Yeomen of the Guard
. He taught English and art and directed the arts and craft club. In this club, which I joined on my very first day in Newbridge, I learned how to turn wood and the rudiments of cabinet-making, skills that have been useful to me all my life. My friend Fergal McAuliffe made a flat-bottomed boat that we later took down the Liffey as far as Yeomanstown.

One of the nice things about Newbridge was that you were not forced to play rugby – a game for which I had very little talent anyway. So, while my mates may have been practising the scrum or line-outs, I might be turning a large salad bowl in the arts and crafts club. I am not saying that one activity is in any way superior to the other. All I'm saying is that in education, rather than regimentation, latitude in allowing students to find their own niche is very important.

The Coot taught us English in fifth year and asked us to write an essay about a train journey I think it was. I remember then, for the first time in my life, using some descriptive passages and creative ideas and actually enjoying writing. What I produced was no masterpiece of course but Fr Flanagan thought it was good enough and he read it out to the class and congratulated me. I do not believe that all teachers fully understand the importance of a little praise now and again. That year I was given a gold medal for essay writing and my confidence was renewed for all time. It is the small things and rare moments like that that education should be all about, not brilliant marks and six honours in the leaving certificate.

While in Newbridge I also joined the FCA or Forsa Cosanta Áitiúil, Ireland's reserve army. The other fellows in our class used to laugh at us and say that we were in the Free Clothing Association. But they could laugh away. I was in the FCA for three years and enjoyed every moment of it. I fired the Lee Enfield .303 rifle, the Vicker's Submachine Gun and the Bren Gun. Every summer we went to Kilkenny to the army's annual training camp where we were sent on field manoeuvres, learned about combat tactics, field communications, ceremonial drill and how to work the butts under the huge targets to signal to the marksman 500 yards back where on the target their rounds were hitting. After a day of that you would eat a horse. If you misbehaved you were sent on ‘fatigues': peeling potatoes for a day or some such demeaning activity. All of this gave me great insight into army life, enough to know that it was not something I would ever want to get into as a career.

In sixth year I was in the debating society and this was something else that stretched the imagination and taught one how to assemble one's argument and present it in a persuasive way. That year too we had a concert at which I sang a song called ‘Whistling Phil McHugh', a Percy French song but by no means one of his better ones, wherever I got the idea from:

Now whistling Phil McHugh has come over from Dunlahy

And we don't know what to with Miss Mary Ann Mulcahy.

Oh stop please, this is embarrassing. Let's have no more of that. But the point here is that this was the first time that I ever stood up on a stage and sang a song to a real live audience and I must say my audience was most gracious in their applause.

* * *

At home both parents were still beavering away at their typewriters. It was during these years also that my mother made her three lecture tours of the United States. Each tour would last six to eight weeks and take her around most of America, east to west. Her venues were in the main third-level Catholic institutions and her subject was the lives of saints – mostly Irish saints I think. They were fairly punishing schedules and by the time she was finished she would come home absolutely exhausted. But they were also very lucrative and quite frankly money in our house was always pretty tight what with four of us in boarding school more or less all at the same time and writing being the main source of income. Later in life I would learn all about trying to put children through boarding schools myself. It's no joke. In many ways America and my mother may have saved the day.

My mother had a wicked sense of humour. We had a French lad staying with us one of those summers when I was in Newbridge. He was with us as an exchange student to learn English. His name was Jean Pierre and in fact his English was very good except that he was very fond of using the word ‘completely' for some strange reason. In a huckster's shop down in Prosperous there was this elderly frail old lady known as Cis Cribbin. In addition to being very old Cis did not make things any easier for herself by having a lighted cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth from dawn until dusk every day of the week. Her hair, which otherwise should have been white, was now being constantly smoked into a streaky yellow colour. When Jean Pierre first saw this apparition he got a bit of a fright. That evening at supper he was heard to remark: ‘Poor Cis Cribbin. She is completely old and yellow.' On hearing this mother took a fit of the giggles from which we thought she would never recover. Indeed, whenever she was reminded of the story later she would chortle to herself for ages. Her take on it was that it must be bad enough to be old but to be completely old and completely yellow at the same time was all just too much.

