- 29 -

The cat sat on the mat Our room-and-kitchen at No32 had been Granny Hughes’s after the family moved from Philipstoun, where Grandad had worked in the opencast mine. Both were from Co Tyrone - Mary McGrory from Dungannon, and Arthur Hughes from Annagasna, Moy. We never knew them, for Arthur had died not long after Joe was born, and Mary, before Joe and Martina were married.

Joe liked to spend his holidays at the family home in Moy, and it was on one of those visits that he met Martina Deasy.

Martina, the eldest of six surviving children, was born in Richhill, Co Armagh, but quite early on the family moved to Ballinasloe, Co Galway. Martina’s recollections were always of there. I think perhaps that’s where she felt she really belonged. She spoke of it always with great affection, in the lovely Galway accent that she never lost. Her favourite subject at school was English. She didn’t like Irish language lessons at all, and years later could say only, “Sit on the chair, please”. When Martina left school she worked in the post office – oh, but I’m forgetting that in her school’s production of The Merchant of Venice she played Portia. She loved her job in the post office, we heard though not from herself, and it was with a heavy heart that she went to help an Aunt Lisa and an Uncle Willie, who had a pub, The Eagle Bar, in Charlemont, just across the bridge from Moy. The cat sat on a mat beside the bell and rang for service if a customer came in while Lisa or Martina was down the cellar. It was always drunk.

On 9 August 1933 Martina and Joe were married in St Brigid’s Church, Derryvolgie Avenue, Belfast, and went to live at No 32, High Street, Linlithgow.

- 30 -

From the kitchen window you looked ‘down the back’ to the wash-house and toilets and, beyond them, the small gardens for the six families that lived up the close. The door on the right in the close itself opened into the back shop of Isa Morison, who sold paint and wallpaper. I called her ‘Pink Isa’, and she lived in dread of the day I would spot her coming back from Holy Communion, and call out her name. I have always liked the colour pink, and long after the Linlithgow years learned why: in some Buddhist countries each day of the week has its own special colour. Tuesday is pink, and I was born on a Tuesday.

Anyway, if you jumped over the burn, climbed the wall, turned right, and continued past the back of Linlithgow Academy, you’d come to a small footbridge that went back over the burn, near where we played sometimes, seeing who could jump the furthest, and where I saw a water-rat once, about a foot long. But before we go on to the footbridge, step out from the trees and you’ll be at the edge of Linlithgow Loch. Look away to your left now, over the green expanse of the Peel, to Linlithgow Palace, where Mary, Queen of Scots was born. When the air-raid warning sounded in school-time (wait) we made a mad dash across the Peel to take shelter in the Palace dungeons. There I sang in public for the first time but half-way through forgot the words of Oh, Johnny, oh, Johnny, heavens above.

Our garden, the last on the left, was right beside a slightly smelly burn. Father built an underground shelter there that I remember going to late one night when the air-raid warning went - you can probably just make it out, in this photo of Irene and me with Auntie Shelagh, who must have joined us from Ireland very soon after I myself got back.

- 31 – There’s a small island in the middle of the loch, on which a man was once imprisoned and left to starve to death. A black greyhound swam out to her master every day with food, and saved his life. The dog’s loyalty is commemorated on Linlithgow’s coat of arms: a black bitch dog beside an oak tree.

Palace across Loch, from northeast: Courtesy West Lothian Council

Up the narrow lane from the footbridge, you passed, on the left, the bungalow that housed the original Laetare International Youth Hostel, founded by Father McGovern, and a little beyond that, on the right, the back way into the playground of St Joseph’s Primary School. The lane opens out on to the Low Port, where the wee sweetie shop did a brisk trade after school.

Low Port: Courtesy West Lothian Council

- 32 –

Father had been a pupil at St Joseph’s, and when he left in 1914, aged thirteen, Miss Hoban, the Headmistress, pleaded with Mrs Hughes to let Joe stay on as he showed great promise. But the decision was Joe’s own: to find a job and bring in some extra money for his twice-widowed mother and six surviving brothers and sisters. It wouldn’t be long, though, before Jim, not much older than Joe, would be adding a few years to his age so that he could join up and go with his pals to fight in France.

I don’t suppose I do remember running away on my first day… memories are mainly of hot cocoa and mother’s bran scones at playtime in Winter, and really nice school dinners, when they were introduced, in the wooden hut that served as the parish hall.

Beside the school was the Chapel, St Michael’s, where Irene and I were baptized, made our First Confession and Communion and at our Confirmation got a slap on the cheek from Archbishop Andrew Joseph McDonald.

Andrew Thomas (changed to Joseph when he became a Benedictine) would have been about three years old in October 1873, when Mary MacKillop, on her visit from Australia, stayed with her cousin Donald Peter McDonald and his wife and seven children, at

In the early years at St Joseph’s Irene and I were taught by Miss Helen O’Donnell, from Linlithgow, and Miss Mary Finnegan, from Winchburgh. I still have the little picture of the Nativity Miss Finnegan gave me at Christmas 1943, on which she wrote simply “Pray for me” and signed her initials MF. The top part of the wall separating their two classrooms was of glass, and they would stand on chairs during our lessons to chat to each other through the partition.

Photo by Laurie Alexander

Invernevis, Fort William. Mary had earlier stayed in Drimnin, where the priest remembered her father Alexander from their seminary days

- 33 -

together. Alexander had spent a total of eight years in seminary – at the Scots College in Rome, and at Blairs. His son Donald became a Jesuit priest. I know of at least two students who were at Blairs with me whose sons became priests, but none so far whose daughter has been declared a saint, as Mary has. Well, it’s early days yet, wouldn’t you say?

