I Learned to Count with Cotton Reels
Memories of an Irish village education in the 1950s
I learned to count with cotton reels.
There were one hundred of them in multicoloured loops around the classroom wall. I did not have to be cajoled to learn to count. Every day I would check. Yes, there were still ten pink ones at the beginning, then ten blue ones, then ten green ones and so on, the colours repeating themselves when my teacher’s paint box ran out of choices.
My introduction to formal education was in a tiny school in a village in Donegal, in 1955. The pounding breakers of Rossnowlagh were not too far away and the thought of them made us draw our benches closer round the turf fire on a dark winter’s day. Every pupil was expected to contribute to the turf fire, and we could be seen making our way up the village street to school with our bags on our backs and our piece of turf in our hand. If the piece you had was small you kept quiet, but if you had got a particularly impressive piece that morning it was quite socially acceptable to brag.
I didn’t like school at first, but life soon settled into a routine. My mother would plait my hair and tie it carefully with ribbons as she asked me my spellings. You could get smacked for getting one wrong – that happened to me once and at the time I thought it was the end of the world. I became a good speller, though.
My older brother was entrusted with taking me from our front door – which opened straight on to the street – up to the top of the village where the school nestled, half in the country, surrounded by trees. It was a two-teacher school, and the one big room was divided by what seemed to me to be huge sliding doors, floor to ceiling, which gave us some measure of separation from sight, but not from sound.
We tiny ones were round-eyed with alarm at the level of the sums and reading we heard going on in the other room. We would never be able to do all that! We were apprehensive about leaving our fair but strict lady teacher – the daughter of a village family down the street – and moving next door to the realms of The Master. The Master’s voice could get very angry indeed and sometimes we winced at the crack of the cane.
There must have been about three different classes on our side of the partition. The big ones sat most of the day on the desks at the back, right against The Master’s room. The wee ones and the middling ones swopped places during the day. There were benches set out on three sides of a square round the fire and this is where we started, with much jostling and chatter before the teacher called us to attention.
This was where we did our spellings and our tables. I always hoped I would be asked to count the cotton reels because they were my favourite things in the whole room. The blackboard stood on an easel to one side of the fire. When the spellings were over and the teacher wrote a sum on the board and picked a pupil to do it aloud, I shrank as small as I could and wished myself anywhere else.
When this stage of the morning was finished, we swopped with the middling pupils who had occupied the first few rows of desks. These were very long desks and much carved upon over the years. It is strange to see benches like them in history and folk parks now. There was always quite an interlude if someone sitting in the middle of one of these benches was called up to the teacher or needed to go to the toilet. The whole row of children had to be unpacked and packed again.
When we sat at these desks, each of us had a slate on which to write. These were not perfect slates; they were uneven and broken over the years. There was the odd furtive tussle as someone who had got a good slate tried to hold on to it. I remember that the writing implements were not exactly chalk. They seemed to be much scratchier than chalk and made a thin, squeaky line on our slates.
A trip to the toilet was not the same experience as it is in school today. There was a little hut out the back, not an inconsiderable distance away, and this had to be reached through the mud and snow of winter as well as the sun and rain of summer. Inside was a wooden bench with a hole in it. And it smelled.
This was one of the things I did not miss when, after I had been at school for only a year, we moved to Belfast. I was sent to a large suburban primary school and was totally disorientated. I was just coming to terms with what school was – classmates that I knew from the street, turf fires, long benches, slates and cotton reels – when all of a sudden it seemed that that wasn’t what it was at all. Here were strangers; each class had a whole room and I had to find mine down a long corridor; nobody asked had you forgotten your piece of turf; the huge playground was a whirl of shouting and running; I had no idea what family the teacher came from. And there were so many teachers,
Rather than drowning, I struck out with the resilience of childhood and learned to swim in this new sea. But I never ceased to miss the comfort of the turf smoke and the cotton reels draped around the walls of that little schoolhouse in Donegal.
And I never saw the other side of those huge sliding doors.
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