Living in Hope, and FFF XIV.

"Unfortunately you fall just outside our criteria", said one crowd. Well when a society is run by people, notably bureaucrats and bankers, whose main principle is to watch the 'criteria' at their backs, then we may take it that society is on the way out. But with what can we replace them? Well, in the case of raising a few euro to repair the Anna M, a bit of family solidarity has happily done the business. Let's hope that when I get down to Nazaré next Tuesday, the other bit, actually getting the work done, falls into place as well! 

The precepts for human flourishing have been clearly laid out in theory - I mean faith, hope and love and all that goes with them - but how to live them out is of course another thing. How, for example, does ordinary day-to-day hope stand in relation to that transcendent hope promised by Christian faith? And how do we go about building real practical solidarity, even in our families?

For myself, ordinary human hope is like a spring-board. You have to jump firmly on it, and in fact go down with it, in order that you may take off with it into transcendent hope; in fact getting the Anna M to sea again is a pretty good little image for it. And indeed we need such little, practical, physical images, and you may be sure that any vibrant human culture is rich with them!

Sometimes the Church has concentrated too much on the hopelessness of life in this world, offering a transcendent hope more as consolation than as a fruit for our human strivings. Even when these appear vain, faith is trusting that they are never utterly lost. If we are to have a genuine faith in eternal life, it must come at the very pitch of our efforts here on Earth!

But not to mention the transcendent bit, ordinary human hope, and the beauties that go with it, was sadly lacking for the kids I briefly tried to teach in Liverpool, back in 1968. Read on! 

FFF XIV. The little segregated schools of four parishes had been amalgamated into the coeducational paragon, the Archbishop Whiteside Secondary Modern, but as yet only the new intake was integrated; the older boys and girls were still segregated. The headmaster was desperate for staff and seemed to be pleased with the new victim, in spite of the fact that he was totally green and with no training in teaching. BA Cantab was supposed to qualify me! He gave me the lowest stream of the last year boys for over half the timetable. He asked me what I could teach and I said that I supposed I could make some kind of fist of anything, except Maths. He gave me more Maths to teach than anything else. I also taught all the first year students French, for one class a week. Things were getting classy on the Scotland Road!

       The outfit was held together, in the sense of not descending into outright riot, by the deputy headmaster, a cynical thug. I have noticed that all weak bosses tend to have a hatchet man at their side! There was also a female deputy-head for the girls, breaking her heart at the chaos. She had been headmistress of one of the parish schools, and was that rare and precious thing, a good school-teacher. She stuck it for a lot longer than me, but didn’t last long there either. I find this reference on the internet to that school:- ‘I taught for a short while at Archbishop Whiteside RC Secondary on Silvester Street as a supply teacher in the early 1970s and the sense of failure permeating out of the place was almost tangible. However bright a child was, they had little chance of succeeding in such negative places.’*

       I was confronted with a place, a community, with no future, while its denizens had no hope unless it were to get out of it. Yet my lads were totally alienated from the whole idea of education. Many of them had elder brothers in borstal or prison. It was rare for any of them to go home to a square meal, though some Mums no doubt made heroic efforts. They were lucky if they were thrown a few bob for (fish and) chips. Chip butties (sandwiches) or jam ones, with grotty sliced bread of course, was what a lot of them seemed to live on. Since I taught them both Maths and English, I made valiant attempts to get them to do simple arithmetic and to write. What could I get them to write? I managed to get permission to take parties of them down to the docks, and tried to get them to write about what they saw, and whatever images it provoked.

        I undertook to produce a school newspaper, and this was thought very bright. In a moment of naive folly, I got some of the more articulate to write down what they thought of the transition from the parish schools to the new one. Of course they were brutally damning, with their sharp Liverpool wit and some surprising perspicacity. I printed much of what they wrote, and that was the end of my career there. I spent more and more time playing football with the lads. This was the one thing that fired them up; they were transformed when kicking a ball around. They knew very well they were trapped, and the dream of making it as a footballer was about the only escape they could imagine.

       The way the end came for me was rather amusing. What to do with the French classes was a good question. The curriculum was absurdly inappropriate. If I could just give them some idea of France, and teach them to say s’il vous plait  and merci, I thought I would be doing well. It was uphill. Towards the end of one class, when I was failing dismally to get answers to questions like ‘ou est Paris?’, I said in desperation ‘Right, you ask me questions!’ This deteriorated rapidly into ‘Sir, where do babies come from?’ In my naivety, I said, ‘don’t you know?’, and gave them a brief account. Rapt attention! But next morning I had the headmaster on to me. ‘Mr Aston, I hear you were giving sex education in French class?’

       The previous summer, while fixing the roof of the Simon house in Shaw St, I had fallen in with an alcoholic Paddy by the name of Rory Dunbar. Rory had grown up at the foot of the Dublin mountains, which might as well have been in the wilds of Donegal in those days, before Tallaght came sprawling out to meet it. When he was young there had been no electricity there, water was drawn from a pump and turf for burning from the hills. Modernity Dublin-style had soon swept away that way of life, but I suppose Rory had never quite been able to adapt. We became friends, and down the years to come Rory taught both Fiona and I many basic survival skills, helping us to come down to earth.
He also fostered our interest in Ireland, in my case much aroused by the very good Irish school-friends I already had, especially Ken and Rodney. It was another few years before I actually got around to even visiting Ireland with him, and we'll come to that later, but here in Horseshoe Cottage right now a great friendship lives on that he initiated, with the Pye family. Rory used to help Patrick Pye to lead stain glass windows, up the road in Piperstown, looking down across Dublin from the hills above Tallaght.
I like to think that something special has occurred, what with Ken's and Patrick's art, and Rodney's eremitical life, and perhaps even my own poor scribblings, that one day might be recognised as a glimmer of a new dawn of Irish Catholic culture. Poor Patrick, an artist and devotee of beauty if ever there was one, is temporarily in a care home right now, but here having a bit of respite from looking after him is his wife Nóirín, a lady of real hope! -

Nóirín Pye.

       

*<http://streetsofliverpool.co.uk/lost-schools-of-liverpool-2/>