These years were the heydays of Muintir na Tíre, the rural organisation for community improvement founded by Fr John Hayes from Bansha in county Tipperary. My father was a passionate supporter of this movement and founded a Muintir branch in Prospe
rous at a very early stage of the organisation's evolution. Today there
is a line of maturing lime trees running down the side of the street across from Larry Keogh's public house in Prosperous that still bears testimony to the work of those early Muintir people.

Muintir na Tíre held an annual conference called rural week. These for the most part took place in boarding schools then emptied for the summer holidays. They were innocent enough kind of gatherings, each evening ending with a kind of freelance meeting called a fireside chat. Here people were encouraged to bring up for debate more or less any subject that occurred to them other than religion or politics which were both statutorily barred. Apart from these there were the usual home-grown concerts and céilí dancing after the more serious stuff during the day. There was no alcohol available on site, something that didn't bother me in those days. For a young teenager rural weeks were fertile grounds for opportunities to meet the opposite sex and it was at such a venue in Carlow that I first fell in love, with a girl called Phyllis. After that Phyllis used to write to me in Newbridge College on a regular basis, her letters arriving hidden in the pages of the
Carlow Nationalist
. All letters were screened going in and out of the college. When I wanted to reply to her I had to give my letter to a dayboy or non-boarding pupil who would post it from outside. A lad called Hughie Garret, God bless him, always obliged me in this underground activity. These love-letters from Carlow were very important for sustaining sanity during those otherwise trying times.

Finally then along comes our sixth and final year and I am made one of six prefects who are given minor authoritative roles to play like overseeing the picking up of litter. I share a room with Fergal McAuliffe on the top storey of the new wing. One evening Fergal announces that he thinks he has a vocation to become a Dominican priest. I never then or since actually believed in the concept of ‘vocation' so this was all a bit odd. I mean if you think that you are cut out for the weird life of priesthood then that's fine, just get on with it. But what's all this about a calling from God and where is there any evidence to support such a concept?

Under the direction of the Coot we put on a version of
The
Pirates of Penzance
and then, six months later, the leaving certificate examination is upon us. In this I failed Latin and French but passed all other subjects easily if without any particular distinction. There
was no points system for entrance into third-level education in 1961
so the pressure to get great results in your leaving certificate did not really exist and certainly not to the extent that it does today some forty-plus years later. That said however, the leaving certification examination was a defining moment in the lives of everyone who sat it.

I still have a recurring nightmare about the leaving certificate. In the nightmare typically I have failed in Irish or in maths but this failure is not unearthed until after I have graduated as a doctor. Because of this I have in effect failed the leaving certificate examination and should never have been allowed to enter medical school. Therefore in effect I am not a doctor at all and will need to go back and repeat the whole thing again from start to finish.

I know that this recurring nightmare of mine makes no real logical sense but then is that not the very nature of all or at least most dreams? The point here I think is that there are some defining moments in all of our lives that are of such a magnitude as to switch on a recurring sleep thought that stays with individuals for the entirety of their lives and the leaving certificate examination is such a defining moment. It is nice to wake up from a nightmare like that and know it was only a bad dream.

* * *

Now it is the summer of 1961 and all is well. My long years as a boarder in Newbridge College and the leaving certificate are at last well behind me and this, combined with the sunny, warm weather, induces a certain mild and contained euphoria that I can still feel to this day. My father has not yet developed the rheumatoid arthritis that was soon to blight his health in his declining years. In the back of the
Irish Times
my mother spotted an ad from an elderly gentleman living on the coast road beyond Dalkey. This wealthy old man seeks a young driver to drive him around the continent in return for all expenses paid and a small lump sum. It is a good deal. I have never been outside Ireland before in my short life and this seems a golden opportunity. We agree to meet outside the parade ring at the Curragh race course where the Irish Derby is being run and, after a very brief interview I am hired, just like that. Would that everything in the life to follow were to be so simple.