Before we leave Linlithgow, can I just mention one of my first Russian ‘set books’ – Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. There may be a Scottish connection, to say nothing of a Linlithgow one. Cross over to the other side of the High Street from No 32, go up past the railway station towards the Canal, and you’ll come to Learmonth Gardens, with their beautifully-kept lawns and large stone beehive-shaped dovecot, or doocot, which was built in the sixteenth century. It has nearly four hundred nesting boxes inside its three-foot-thick walls. Those ‘ropes’, or ridges, were there to stop rats getting in, otherwise there would have been nothing but feathers left for the winter pies, that only the nobles and landed gentry would ever sit down to: ordinary folk could never have afforded the grain it took to get the pigeons ready for the pie-dish. I have always imagined lemon trees in the Gardens but that can only be because of the name. We liked to have picnics there, until we moved to Linlithgow Bridge.

Carmen Miranda and me at the RoxyFather was the lorry driver at Lovell’s Paper Mill,

Linlithgow Bridge, so when we moved to our ‘tied’ house in Lovell’s Buildings, he was able to do our flitting. Mother sat in the front with Irene, and I was in the back with all our furniture and belongings.

- 34 -It was a two-down two-up close at 38 Main Street, with

the two toilets at the turn of the stairs. We shared the landing with Mr and Mrs Ritchie and Jim and Isobel, who were ages with Irene and me, and Anne, a few years younger.

There were two bedrooms to the front of the house, looking on to Main Street, and the kitchen/living-room was at the back. In dreams sometimes, I have been by that kitchen window where the primus stove stood, looking down to the open ground, on the left of a narrow path, that would have been gardens once, like those on the right. Ours was the end one, up against a wall, with a patch of lawn, and marigolds and sweetpea.

One afternoon in the Summer of 1947 I went to that garden with Ronald Kidd, Brian’s elder brother. We spent the time looking through a big illustrated dictionary that mother had recently got us. Ronald was disappointed, I think, not to be going to the Academy because he had failed his Qualifying. I had failed too, but mother refused to accept the result. I don’t remember now how hard or easy it was to have that decision overturned, but I did get to Bathgate in the end.

The bus that took me there had started its journey at Bo’ness, so I travelled to school every day with Pasquallo Marandola, or Pete, whose family had a fish n chip and ice-cream shop there. The conductress used to buy Pete and me meringues when the bus stopped at Armadale.

It only dawned on me many years afterwards that I couldn’t really have failed the Qualifying, for then mother’s efforts would have come to nothing. So had Ronald really failed? He was the tallest, the cleverest, and in some ways, I suppose, the leader of our little group of pals, which included Jim Ritchie. Jim and I were wondering one day if that was really how babies were made…? Finally, Jim said, “Big Kidd says No.” That was it, then. That’s Jim far left, back row; Ronald’s second from the right, middle row; and far left, front row, is Roy Finnigan, who sent me their class photo. There’s quite a few ‘Briggers’ in it, but I’ll just mention one – Vera Muir, front row, fourth from left, sister of Geordie (wait a wee bit).

- 35 -

Mother’s health wasn’t good at the Bridge. She suffered from frequent attacks of giddiness, which could come on anywhere, suddenly, and completely without warning. She would fall to the ground sometimes, as happened once outside Oliphant’s the bakers, when someone muttered something about drinking, and just walked on. Mother had to attend the outpatients’ department in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where she was seen by an ear, nose, and throat specialist, and was admitted sometimes, to Ward 40. At all these times Mrs Kidd, Ronald’s mother, proved to be a good neighbour.

Not long after our move to the Bridge, father came off the lorry and worked as a boiler-fireman at the Mill, so he had to do shifts: six to two; two to ten; ten to six. If he was at work when one of mother’s attacks came on Mrs Kidd immediately came round to help, and Irene and I would have our meals with Nora, Ronald, Brian, and later Raymond. Bill - Mr Kidd – was in North Africa with the Territorials. The giddy spells meant that mother couldn’t always go to the wash-house when it was her day, or take her turn at washing the stairs, but Mrs Muir across the road from us used to come over and do it all for her. We knew Mrs Muir best by her own name, Vera Lamb. A popular pastime on Main Street was hanging on to the backs of lorries that had presumably slowed down a bit…? Vera’s son Geordie, who would have been about fourteen at the time, got stuck once and was supposed to have been taken all the way to Aberdeen! Vera liked me to sing for her, and it may have been in her house that I sang Galway Bay for the first time, standing by the open fire where Vera sat, getting the veins in her legs burnt all brown.

Another good neighbour who stayed in touch through all the years was Mrs Maria Carmela Di Stefano, from Casalcassinese, near Monte Cassino. She lived up the close with us at 32 High Street. I

- 36 -

remember the shop she had much later, nearly opposite the Linlithgow Picture House, but the first one must have been right next to the close, I think. I don’t know if they had fish n chips in those days, but Joe and his young pals used to go in for a plate of peas and vinegar, and drive poor Mr Di Stefano to distraction, flipping peas into the horn of the gramophone when he was trying to listen to Caruso.

A daughter of Mrs Di Stefano’s, Filomena, had been one of the first pupils to go to the new Catholic senior secondary school for West Lothian when it opened in 1933. Indeed, it was something Filomena told me in later years about how she got to Bathgate, that made me doubt whether I had really failed the Qualifying. Her teacher had discovered that the daughter of a local building contractor would be going to Bathgate, but Filomena would be staying on at St Joseph’s. Yet Filomena had scored higher marks…? When the teacher took the matter up at the County Buildings, she was told the builder’s daughter was more likely to benefit from a senior secondary education. Filomena did get her place, and when the War was over and she was able to leave her job in the munitions factory, went to work as secretary to a firm of solicitors in Edinburgh.

With mother often unwell, and father taking all the overtime he could get, Irene and I were left to go to Sunday Mass on our own – well, not counting Owen and Helen Sweeney, who came with us sometimes. They were from Bridgend but spent a lot of time with Granny Meechan at the Bridge, where they had a cinematograph that showed very jerky cowboys and indians. Irene and Helen, who still lives at the Bridge, remain good pals to this day, though I don’t know if they still call out, “Haw, Helen” or “Haw, Irene” at each other’s doors when they visit.

