School Days – The Worst of Your Life? 0
From The Daily Mail – Investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre, 43, lives in west London with his wife, Ameera, a TV producer and presenter, and their daughters, Allegra, six, and Tiger willow, two.
This picture shows me, aged around 12 , standing behind my brother, Tadhg, who was about eight. I’m sporting a terrible haircut that is very evocative of Ireland in the 1970s.
My primary school – St Patrick’s National School in Celbridge, Co. Kildare – stood near the birthplace of Guinness, which is appropriate because I’m a very happy drinker of the black stuff.
When I was four, my Irish father, Tom – a writer – left home, leaving our American mother, a secondary school teacher, to bring up five young children under the age of nine. As well as myself, there was my twin brother Desmond; my sister, Deirdre; and my brothers, Darragh and Tadhg.
The loss of a parent at that age could have been the most traumatic event, but our mother provided a very loving home life. It also helped having a twin – Desmond and I lived in our own micro-world, insulated from family discord.
But all was not so rosy at St Patrick’s. Long before this photograph was taken, our teacher was the late Tom Sands, who was renowned in the locality for physical abuse and violence. He would beat up the kids in his class on a daily basis. As children we accepted it as part of the curriculum.
And, in a crowd of 45 kids, my brother and I felt a certain safety in numbers – there was a chance of it not being our turn every day. The authorities knew what he was doing but allowed it to continue, believing that corporal punishment was a good thing. I would have been about six going on seven.
Fortunately, by the time we went to secondary school, beating school children had been outlawed.
Not only did this man cane and punch pupils, but he put dusters in children’s mouths if they had a stutter. He used his six-foot-tall frame to throw kids out the window in scenes reminiscent of a saloon-bar brawl. I saw many children shaking with fear.
Worse than being attacked myself, was seeing my twin being punched, insulted, caned and humiliated in front of me.
Even though it was 1973, we still had to write with old-fashioned ink and quill pens, and if you spilled your ink, as kids do, you’d get beaten. Seeing my brother punished was horrendous, and I felt powerless to help. In retrospect, I think that has formed me more than anything else.
To spend two of my most formative years with a brutal monster who, on any one day, would commit up to ten assaults on children, has shaped the way I think. The sense of powerlessness and vulnerability in the face of oppressive power has left me with a great love for the underdog and a fury against injustice.
I used to wonder why people couldn’t leave their dysfunctional childhoods behind – I’d buried my own memories, or so I thought. Then, 30 years after I’d left that school, I went back home for a wedding. I was in a crowded bar, struggling to get a drink, when I saw the freckled hand of one of the nicest teachers in the school.
I thought, ‘My God, 30 years on, I can still recognise a kind man just from his hand!’ Then I realised what impact the hand of the brutal teacher must have had on who I am. That was a revelation.
I did see Tom Sands again once – across the road – when I was 26. I was petrified and took refuge with the local postmistress, Eileen. I’d been on dangerous investigations that had seen me parachuted into war zones and meeting hit men, and yet here I was rooted to the spot, terrified of an old man.
Our secondary school, Scoil Mhuire in Clane, Co. Kildare, was a much happier place. We were seen as different as we were the only family whose parents were separated, and it allowed us a certain leeway with the teachers, as they were afraid to intrude on what they saw as a tragic situation.
For example, Desmond and I would go off turkey-plucking for two weeks every December.
We told our teachers we needed the money for Christmas presents and we were allowed to go, but our mother thought we were at school the whole time. We kept under the radar because people were afraid to inquire too much. And I was mad about sport – I was good at athletics, football, boxing, rugby and canoeing, and lots of that took place outside class, which meant more skiving off.
My siblings and I all did well enough at school to go to university, but our real, wider education had little to do with anything we heard in the classroom. It came from within the family – from reading books and newspapers, and listening to Radio 4 and the World Service from morning to night. It was the soundtrack of my childhood, and the walls of every room in our house were covered in books.
I went to University and got a poor B.A..
Then, aged 28, after six years as a journalist, I did a Masters in communication policy at London’s City University, taught and mentored by Professor Howard Tumber – a wonderful, encouraging man.
After spending 18 months undercover for a TV report, I was accepted to spend a year studying at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University.
I was sharing student digs with youngsters – just after coming off the front page of the Radio Times. As well as keeping my feet on the ground, it was great to re-engage with the energy, intellectual enthusiasm and hopeful exuberance of youth.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1253943/Me-school-photo–Donal-MacIntyre-abuse-suffered-school.html#ixzz0gm1k3fBT
