My teacher told my parents I was ‘retarded’. My grandmother taught me to read

In the late 1920s, my grandmother, a tanner’s daughter, was offered a scholarship to study English literature at university. Waste of time, her father said, you’ll only go and get married. Her father was quick to anger and her instinct was always to propitiate. She did not go to university. But she went on reading, all her life, and when everyone else had given up and my teacher had told my parents I was “retarded”, she taught me to read and then kept up a steady supply of books.

She liked me to recite poems while she cooked, so early on, while it was still easy, I memorised her favourites, which were mostly Victorian – Wordsworth, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Christina Rossetti.

Break, break, break on thy cold grey stones oh sea. Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness but trailing clouds of glory do we come.

I sat on the step she used to reach the high cupboards and declaimed while she chopped and stirred and wiped.

The man I met while out running thought I was wrong not to track my miles

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I don’t use social media and of course I sometimes wonder if the cost is worth the benefit

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You’re so brave, people say, to cycle in Dublin

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My teacher told my parents I was ‘retarded’. My grandmother taught me to read

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She did not live to see the publication of my first book, but she took great pleasure in my eventual doctorate in English literature. I felt then, in my 20s, as if I’d moved beyond her orbit, as if I could navigate galaxies whose existence she could not guess: post-colonialism, Marxism, deconstruction, New Historicism. I had learned if not quite to look down on the benighted error of the Victorians, at least to cut them down to size and put them in their place.

Jane Eyre was an engaging Cinderella story but, more importantly, it was racist, anti-Catholic and bourgeois, which was what students needed to understand. Wordsworth could do exciting things with poetic form but you had to prove that he was really committed to workers’ rights and the abolition of slavery to justify reading and teaching him.

[ Sarah Moss: Irish dog-walkers are kinder than English dog-walkers ]

I caught up, of course. I was at least trained to read widely and think hard and change my mind, and I had always lived surrounded by people from different traditions and cultures, and had always understood that most of us wear blinkers most of the time.

I teach, I hope, a more open and inclusive way of understanding books and the world than I was taught. But I still love the poems my grandmother taught me. They’re still what comes to hand, to mind, at the end of a long run or during take-off or dentistry, and recently I began to see that they are lovely not despite their limited perspective but with their limited perspective.

Life and art are complicated, contain multitudes, and fortunately our job is to read and reflect and not decide which books pass the test of the month

Beauty does not come plus or minus exclusion but beside it; we can think and not but. Jane Eyre is artistically stunning and a bit lacking in the class war department. The Prelude is interested in the formation of the artist as a patriarch and magical in verse form and simile.

Life and art are complicated, contain multitudes, and fortunately our job is to read and reflect and not decide which books pass the test of the month. Some things can safely be left for hereafter.

I started to experiment with replacing all the buts in my thinking and writing with and. I want this dress and I can’t afford it. I’m sorry but, I’m sorry and. I noticed years ago how I flinched at a friend who said to her kids, “I love you but I wish you wouldn’t do that”, as if their fault was subtracted from her love. I love you and I wish you wouldn’t do that. It’s especially useful when listening to someone else, shows up even more the crassness of “No offence but” or “I don’t mean to be racist but”. No offence and I offend, I don’t mean to be racist and I am racist.

Sometimes you really do want but, a sentence with an equation, this minus that. (He likes to drive fast but there are children cycling to school.) Often it’s more interesting, opens up the world a bit more, just to let a contradiction sit with you.

[ Kevin Barry: ‘I didn’t publish a book till I was 37. I thought I must have been an awful f*cking waster’ ]