After Mass Irene and I went up to the Di Stefano’s, where we would find real (wait) Catholic newspapers, magazines like The Catholic Fireside, Catholic Truth Society pamphlets, and little books about very holy French children, like Anne de Guigné and Guy Long … oh, I can’t remember the rest of his name. It doesn’t matter: they don’t like you going in for that sort of thing at Blairs. It was wartime and there was rationing, and Mrs Di Stefano could serve up dried, powdered egg, and spam like everybody else, but we also had our first taste of Spaghetti Bolognese. And during the time that she worked as housekeeper to Father McGovern, she would quite

often give Irene and me our dinner in the presbytery kitchen if mother was sick or in hospital. She spoke sharply to me once only, for sniggering when Marcello, on a visit from Italy just after the War,

- 37 -started to eat dry bread with his tinned peaches: “That’s what we do in Italy.”

Italian prisoners of war worked on farms round about and on Sunday attended Mass at St Michael’s, wearing their rough brown uniforms. Mrs Di Stefano would have loved to be able to make contact with them but couldn’t invite them to her own home. She asked mother if she could meet them in our house. Years afterwards, I think, mother still regretted that she hadn’t felt able to go along with the plan.

For us children there was no problem. At the end of each day’s work the prisoners gathered by the low wall at Newlands’ dairy, just where the bridge started that crossed the Avon, to wait for their transport back to camp. We liked to go and talk to them for they sometimes had chewing-gum for us.

On the other side of the bridge, in Clackmannanshire, was Battison’s pub where father went for his pint in the evening, and where he sometimes helped out as part-time barman. To the right took you to Falkirk, and left, Whitecross. Not far along that road, on the bank of the Avon, Ned Hunter fed his hens on pigswill, and their eggs smelled and tasted of fish. They were no threat to our business. So you kept hens? Haven’t I told you?

Past the wash-house that was near our small garden, was a large drying-green, and beyond that, the vegetable plots. Father grew nearly all our own vegetables, and on an unused plot kept hens — Rhode Island Reds and White Leghorns. They were fed only the best meal and

grit, and their eggs – guaranteed fresh – were always in great demand. From quite an early age, I was a very successful travelling salesman. One of my customers was Miss Finnegan, in Winchburgh as I’ve told

- 38 -you. The eggs were five bob a dozen – a lot of money in those days, but people were glad to get a rest from ‘stamped’ eggs that might have lain anywhere for goodness knows how long!

Anyway, turn round now and make your way back towards the bridge. Up there on the left, overlooking the Avon, was the Browns’ large house. ‘Paw Broon’ worked on the Linlithgow Gazette. He had a 1926 Alvis Saloon just crying out for rowdy youngsters to pile into the back of, so of course we obliged, hanging around after school until Paw finished work. He seemed really to enjoy both our merriment and the gales of laughter that accompanied our passage from Linlithgow to the Bridge.

‘Maw Broon’ was a member of the WVS – the Women’s Voluntary Service, and one of her charitable works was to organize a Hallowe’en Party to which everyone was invited. We were all got up in fancy dress, and carried turnip-lanterns. There were lots of good things to eat, and plenty of ‘skoosh,’ but the highlight was ‘dookin fir aipples’ in a huge tub, and trying to trap sticky toffee apples swinging from the rafters of an outbuilding that had probably been a stable once — and no hands, remember!

There were two other events organized by ‘Maw’. One was a Fancy Dress Parade in which I went as the newly-opened-up Second Front. I wore battledress and helmet and had a cardboard figure

of a soldier in full khaki uniform pinned to my back. I got second prize. Mother thought afterwards if I had walked on backwards I might have come first.

- 39 -

The other event was a Nursery Rhymes Concert in which I played Willie in Wee Willie Winkie, and the dog (on its hind legs) in Old Mother Hubbard. But it was my grass-skirted, hip-swivelling Conga that brought the house down. A foreign-looking lady came round to my dressing-room after the show and in heavily-accented English told me how much she had enjoyed my dance-routine and would I mind if she used it? Not at all. We shook hands, and as she was leaving she turned and said, “I am Carmen. Carmen Miranda.”

So where did you learn your acting? At the Roxy. Where? In Falkirk. We went to all the Christmas pantomines (yes, I know) and some other shows as well. The Concert and Parade were held in Chalmers Hall, on Main Street, not far from Mrs Hunter’s post office. There was a low wall in front of the Hall from which the iron railings had been removed at the start of the War. None of them would have been used, I heard later, but it made people feel good to think they were sacrificing their beautiful wrought-iron gates to help the War effort. With the railings gone, the wall made an ideal jump for our own Grand National in 1946. I rode Lovely Cottage, which won that year. Another fantasy had us riding through the boulder-strewn ‘Rockies’ at the foot of Mill Road, a good bit past the turn-off to Lovell’s Paper Mill. The Rockies were approached, left, along a narrow path from the hollow just before the road wound on and up and round to Bo’ness. In the hollow was a caravan, of the old horse-drawn kind, where Jock Mason lived. There is a bench there now, dedicated to his memory. It was near there that I did my Scout Tenderfoot Test. I got tied up in all sorts of knots, and on the camp-fire made ‘scones’ that nobody could eat, but Ted Pearson and Phil Devine passed me all the same. Irene and I wouldn’t have come so far down Mill Road when taking father his piece at the Mill. We took a short-cut, close by the Avon, to the boiler-house where he worked shifts, as I’ve said. The War might be over but we still had ration-books, and you didn’t see much butter. The margarine wasn’t like the nice vegan varieties you get today but was made from blubber, we were told. Horrible it was, and once when I had to make up the piece, spread it as thinly as I would have on my own bread. Father wondered why I had been so stingy. On one of those piece-runs with Irene I teased her about her boyfriend, Eddie Ward, who was in her class at St Joseph’s. I must have gone too far, for when mother heard of it she threatened not to let me go to Blairs.

- 40 -

Another incident, had it happened nearer the time, might have put paid to the Blairs idea altogether: mother found a long, passionate love-letter I had written to Margaret Donoghue, in my class. The scene was set largely under water. I couldn’t even swim.

