By now some of you may think that the level of brutal violence
that I had to face, on a daily basis, was extreme. It was.
You may also think that it may perhaps be too extreme, especially when I
was being prepared to be a world leading Master Candle Maker, the Chief of the
O Neill Clan and the King of Ireland. The
secret cabal who organised my training didn’t think so. From the moment I could understand, if not
before, I had been told that my mother
had died giving birth to me and that my father, a recently qualified
professional, had gone abroad to further his career, knowing that I would be
able to access better medical care and enjoy a better education if I stayed in
Ireland. They could never remember which
country my father had gone to or exactly what profession he had ‘recently qualified
in’.
Almost every day I would look at the line of cars on the
Belfast to Dublin road and wish that one of the cars would be driven by my
father, my biological father, and that he would sail up the long avenue to Violent
Hell, and take me away to safety. It
never happened and I do think that the secret cabal who organised my training had
sent me to Violent Hell to allow me to experience the bitter loneliness that
many of my people might experience. So
that on taking up my role as King of Ireland I could begin to effectively protect
and help the elderly and the persecuted.
In order to maximise the experience, they placed an uncle of mine, the
other priest, at Violent Hell.
One of the ‘nice’ things that could happen to you at Violent
Hell is that a priest would invite two or three boys to his room for the entire
second study period where they would watch television and enjoy tea and
biscuits. I promise you I never heard
one whisper about malicious intent or perverted behaviour during my time
there. My uncle had been brought back
from the missions in Africa as he was to undergo an operation on his
throat. He taught me physics yet I was
never invited to my Uncle’s room. He never
spoke to me, apart from once when he told me that my paternal grandmother was
dead and we were to go to the funeral the next day.
So as you can imagine the levels of loneliness I was
experiencing was intense, now put on top of that the oppressive violence I was
subjected to and simmer for a couple of years.
I remember once I had gone to Ireland for a short holiday. I was with my favourite aunt and she was
asking me what had gone wrong at Violent Hell.
The simple equation that one of the top academic schools in Northern
Ireland plus one of the highest IQ’s in Northern Ireland being brought together
equals zero did not compute. All her
brothers had attended Violent Hell; she had even considered sending her own son
there. I began to explain about the oppressive
brutality there and was actually naming the priests. I began to speak about one priest, who I considered
to be the most violent of the lot, Big Jed.
This was a country boy made good. Jed ran the school farm and taught
Latin. Most schoolchildren remember
teachers throwing perhaps a small piece of chalk at them. In one of the second year classrooms was a
hole in the blackboard where Big Jed had thrown a blackboard duster at a boy
who was supposed to be declining a verb on the blackboard. The hole remained there for a good number of
years and some said it was to remind us what would happen if we got it wrong.
I explained to my favourite aunt how this animal was so short
sighted that we, when being punished by him, would try to pull or push our hand
so that the cane would hit our hand and not our arm or shoulder. Big Jed, if he noticed, would take this as cowardice
and really lay into you. My aunt looked
at me and nodding toward the local church just across the road from her house said,
“Well he’s my parish priest now, but he’s all right as long as he takes his
medication.”
Once he called a distant cousin of mine, Pascal, to the front
of the class and began to slap him with a cane on the hand. Pascal moved his hand to try and catch the
blows. Big Jed became furious and began
to lash Pascal’s legs with the cane. Pascal
entered into, and began to suffer, an epileptic fit. As he writhed on the floor Big Jed continued
to attack him thinking that the boy had the audacity to fight back. At least Pascal’s parents had the moral courage
to go to the school tell the priest what they thought of them and took Pascal
away to a place of safety.
I do not know how it came about but suddenly the priests were
not allowed to carry concealed weapons. They
still held them in their day rooms, but they were not allowed to take them into
the classrooms, nor were they allowed to launch into us with their boots and
fists. It must have been nice for the
new boys joining the school but for those of us who had suffered, under the old
regime, we still lived in fear.
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