MEMOIR: In this extract from his new memoir, a rattlebag full of food, wine, gardening and good living, Irish Times restaurant critic Tom Doorley recalls his schooldays
There is something about classrooms that never fails to give me a touch of butterflies in the tummy. Even today, when I walk in to meet a new crop of pupils at Ballymaloe Cookery School, I experience a twinge of anxiety. They invariably turn out to be delightful and wide-ranging people; deeply knowledgeable food enthusiasts from Canada or Carlow, pretty teenagers who want to be chalet girls, career-changers who have discovered grub, kitchen designers, the odd bored housewife, people who have always wanted a restaurant, inscrutable and polite Japanese folk, every sort you can imagine.
My task is to teach a course that introduces them to the world of wine, with plenty of tasting, as much technical stuff as they need and, I hope, an injection of enthusiasm for the subject. And yet, the first encounter still induces a degree of anxiety in me.
My schooldays could not be described as a bundle of laughs. I was sent, at first, to the Dominican convent in Eccles Street, where I was taught by a formidable lady by the name of Miss Frawley. Poor Miss Frawley was not a ray of sunshine and eventually she fell seriously ill. She was replaced by a very young, exceptionally pretty and wildly enthusiastic young nun with whom I instantly fell in love. She actually seemed to like us and enjoy our company. If my education had continued in this vein I am sure that I, and all the rest of the class, would have ended up as very clever, well-adjusted, high-achieving people; reality, of course, had to break in and nothing lasts forever. Soon, I was entrusted to the tender care of the Christian Brothers.
Daily life with "de brudders" was fraught with danger. The chances of escaping without at least one dose of corporal punishment during class time were virtually nil, and extracurricular activities were either spartan or character-forming, depending on your point of view. The only ones I remember were the ritual humiliation of Irish dancing lessons and learning Gaelic football in a field liberally dotted with fresh cowpats. For somebody with my lack of physical coordination, both of these pursuits added to my sense that school was, essentially, a hostile environment.
In time - it seemed like aeons, but I suppose it amounted to about two years - I said goodbye to national school with considerable relief, and headed off to the preparatory school at Belvedere. The Junior House, as it was called, had parquet flooring, a different teacher for each subject and a curious calm which made the Christian Brothers' place seem like a hedge school. Boys were not biffed in the heat of the moment; instead they were sent to the headmaster, or Prefect of Studies in Jesuit parlance, with a note in Latin. The Prefect of Studies could then administer the lashes in cold blood.
Belvedere, in my time, was a smug and self-satisfied school, very different from the vibrant establishment that is there now. In the 1970s it was coasting along on its reputation and some of the teaching was frankly abysmal. But there was one teacher at Belvedere who really inspired me and who has remained a lifelong friend. Gerry Haugh came as a callow H. Dip. Ed. student in my first term in the senior school and he is there still. He introduced me to Shakespeare and to real theatre, handed out criticism and encouragement and, above all, was a grown-up to whom we could talk about absolutely anything. If I had not had his example, I doubt I would have entertained any notions of returning to the classroom after graduation. And that, somewhat to my own surprise, is what I did after Trinity College, Dublin.
The year 1981 was not an auspicious one in which to graduate and go about the business of getting your career on the road. I had spent four relatively easy and carefree years at TCD pursuing a degree in History, discovering the opposite sex in greater detail, drinking prodigious quantities of stout and spending considerably more time on what one might loosely call extracurricular activities than on my studies. However, despite my patchy enthusiasm for history, I came out after four years with a creditable 2.1 and, after a stab at an MLitt, I decided to try teaching and signed up for a H. Dip.
My first task was to find a school that would be prepared to unleash me on its pupils. An offer from St Columba's was intriguing. I knew dozens of Old Columbans and even liked quite a lot of them. They tended to be clannish in a way that suggested that their schooldays had formed some sort of immutable bond between them.
St Columba's is a curious old place, perched in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. Founded in 1843 by William Sewell, an English clergyman who went on to establish Radley in Oxfordshire, it was designed to be a school that would educate the sons of landlords in their own country rather than in England. In the early 1980s it was a small school, with just under 300 pupils, boys and girls, the majority of them boarders. As I walked up the steep driveway in early September for the first staff meeting, I thought it seemed like a pleasant enough place to do my teaching practice. I had no idea that I would end up spending four years there. Or that it would change my life ...
Young, single members of staff were expected to get as fully involved in the life of the school as possible. I ran the junior debating society, produced the junior play, took mini-busloads of sailors to Greystones on Saturdays, read bedtime stories in Tibradden House, and even took camping trips. At lunch the staff ate together, but at supper we ate with the troops. I got to know my pupils extremely well. I discovered why some of them were difficult or withdrawn. I learned about their families, their enthusiasms, their weaknesses. I came to care about them in a way which I had never thought possible, having always regarded teachers as a rather aloof bunch.
With older ones I'd find myself discussing the meaning of life and other adolescent issues; with the younger ones I would occasionally have to deal with tears and homesickness. St Columba's was a community. I was part of that community with certain roles to play, and I was appreciated. It was exhilarating, challenging, tiring, fulfilling, and I was introduced to the notion that I could, in however tiny a way, influence people's lives. I learned a vast deal more during my four years at St Columba's than I had during my 10 at Belvedere.
But how, you may ask, did it change my life? Well, teaching O-level history to a mixed-ability group gave me my first experience of trying to explain something complex. In a roundabout way, teaching history honed my ability to help people understand and enjoy wine. St Columba's also gave me many lifelong friends, some of them members of staff, but most of them people who are big enough to ignore the fact that I once marked their prep.
But in terms of life-changing, by far the biggest element was the fact that I fell madly and silently in love with a blonde, blue-eyed girl in the sixth form called Johann McKeever, who helped out with the junior play. I certainly don't recommend young schoolmasters to entertain romantic feelings towards the girls in their school, but in this instance there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was smitten and, as it happens, fate was on my side. On her last night of term, she and I ended up strolling down Dún Laoghaire pier by moonlight. We have been married to each other since 1984.
People sometimes say to me that it must have been quite strange marrying a pupil. The simple answer to that is that I didn't. I never encountered Johann in the classroom, and in the curiously egalitarian atmosphere of St Columba's in the early 1980s, we started off our relationship as friends, pure and simple.
On a school trip to Russia in 1983, very late at night in a Moscow bar, I told her - in anunguarded moment - that I thought she was wonderful, an opinion which I have never since revised. When we returned to school I was spared any real embarrassment by the fact that Johann was clearly going out with someone else. But our friendship grew and, at the end of term, blossomed into something else.
I was, at the time, a rather immature 24-year-old while Johann was an 18-year-old wiser than her years would suggest. When we got married, at 25 and 19 respectively, I think it is fair to say that we did so to keep our deeply conservative parents happy. Otherwise we would have cheerfully cohabited.
Johann has been a full-time homemaker ever since our eldest daughter, Sarah, was born in 1989. Georgia followed in 1993, and Roberta in 1996. However, she has managed to snatch some time to develop her artistic talents, something that she plans to develop further when Roberta heads off to boarding school in five years' time.
I recently had a consultation with a particularly thorough homeopath. "What is the best thing that ever happened to you?" was one of the questions she asked. No prizes, then, for guessing my answer.
Muck and Merlot, by Tom Doorley, is published by O'Brien Press at €19.95