My last memory of St Mary’s, Bathgate is of the last half-hour on the last day of term. Molly Savage joined us. She and Mr McCann wished Francie and me well and gave us each a large picture of the priest holding up the Host at the Elevation.

The three Danny’s

1948 Staff Group

l. to r: Frs James McGinley, Gordon Gray, Walter Crampton, Francis Duffy, William Duddy

So there I was in second form, sitting between Francie and Gerald McEntee, who came from Glasgow, wore rimless glasses, and smelt of camphor. Father William Duddy (the Dud), who took us for Latin, called Gerald ‘McKenty’, and always put on a funny face when we came to gracilis (slender). On the other side of Gerald was Pat McKeon, who must have been from Glasgow too for he was still wearing his St Aloysius blazer… or was it St Mungo? He must have had a leaky pen – Pat, I mean – for his fingers were always covered in ink, but he did beautiful writing, holding his pen between forefinger and middle finger. I tried holding my pen like that but it didn’t work. Pat

used to write the Jesuit motto A.M.D.G at the top of every page: Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the Greater Glory of God).

- 41 -

We were in St Machar’s, with form-master Father Hugh McGurk (the Gaffer). I don’t know how he got the nickname for you couldn’t imagine anyone more at ease with himself, and us, in Christian Doctrine lessons or in his room after supper, where we could go just to chat or listen to the wireless. With the other profs he was the life and soul of the party and a great practical joker, I heard. It was inevitable, I suppose, that his brother Tom would be the Boss even before he arrived, straight from Cambridge, where he had been a football ‘blue’. Word got round that every night during his finals in Classics he had still played football!

There’s a 1939 photograph of Hugh and Tom with Sydney MacEwan and the rest of the Scots College, Rome football team. In his Autobiography Father Sydney tells us it was the Scots College that introduced football to Italy, going on to play clubs like Roma at one stage. He adds a wistful note about never losing to the English College in his day, but says nothing about the part played by the team’s fantastic wingers – himself and Hugh McGurk.

Tom would come to class weighed down with a huge dictionary and pile of reference books, which he might not always consult, and he could get annoyed if you slipped anything that looked like Church Latin into your Prose Composition, like the day Neil Diver thought he could get away with revenire for ‘return’. Yet Tom laughed with everybody another day when we heard about the student in a Higher Latin exam who couldn’t remember how to say ‘for ever’ and wrote ‘per omnia saecula saeculorum’. That was funny? You mean…? Oh, never mind. At the end of the lesson, shoulders hunched again, Tom would cart away all the books and go and join Hugh and Tim Mannion for a smoke at the post-boxes.

There were five boxes, one for each form, with the name of the patron saint written on it – Scots-Irish saints like Machar, Ninian, Mungo, Columba. Father James McGinley (wee Jimmy) broke with that tradition in 1948 when he became St John Bosco’s form master – like the French nun, you know, who introduced herself as the Mother Superior of the Holy Ghost, and received the reply, “Mon Dieu, quelle responsabilité!”

- 42 -

I liked to go to the post-boxes to inspect the handwriting on the envelopes, which had to be left open to make sure no whiff of scandal ever reached the outside world. And your form-master got to read all the latest gossip from home before you did. But I haven’t told you about the handwriting: Davie Currie and John Joyce were the best. Oh! I nearly forgot: don’t let dear old Johnny you-know-who see those spare stamps on a letter-writing night.

You stayed with the same form-master and patron saint for the whole five years – unless of course you went up or down. Two students from Barra, the Whisky Galore island, went up. (‘Galore’ is from Gaelic ‘go leor’, and wee Jimmy liked to pronounce it ‘galyor’.) Everybody laughed when Iain and John said their names – Iain McIntyre and John McNeil, which I heard first as ‘Macanaden’ – but the lilt was lovely. They went up to the Duff’s St Ninian’s.

It’s more usual to go down so don’t be put out if that happens to you: you’re in illustrious company – Canons, Monsignors, Vicars-General; we may even find an Archbishop…?

Big Tim will have finished his cigarette now and if it’s Maths next, well…so be it. At least they’ll drop you before the Lower Exam. He took me for Greek later, after a very enthusiastic introduction from wee Jimmy and a second start with Gerry Maher, a Cambridge History graduate who taught mainly Maths. Greek became my favourite subject, yet all I remember now is the day Frank Callaghan let us all down when he referred to Hecuba’s husband as ‘her man’. Maybe that’s how they talked in Addiewell? Oh, come on! Anyway, all I can say now is ‘Oh dear, what can the matter be?’ Go on, then. Oh, all right. Will I sing it?

Few few teapottygeggoneh(3) tea potty geggoneh day;In October 1960, though, I still knew how to say ‘Is this our

bus?’ in Ancient Greek, and at a bus stop in Famagusta tried it out on some students who were also going to Ayios Nikolaos. It took them a wee while… but yes, it was. There were other profs like Gerry, all from Cambridge, who didn’t teach ‘their’ subject: Father James O’Hanlon (the Jigger, for his skills on the football field), Father Matthew Donoghue (wee Matt) and Father Daniel Boyle (Danny, or the Byle) had all studied at senior seminaries in France and taught French; but the Jigger was a Classics graduate, with a special interest in Pindar; wee Matt did also teach English, though, and got great performances from his fifth forms when they put on Shakespeare.

- 43 -

When Danny later became Spiritual Director to the students at the Scots College in Valladolid, he shared with them his love of the classics of English literature, taught them Spanish, and encouraged them to keep up their French – all this when they’d come up for air from deep Metaphysical mysteries like Ens est transcendens (Being is transcendent). Is it? Well, of course: where would we be without it! Anyhow, we tried to steer clear of him: he was Master of Discipline, for which he was ideally suited, he’s said to have confessed, since he had broken so many rules himself as a student that staying one step ahead of us was second nature. He must have started passing himself off as someone else quite early on, for when the Scottish Bishops put him in the unenviable position of having to pull a fast one on General Franco – and not just once but over a number of years – he carried it off with great aplomb. Eh?!

