Every morning, Class 1 C stands to attention beside our dark wood desks and chants The Lord's Prayer, then his holy times-tables and finally we sing one of the sacred spelling commandments.
"The Lord be with you, and also with you. Six-eights-are-forty-eight, seven-eights-are-fifty-six. I before E except after C. I before E except after C."
School bores me.
Ursuline Primary School is run by nuns who slap my fidgety legs and send me out of class whenever I shout out answers instead of waiting my turn.
Older kids snigger and point while teachers smile knowingly as they pass me, head bowed in shame, staring at the gloomy corridor’s herringbone parquet floor until break time.
Eventually, the nuns do me a deal.
“You’ll only get one chance young man. If you finish your sums and spelling in silence, you may go outside and play. No more waving your arms around and no more jumping up and down on your seat.”
* * *
After two years of educational combat with the nuns, Mum moves me to St Mary's College, the Christian Brother's school just over the road from the Ursuline. The red-bricked prep school offers scholarships to those with "outstanding potential".
"WHY??" I shriek.
"It's the only way you can fulfil your potential."
"I don't want bloody well want potential."
* * *
The night before the entrance exam to St Mary's, I wake in the dead of night to the shame of sodden pyjamas. I last wet the bed a few years ago and taught myself to wake up from the nightly scary dreams before my bladder let go. I never feel scared when I am awake, but when the chasing dreams come, my dressing gown tries to strangle me and I pee myself in the cold pitch dark.
Mum and Dad mustn’t ever hear me however loud I call out, so I chuck my bedclothes in the wash basket and strip the soaked sheets from my bed, flipping the fusty mattress over and curling my legs tight to my chest to avoid the wet patches that soak through.
* * *
Six-fours-are-twenty-four pupils sit in one of the old dark wood classrooms, watched over by a full-size Jesus, nailed to the wall's wood panelling by his bleeding hands and feet.
'Write about anything that interests you’ the exam sheet says.
‘Anything’, wow, where do I start?
The voice in my head is loud and excited. Old and new ideas scribbled in scruffy shorthand. My pencil can’t keep up.
"Stop writing," shouts Brother Douglas.
Is that it? Two whole hours of gravity and planets and ozone and time and speed.
“Stop. NOW”, he shouts in my face and pulls the paper from under my 2 HB, leaving me to punctuate the desktop with one final full stop.
* * *
The school is so impressed with my explanation about how gravity keeps the radiators on the floor, that they move me up an extra school year, straight into the class run by the headmaster.
* * *
Brother Joseph has a single bulging blue vein that runs up from one short, thick eyebrow diagonally across his forehead and into his crew-cut hairline, grey at the temples. His stocky frame crams into a neat black suit, like a bouncer outside a nightclub, except for the starched white dog-collar that’s so tight, it makes his face go like a beetroot when he shouts. ‘BJ’ (that’s what I call him in my head) shouts loads.
The first time I meet him, he grins and pumps my hand.
‘Rip your arm out of the socket and beat you to death with the soggy end’ my dad used to say.
"You look like a rugby player," BJ growls and fixes me in a tight headlock. Trapped in his armpit, Brother Joseph smells of Brylcreem and Old Spice.
* * *
Brother Joseph calls the whole class out to the front of the class, and we mill around, giggling and jostling in front of the blackboard.
Brother Joseph points at a red-haired lad who had rushed out ahead of the crowd.
"Teacher's pet," Mum would have said.
His neat burgundy blazer is two sizes too big for him and clashes with his carrot-top. 'Ginger' seems like a cheerful chap.
First-day newbie like me.
"Eight sevens?" demands Joseph, muttering and grumbling as the boy hesitates.
Jesus looks on with a stony stare at the shaking boy.
"EIGHT SEVENS!" snarls BJ and rams one broad bony knuckle into the lad's freckled forehead, forcing him back into the circle of classmates, gathered as if for a schoolyard scrap.
"EIGHT SEVENS! EIGHT SEVENS! COME ON! COME ON!"
Brother Joseph’s polished black brogues squeak as he crouches down onto his haunches at Ginger's feet, glaring upwards at the lads frozen face. BJ fells the loser with an open-handed right cross to the cheek, sending Ginger yelping sideways into the stunned crowd.
"Fifty-six," I whisper.
"What did you say?" Brother Joseph screams.
Is he talking to me or his daemons?
Now he backs me against the board, chalk powdering my shoulders.
"New boy. Clever, are you?"
"NINE-FOURS. Thirty-six. TWELVE-ELEVENS. One-hundred-and-thirty-two. NINE-SEVENS. Sixty-three."
I never blink, never miss a sum. Exciting. Not scary.
Brother Joseph belts me round the back of my head anyway. That's OK.
BJ and me both seem to enjoy the competition.
* * *
Brother Joseph teaches us lessons from the Old Testament Book of Mathematics every morning.
'Thou shalt not seek shelter.’
‘Thou shalt not hesitate.'
'Thou shalt not cower or blubber before the Lord.'
Bruce
