Maybe ‘the good old days’ were not all that great

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Someone asked me recently, was it long since I did my Leaving Cert to which I instinctively replied: ‘A good 30 years’. I had no sooner the answer given than I realised that another decade had to be added onto that time span, but yet to this day, the thought of sitting down to the first paper in early June, still sends a little shiver of fear down my spine.

Like a lot of other households around the country, the Leaving Cert has been at the top of the family agenda over recent weeks, and really nothing much has changed in terms of the aura surrounding the attainment of this piece of paper, that supposedly defines us for the rest of our days.

After that Leaving Cert in the days of the mid-70s, when the hits on Top of the Pops featured the likes of Abba (Waterloo), Rod Stewart (Sailing), The Bay City Rollers (Bye, Bye Baby), Queen (Bohemian Rhapsody) and David Essex (Gonna Make You a Star), many more exams followed (for what gain I have little clue), but none ever left the same impression as the ‘Leaving’.

There was a distinct absence of structure to my study life in those days, and inevitably there was that choking feeling the night before the exam. It coincided with the realisation, that I really didn’t have in my armoury, enough quotes from Yeats or Keats, and that my Irish grammar had a foundation as solid as a straw house. I still recall the fear of that red covered booked entitled, ‘Rechursa Gramadai’, where the Tuiseal Ginideach and Tuiseal Tabhartrhach ruled supreme.

Obviously some severe psychological damage was caused by the lack of preparedness for the ‘great exam’ and the modest enough results that inevitably ensued, for to this day nearly four decades on, I occasionally wake up in a sweat in the dead of night, after a vicious enough nightmare. The theme is always the same: it’s the night before the English exam and while in my dream, I have some faith in my ability to piece together the words that will form the nexus between brain and the answering sheet, not one line of a poem has been read and the poetry book just can’t be found . . . anywhere.

The follow-on dream tends to get worse, involving a paralysis of the right arm and hand that prevents me from writing any answer down on the exam sheet, even though on this occasion, the answer is clearly in my head. So that’s the sub-conscious legacy of the Leaving Cert for me – those intermittent dreams that send me hurtling back to my late teenage years without any warning.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.