There were two priests called Daniel Boyle who had been together at Blairs, Saint Sulpice, and Cambridge, where they studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages and History. You can find the story of their dramatic escape from France in 1940, told in Father Daniel J’s own words, in the Scottish Catholic Observer, 16, 23 February and 2 March 2007. One was Daniel J, you’ll have gathered, and the other, Daniel P, ‘our’ Danny. When he was nominated to succeed Monsignor Philip Flanagan as Rector in 1963, the approval of the Spanish Head of State was required owing to the College’s Royal status – Real Colegio de Escoceses. But the name submitted by the Scottish Bishops was Daniel J, and when the mistake was realized it was too late. Throughout his time as Rector Danny had to trick the Generalisimo into believing that he wasn’t really who he said he was. Have I got that right? No, but I know what you mean. That’s okay then. I ought to tell you, though, there’s another version which says it was when Danny P was appointed Spiritual Director in 1950 that the mistake was made. So maybe the Bishops got it wrong both times! We don’t know that now, and anyway it wasn’t only the Bishops got them mixed up. When Father Daniel J was parish priest at Pittenweem he served as chaplain to the Joint Services School for Linguists at Crail. He told me that when Father Danny P turned up at Saint Sulpice to begin his Sulpician training there was some surprise as it was the short, plump DJ who had been expected, and not the taller, lean DP. There’s a nice little story on the Blairs website about him and his addiction to Caporal which perhaps explains why.

- 44 -

There were ex-seminarians ‘galyor’ from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales at JSSL: anyone who had done French, Latin and Greek, to say nothing of a little Hebrew, would find it quite easy to get on to a Russian, Czech, or Polish course, or perhaps Chinese at Pucklechurch, near Bristol — provided you weren’t Chinese-tone deaf.

One weekend guard-duty when it was just me keeping an eye on the East Neuk of Fife, who comes along but Danny Doherty and his wife, on their honeymoon! I did the unforgivable and dropped my rifle to go and talk to Danny and Mrs D – not long enough for anybody to pick up on it, though, so there was no real danger of invasion.

Another day, another week, another month, and maybe others would have dropped their rifles… Brian Gunn, John McQuillan, Connie McMahon, Dennis McIlwraith….

I hadn’t seen Danny since around the time of St Ninian’s riotous bread-and-jam re-telling of Macbeth, about seven years earlier. Again? Later.

- 45 -

They gave the job to Francie

Staff 1949

l. to r: Frs John McKee, Daniel Boyle, James O’Hanlon, Thomas Mannion, Francis Duffy, James McGinley, Gordon Gray, James Kilpatick, Matthew Donoghue, Walter Crampton, Hugh McGurk, William Duddy, John Sheridan, Stephen McGill

Science and Geography won’t be quite what you think but as you do them for only two years.… You will see the occasional beaker and Bunsen burner but Doctor John Sheridan (the Doc) has more important things to do, like mending broken specs. If they’re beyond repair Father Walter Crampton (Big Wat), the Infirmarian, will cast a critical eye over your letter asking for a free NHS replacement, and point out that ‘onto’ as in ‘fell on to the floor’ should be two words.

- 46 -

You’ll never have to consult a map or weather charts in Geography so no cause for anxiety there, and you won’t learn anything about tides either more’s the pity. Eh? Later. Father Michael Walsh (wee Papa) will read from a pretty dull textbook but even he can take only so much and then he’ll get you to take it in turns. He couldn’t have been much more than thirty but his hair was pure white. He suffered from recurrent bouts of malaria, contracted when he was a chaplain during the War and taken prisoner by the Japanese. We heard but not from himself that the other prisoners would more often take their weariness to him than to their own chaplains. It was easy to get him off the subject and on to his Burmese days. We played up sometimes, taking advantage of his easy, gentle way. He would only ever say, “Ah, steady on now, boys.”

Was it Sammy or the Belloc fixed our specs after the Doc left? Science was taken by a retired teacher from Aberdeen who slapped my face one day when he caught me making faces as he corrected my work. There was no corporal punishment: did he ‘confess’, I wonder, like the lady music teacher to the headmaster at a Jesuit school, that she had hurled a pretty hefty tome at a pupil? You didn’t miss, Miss Grant? No, Headmaster. Good!

I didn’t lose any sleep over History at first – the nightmares would come later. If all your History was Scottish triumphs and tragedies you might wonder where Marius, Sulla, and the Gracchi had suddenly sprung from. Everybody else seemed to be on first-name terms with them. Oh, all right: Gaius, Lucius Cornelius, Gaius again, and Tiberius.

There was no textbook, just the Belloc’s typed sheets. At the Christmas exams 1948 everybody round about was writing reams, filling page after page of unlined foolscap. I had never done History like that, and it was no better after I went down to first year: they were still scribbling their screeds at Easter about Solon and something called the Confederacy of Delos, whoever he was.

History began to sort itself out with Big Wat and before I knew it I was on first names with the likes of Hannibal and Hamilcar – or was he a battle? If he was he would have crossed swords after his name and there would be a three-liner about him. Incidentally, have you never wondered why I say ‘sword’ like that? Like what? Pronouncing the ‘o’ as in ‘ore’ and not as in ‘or’. I thought everybody said it like that. They do now, but only after they heard the Boss say it that way in the Chapel one evening. It made everyone look up. Anyway, Big Wat used to dictate those three-liners to us. I can’t remember any of them now except the one on Mark Antony, which ended, “Dalliance with Cleopatra led to his downfall.”

- 47 -

The Belloc had the first tape-recorder – early 1949 probably— and we went up to his room after supper one night to hear what we sounded like. Hoots of delight greeted my “I come from Tranent, Father”, but the Lithgae sing-song gave me away.

