1961-1964 Cabin Hill Prep school

Cabin Hill

At primary school I was shy and introverted, but on vacations in Donegal,  I was very sociable and thought to be a 'brilliant conversationalist' by Mum's friends. Yes, I felt comfortable around adults at that age. but, my personality began to change at Preparatory school.

Prep school itself, was not memorable. I have a montage in my mind of seemingly unrelated memories. I remember cycling to the school in Belfast come wind, rain or snow. It was about two and a half miles and that seemed a very long way for a ten or twelve year old. It was often very windy. If it was raining or blowing really hard Dad might relent and let me go on the bus as a concession. I do not remember once ever being taken to school by my parents in a car-even though dad worked as a civil servant quite close to the school. I have often thought how lucky my own children were that they never had to do this; they were always given a lift to school by myself or M.

The teachers were remote and for the most part colourless, strict and dour:it was Northern Ireland of course and there was very little fun involved with school. There was the Latin teacher who one day smacked about a dozen of us with a ruler on the hand for making a noise before his (late) arrival to class. I didn’t mind the smack so much as the comment he made before he delivered it. He was angry:

‘Might have known it would be you, Nixon’
.
I was stung by this insult and never forgave him. I didn’t consider myself to have a reputation as a miscreant.

Mr. L. was another cold fish. He was the history teacher and the cricket coach. I used to open the batting for the first XI and on ‘Father’s Day’ made what I considered to be a memorable 39 not out. Apparently this wasn’t good enough for him, as he said in the team meeting afterwards that my scoring rate was too slow. What an asshole! I remember feeling completely deflated. He couldn’t manage to praise me for my highest score of the season.(and the second highest score of my career)

H was a smooth talking, oily individual. He was the maths teacher and he drove around in his Jag Mark 10 and of course we boys were all mightily impressed. But one day the ‘Mr.Hyde’ side of his character was displayed which made me lose respect for him entirely. There was an accident prone new boy called Alastair B who was bullied mercilessly by everyone when he first arrived in the class. H thought he would join in the fun, one day, when the hapless B had committed some minor misdemeanour. H made merciless fun of him in front of the class at the same time as pulling him by his sideburns and banging his head with the blackboard duster. B was in tears. H and the boys all thought this was hugely funny.I couldn’t understand why everyone was laughing at B. I remember I didn’t laugh. I thought H was a smarmy bully. (but I continued to keep on the right side of him and let him drive me around in his Jag Mark 10.) These were early signs of me developing the character of an ‘outsider’.

H was the English teacher. I remember him scoffing at the idea that I was reading the “Famous Five” books by Enid Blyton when I was 13. The pompous ass presumably thought I should have been reading Dostoyevsky. As I am now an English teacher I find his scoffing reprehensible. I’m happy if my fifteen year olds are reading comics-at least it’s reading. You can’t motivate people by scoffing at them.

The Headmaster was a jovial man. He was strict but not mean. He had one unbreakable rule. When he was speaking in assembly if he saw you talking he would say:

“_____, would you kindly come up to my office after Assembly please?”

Upon arrival in his office the offender (myself in this case) would be asked to bend over his sofa and would be whacked once with his cane. It hurt like hell. The head was smiling and joking all the time and I think he regarded it as very funny.

He never held the offence against you. Most people were whacked at least once by ‘The Bow’ as he was known. Just the once for me.

I discovered an important thing at Cabin Hill: that I was very competitive. I discovered it during the athletics on sports day. I could hardly control myself I was in such a nervous a state at those races. My anxiety was unhealthy: I can still remember the tension. I was developing an overanxious, overachieving highly - strung personality.

Friends at Cabin Hill

There was S. B. S befriended me in the fourth form while I was waiting at a bus stop to go to the dentist. He offered me a ‘Tuti-fruti’ and I accepted . This was the beginning of a friendship which lasted for three or four years. We did lots of things like visiting each others house to play cricket and rugby or make fireworks etc in each other’s homes.


We had some delightful visits to Lough Eske in Donegal where we fished and shot birds and played around on the lake.

Mr Swann, the owner of the land at Lough Eske, had a beautiful daughter who was sixteen and two years older than Stewart and I–I think her name was Diane. She was a flirt and more annoyingly, she flirted with S more than with me!

In order to tease us, I remember one night in the caravan she came to kiss us good night. She seemed to fancy S and kissed him lingeringly on the lips. That she should want to kiss at all seemed to me gross in the first place–but to kiss a little twerp like S was completely incomprehensible when she had a real man-and an intellectual heavyweight at that-right beside her!

‘Women are unfathomable’ I thought. She didn’t kiss me at all. To my horror I also realized I was a coward. I was becoming afraid of women. I just couldn’t figure out what made them tick.

Another story from around the same time (when I was about fourteen) corroborates this. I was accompanying R, my other friend on a ‘walk’ along Church road one evening. It was a Saturday night and we were bored with nothing to do. Suddenly we found ourselves following two giggling girls of roughly the same age as ourselves. I think the girls must have deliberately put themselves in our path. R’s instinct was to try and catch up with them and wolf whistle at them -which he promptly did.

As a nerd form a nerdy boys school and with no sisters I was perplexed by this ‘primitive’ behaviour of R. How could he be so crude? I almost felt like apologising to the poor girls for R’s ungentlemanly behaviour.

There was a puritan streak developing in the outsider. Would not the girls surely be offended at R’s loutish attitude?. I felt sure the girls wanted only to engage us in an intellectual conversation about dinosaurs, or discuss George Orwell and the meaning of life. I was sure that was what all the girls wanted. Very sure.

To my astonishment, the girls however, in a swift maneuver designed to prolong the flirtation took a sharp turn right down a road at the same time as throwing us a coquettish glance over their shoulders.

Then, something absolutely amazing happened: To my utter disbelief - and genuine consternation - they wolf whistled back at us!

R was delighted and wanted to take off after them for a snog and a grope in the bushes. So did I. So did the girls. The easy-going and ‘cool’ R turned to me with a an expectant, leer. But I was already running in the opposite direction!

Even R wasn't up for a threesome. He was very disappointed with me.

So was I. Such a coward! This realisation that I was nervous around girls was actually very painful for me to handle. I gradually realized in my early teens that my bubbly little personality was disappearing and being replaced by an increasingly neurotic one. This came as a great disappointment to me and was accompoanied by feelings of intense anxiety, shame and low self esteem.

This lack of confidence with both sexes–but particularly girls, stayed with me in some measure through most of my adult life. Not that I saw many girls in my early teens (which was of course the problem). But those I did meet found me unapproachable.

The friendship with S came to an abrupt end when I realized he was turning into a selfish prick with a high opinion of himself. He became arrogant and started to boss me around. As I've said before arrogance was 'beyond the pale' to me.

Fifteen years later I ran into him again in Belfast when I was teaching at Methodist college. He was married but we struck up the friendship again one summer vacation when we were both at a loose end. I had resigned form Methodist College and was waiting to go to Malawi. As S was out of work I introduced him to my neighbour D G who had a business erecting Greenhouses. In fact I got S a temporary job with D at the end of the summer I wasn’t pleased to hear when I returned from Malawi that after learning the business S had set up his own rival business and tried to buy D out! A few years later, when S’s own business was booming, he also loaned me a car for a week when I returned from Colombia but he had the cheek to charge me for it! I was not impressed since I was the one who had basically got him back on his feet a few years earlier. I later heard that S had made his pile and retired at about the age of forty-five.