Staff 1952

Back, l. to r: Frs Thomas McGurk, Thomas Mannion, Hugh McGurk, Walter Crampton, Daniel Boyle, Duncan Stone, Gerald Maher, James McGinley

Front, l. to r: Frs Michael Walsh, James O’Hanlon, James Kilpatrick, Stephen McGill, John McKee, Francis Duffy, Matthew Donoghue

When Sydney MacEwan arrived in Rome in September 1938 to begin his studies at the Scots College, the students were still up at the Villa in San Marino. There was a concert that first night. The “splendid, versatile, natural musician” who accompanied Sydney was Frank Duffy.

- 48 -

The Duff was in charge of music, and it didn’t take long to discover where Stein and Slonca had picked up their Italian. We soon had quite good accents ourselves, singing Santa Lucia and Fascist songs like Il nome squilla. (No, of course he wasn’t and if he was ever over the moon because Italian trains had run on time it never showed.) He played the sort of records that most of us had probably never heard before: classical instrumental music; the Glasgow Orpheus Choir; Beniamino Gigli; Yussi Björling, Heddle Nash, Owen Brannigan, Kathleen Ferrier, Joan Hammond. But it was John McCormack and Father Sydney MacEwan that meant most to me. I find it hard to believe now that when I listened to Irish Hospitals’ Requests on Radio Eireann during the Christmas or Summer holidays, I sometimes could not tell them apart. It was often quite late McCormack recordings that were played, some made even after he had come out of retirement in 1939 to sing in aid of the Red Cross. Two, however, stood out from all the rest, that I learned afterwards were from 1927, quite a special McCormack year: Eric Coates’s Bird songs at eventide; and Charles Marshall’s I hear you calling me, the words of which were written by twenty-five-year-old Harold Lake in just twenty minutes. Would you believe me if I told you that the test pressing, on which McCormack himself had written “best”, had to wait quite a few years before it saw the light of day! There were other special years of course: in 1916, for example, Il mio tesoro, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni; 1920, Handel’s O sleep, why dost thou leave me?; 1923, Lotti’s Pur dicesti, o bocca, bocca bella; 1924, Handel again – Come, my beloved; and in 1930, Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives, in which he recorded the recitative in both English and German. In later years when listening to the O sleep, I think it was, McCormack would exclaim, “My God, it can’t be done!” He might have said it of them all, especially the long ornate passage in Il mio tesoro, which only he could sing in one breath.

We didn’t do much musical theory so you might only learn to read music well if you had private piano or violin lessons with the two teachers who came out from Aberdeen. They were brothers, and swam in the North Sea every day. The last thing we would have wanted at the end of a forced march to Cove (wait) was a dip in those icy waters. But we did sometimes go to the Baths in Aberdeen on St John Bosco’s feast day, 31 January, and then head for High Tea at the Mill Inn, just down the road from the College. In 1953, just after those storms I told you about, wee Jimmy took us to Braemar and Balmoral, where the uprooted trees allowed us a view of the Castle that you wouldn’t normally get from the road.

- 49 -

There was a short test in Plainsong, or Plain Chant, theory at the end of the Summer term and if you thought you had a chance of winning the prize you might cram for it, otherwise it wasn’t taken very seriously. But you mustn’t think we couldn’t sing Plain Chant. We sang all the Ordinary of High Mass: Asperges, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei; and there were different chants for all of these: six Credos and eighteen Masses. The Proper, like the Introit for example, would be sung by the Schola Cantorum, made up of fourth and fifth year tenors and basses. Then there were all the Holy Week services, including Tenebrae. Oh, we could sing! And not just Plain Chant. Not everybody was impressed, though: Canon Roger Gallagher lost no time in telling us when we got to Drygrange, near Melrose, what he’d thought of our 1952 broadcast: everybody trying to be John McCormack or Sydney MacEwan! But wasn’t it 1953? 53…? You could be right.

Christian Doctrine was another subject that wasn’t taken very seriously. Christian Doctrine?! I don’t believe that! Yes! The Abbot cancelled the exam at the last minute when it was announced that he was to be the new Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh. At supper that night we sang “The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be, many long years ago!” – very loud, to make sure we were heard in the profs’ dining room up above!

Sometimes the Duff himself played the organ, or the appointed organist – John Cunningham, Thomas Wynne, Francis Keane. That might have been my name there instead of Francie’s, you know, if it hadn’t been for Tom Wynne. Again? In my third year, when they were casting around for a possible successor to Tom, something came over my piano teacher, and he put my name forward. But your feet would never have reached the pedals! Oh, it never came to that. Tom tried me out a couple of times on the piano first, with an O Salutaris Hostia. And? They gave the job to Francie. Wee Jimmy was choirmaster. He had used a period of convalescence when he was still a student to make a special study of Plain Chant, listening to records of the Benedictine monks of Solesmes, and no doubt following in his Liber Usualis.

That was a heavy tome (no, not the lady music teacher’s heat-seeking missile), bigger and heavier than a hardback Concise Oxford, and we had to buy our own copy. We had to buy all our books and stationery. The Liber contained all the liturgical music for High Mass, Vespers, Compline, and Holy Week, and a good deal besides that we never used. Plain Chant has its own musical notation – there are short, simple introductions available now, and CDs of course, of both new

- 50 -

recordings and re-issues: the ones wee Jimmy listened to would have been made in the 1930s. The monks, it was said, felt they had not done themselves justice, for the recording engineers had turned up on a feast day, just after a good lunch, apparently – though whether it was the monks’ or the engineers’ was never made clear.

The monks should have followed our example: we went to bed early on Christmas Eve – it was amazing how everybody could sleep so maybe they put something in the booze. And they must have put something in the cocoa that we had with our perkin after we got up for it didn’t make our throats all thick. Or maybe it was the cold night air that cleared our heads and throats: changed into soutane and surplice for Midnight Mass, we liked sometimes to take a stroll around the plot, especially if it had snowed. I can’t remember now if we were dispensed from the Grand Silence, but it wouldn’t have mattered: who needed words!

Wee Jimmy himself was a fine tenor, with a ‘heavy’, baritone quality, like Fernando de Lucia. You would never forget his Core ’ngrato, La Danza (Tarantella) or Funiculì, funiculà. McCormack’s 1914 recording was thought to be the best ever made of Funiculì. And why not? It was by Luigi Denza, who had adjudicated at the National Music Festival in Dublin on 19 May 1903 and awarded him the Gold Medal in the tenor section. Do you know who came second? Does it matter? Oh, yes: James Joyce, somebody told me once. McCormack himself had a near miss: In October 1902 he applied for a scholarship at the Royal College of Science. There were fourteen places. He came fifteenth.

After-supper socker, played with a few rolled-up socks, had to make way for the concerts … but weren’t they before supper? Were they? Not to worry. We’ll press on, and nobody’ll be any the wiser…the concerts that were held regularly in the playhall on feast days, and for two other special musical evenings: the Pups’ Concert, and the Brats’ Concert. At the first I sang Galway Bay but had gone only a few bars when the Duff, who was at the piano, got up abruptly, leaving me to return shame-faced to my place. The following year I sang a duet with Connell Duggan but came in for quite a bit of stick afterwards because I had let my arm rest lightly round his waist as we sang. Another day, still in second form, when we were reading Julius Caesar, the Duff broke in suddenly, “Look at the two love-birds there!” because I had my arm round Bob Carter’s shoulder. What was wrong with everybody! Was something wrong? Don’t judge – remember?

- 51 -

The profs would sing at those concerts: wee Jimmy of course, and wee Matt, who sang The Road to Mandalay in a high clear tenor. He always seemed to start too high and you thought he’s never going to make it but he did, and at High Mass too, where we risked doing ourselves an injury (had we thought like that) if we tried to make the response in the same key. We were never in any real danger, though, for the Duff would always step in and pitch it somewhere within our reach.

Big Wat was a bass and he got as much fun as we did from his Mud, mud, glorious mud, and Oh no, John! And he had the nerve after that to tell us that we shouldn’t sing love-songs!

Tim, like wee Matt, had only one song. He seemed shy standing there in front of everybody but he was somehow just perfect for Red River Valley.

I don’t remember anybody playing the violin at those concerts but Andy Forrest played a Chopin Polonaise once – without the sheet-music, you know, just like a concert pianist. But didn’t anyone ever play pizzicatos? Again? You know, pluck pluck pluck. I..I do know what a pizzicato is! But at a playhall concert? What gave you that idea! Well, it’s just that I saw this DVD once, and …don’t tell me, he was in St Machar’s form, yes? What’s that got to do with it? I’ll tell you later. But did he mention Elgin at all? Not that I remember. He did say something, though, about going a whole year once without having to play a single perishing football match! Considered it quite an achievement, in fact. Oh, that’s him, all right.

- 52 -

Please don’t let it be me!

Morning lessons ended around twelve o’clock, when we went to the Chapel for midday prayers: we recited the Angelus and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, addressing Our Lady with titles like Morning Star, Mirror of Justice, and Cause of Our Joy.

In Mary’s month of May fourth and fifth year left the Oratory after their morning prayers and meditation to join the others for Mass in the Chapel. We sang hymns in Mary’s honour but never my favourite, Bring flowers of the rarest. When I asked the Duff why, he seemed to suggest it was too ‘pagan’: the nearest it came to mentioning Our Lady’s role was in the refrain, “O Mary, we crown thee with blossoms today,/ Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.”

There was another flower hymn, with titles that might easily have come from the Litany: “O Lily of the Valley, O Mystic Rose, what tree or flower e’en the fairest is half so fair as thee?” But it made clear who Mary was: I’ll sing a hymn to Mary, the mother of my God.

We had our own Queen of the May. Not long into May Day breakfast the new Queen would be proclaimed and you hoped it wouldn’t be you because you knew you would strike a light if it was. Sorry? Go all red. Anyway, there would be other proclamations after that, running all through breakfast maybe. They had to include the word ‘may’, and there would be some awful puns. So if somebody for example wasn’t very punctual you might hear “Three cheers for the late Mario Conti, may he rest in peace.”

- 53 -

All outThere were classes every day except Sunday. I was going to say

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons were free but that would give the wrong idea, for you had to be out, no matter what the weather.

Fifth form could go out on their bikes if they weren’t down for a football match, but they didn’t go in for anything too strenuous: Banchory and the Bridge of Feugh, where they could see salmon leaping (and which now they tell me this isn’t a photo of!), was about as far as they would go – not like the adventurous spirits at St Andrew’s College, Drygrange, who thought they could cycle to Holy Island and back… So what was the problem? The tide caught them unawares and by the time it had gone back out again there was nothing for it but to load the bikes on to a bus: Sic transit gloria mundi, as the Belloc wrote once on Pat Mundie’ History report (So passes the glory of this world).

Reports were sent out at Christmas, Easter and Summer. We addressed the long plain brown envelopes ourselves, making sure the flap was on our left. Included in the report were marks and position in class for each subject, with the prof’s comment, and a general summing-up by the form-master. Spiritual progress was not recorded, but under ‘Health’ Big Wat would write: Good. Gained x lb (or st as the case might be) but never anything about adding a cubit’s growth to one’s height.

- 54 -

With five football pitches, though, football accounted for more than half of the inmates. Many would agree with whoever it was that said standing around on a freezing football pitch was not his idea of fun, but you may well learn to like it – the football, I mean – and put in passable performances at outside right, though you probably won’t come anywhere near Sydney MacEwan’s record of thirty-five goals in one season when he played for Woodside Rovers; or you may even grow into a great goalkeeper. It must have been a really big match on the top pitch that day – an International maybe – with all those spectators. Scotland played in red, Ireland blue (or was it the other way round?). Anyway, that Celtic strip (if you can make it out!) means he’s in the blue team, okay?

The profs have their own team – you’ll recognise everybody, I think, apart from the two Aberdeen priests (front row: second left, and far right), but they’ll also join fourth and fifth year most days. Be warned, though: gentlemanly conduct on the football field is not one of the priestly virtues, so you may wish to consider croquet. You had a croquet lawn back then? No, of course not! But you sound as if there was one later on…? There was. In the Sixties. Oh, I might have known! Flasks of hot tea for the tattie-howkin, and now croquet lawns. What next! I’ll tell you at the ice rink. Again? At the ice rink.

- 55 -

Five-a-sides were held in the Summer term. In 1949 there was one team that everybody said would be great but for the first-former: Jackie McGowan (5th year), Willie Ferguson, Johnny Creegan (3rd year), Lewis Cameron (2nd year). The first-former was told to stay between the posts and do absolutely nothing. They obviously thought they were so good the ball would never get anywhere near him. They were wrong. He forgot what he’d been told, came out, and they won the Cup. So it jus goes tae shows ye! That same year the first-former won both the sack and the three-legged race – the latter with the help of a friend – a triple feat that to this day stands unequalled in the annals of sporting history.

I can’t remember now if Sports Day and Old Boys’ Reunion (though I’m sure we didn’t call it that) were always held on the same day. They were, though, in 1955, as these two photographs show. I won’t spoil it for you by telling you all the priests’ names, just two: Daniel J Boyle, distracted by whatever’s going on at the other end of the pitch, and sitting next to him, Phil Doherty, who had been ordained just a few weeks before, I think.

- 56 -

Internationals were played on St Patrick’s and St Andrew’s Day. But Glasgow Rules OK so don’t think you can play for Ireland just because your father’s people were from Tyrone and your mother is from Armagh and your grandfather Denis Deasy who was the best cabinet-maker in all Ireland played chess with the Earl of Rosse in his Castle at Birr and your uncle Patrick Deasy won an all-Ireland Gaelic Football Medal in 1937 when he was a student at St Patrick’s College in Cavan and you used to have a South Armagh accent … That wasn’t enough? No. You were from the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh and Glesca locuta. That’s Latin-short for what Glasgow says goes.

Just over the hedge from the scene of the wee goalkeeper’s triumphs was a pond that froze over in Winter. Was that where they had to break the ice in the early days – you know, before they could wash in the morning? If they did wash. It would have been dark, and easy to fool the censors pacing up and down along the edge.… We skated there sometimes, with elegance even, on the awkward outsize skates left to us by the icebreakers. Did you never wish you had nice fancy skating boots? Like in the Sixties, you mean? So you guessed! Well, there was this photograph, you see….

- 57 -

If you weren’t playing football you might go out for a leisurely walk, like Willie O’Brien, me, Jimmy Neilson and George Hannah, in this photo taken by Tommy Friel,

1949/50. Or it could be a forced march across the moors, to Cove. That was the punishment Big Wat liked to order when he succeeded Danny Boyle as Master of Discipline. Anyone else would have found it impossible to combine that role with Infirmarian but Big Wat managed it somehow. Once when decano Noel Woods was sick some kind souls went to visit him in his cubicle after night prayers. Infirmarian Wat turned up on his night rounds and in his Report on the following Sunday MoD Wat denounced those little brothers of mercy, demoted them to the bottom of their forms, and sentenced them to be forced- marched to Cove – by Noel himself, barely out of his sick bed!

- But we did visit you, Lord, dae ye no mind that time we went tae see Big Woodsie when e wiz no weel?

- Aye, fine ah mind, but the corporal works o mercy dinnae coont in the Graund Silence.

- Whit fir no?- They jus dinnae.

Noel couldn’t have been all that sick or he would have been in the infirmary, tended by Sister Infir Mary Ann whom a first-former came looking for one day. He would have found her in the dispensary, right by the ladder that wasn’t supposed to take you up the tower. If you do go up and find a good French book and then tell Big Steve you’ll get a long lecture on the need for restitution before absolution. The what? It’s okay, he’ll let you keep it. And you’ll have a bird’s-eye view into the Abbot’s room when you’re up there but don’t stick your head above the parapet unless you’re sure he’s away for the day.

- 58 -

Back up the bounds now, away past that row of houses on the right – you know, where Donal, Sammy and the farm manager lived. We were in second year, I think, when wee Jimmy took this photograph from the top of the bounds, just where the road turns left. That’s Cults in the distance. At wee Jimmy’s back was the field that took you up to the woods, though you weren’t supposed to go.

We sledged in that field. Some of the sledges were named after seminaries that had served in penal times – I started to tell you, remember? – Loch Morar, Scalan, and then Lismore on Loch Lynnhe, Aquhorties, near Inverurie…. But there had been at least four others that for some reason were not remembered: Samalaman, Glenfinnan, Buorblach, and Guidale. They were big sledges, that could carry five people or more: two or three of the bigger boys lying one on top of the other, and two or three smaller ones sitting astride them on the top. That dry-stane dyke at the bottom of the field stopped you from going out on to the road …. When the casualty figures started to climb, we had to take our sledges to the golf course. The golf course?

- 59 -

At the top of the golf course where the fifth-form bicycle shed was that the tree fell on – remember? – well, there was another tree, a very tall pine, that we called ‘the ladder’ – anybody could climb it! When you got back down to earth, John McAveety (Makka) might be standing in wait, looking fierce, but he wouldn’t put you on Report.

The Report, which named and shamed that week’s transgressors, was solemnly read out every Sunday by the Master of Discipline at the end of the two-hour study period. Transgressions were: breaking bounds – up the tower, up the woods, up trees, down the cellars, snooping around the Old College where the Abbot cured his own tobacco and tried his hand at joinery, or commandeering small boats to row over to the opposite bank of the Dee; keeping a low profile indoors when everybody else was standing around on freezing football pitches or being forced-marched across the moors; and all the dull, routine offences like being late, laying on hands (fighting, wrestling), pretending to sleep in, disobedience, impertinence. Each infringement of the law carried its own number of penalty points: more than three and you were automatically in detention or frog-marched you-know-where.

You know, where all the daffodils were in Spring, and where we played cricket in the Summer term. In our fifth year wee Jimmy introduced us to his ‘philosophy’ of cricket, and we even became enthusiastic about fielding. You’re making this up! Oh, no. I only make up concerts. I’ll tell you later.