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Contents
Teacher of Art. It is time to return to myself and my early days as a teacher.
One would think that fully-qualified specialist teachers like my Art-school friend
Rosie Graham and myself would have little difficulty finding a job. But it was not
quite like that in the early twenties. My first years were spent as a 'peripatetic'
teacher moving from one Catholic school to another and giving one-period-a-week
instruction mostly to the 'Advanced Division' - post-Primary pupils taught in the
same buildings where they had done their earlier schooling. You have to remember
that there were far fewer Secondary schools then. The 'Junior' and 'Senior' Secondary
system was far in the future, and Comprehensive education still further. Facilities
left a lot to be desired, and it was difficult to accomplish very much, or see any real
development even in talented pupils, when one's contact was so intermittent. But it
was not a bad apprenticeship for more settled and serious teaching, since one had to
improvise amid the spartan provision of so-called 'Art-rooms' and cope with all sorts
of situations inside and outside the classroom.
Within Glasgow city itself there was little chance of promotion, so after a year or so both Rosie and myself applied for and obtained assistant posts in the Art Department of the large Catholic Secondary school in Greenock. The Headteacher was a Marist, a member of the teaching order of religious Brothers who contributed so much to Catholic Education in the West of Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries. St Mungo's Academy in Townhead was the Marist flagship school which gave countless boys from relatively deprived backgrounds their chance of educational qualification. They also had a boarding school in Dumfries drawing pupils from all over Scotland; but like the teaching Sisters they worked in other schools wherever they were needed.
It was a long tram-and-train journey for the two of us to and fro each day, but it was worth it to feel we were really passing on some of the skills carefully acquired at Art- school. We found ourselves accepted by the other members of staff, mostly senior to ourselves, and were not much troubled by the banter we were to hear so often which suggested that Art was a non-academic subject to be pursued by numbskulls unable to manage anything else. Our only real trouble was working alongside a middle-aged lady Art Principal who did not have a Diploma and whose position - it was whispered - had less to do with talent than with good connections among the higher clergy of the Archdiocese.
Among the pupils I taught in Greenock was one - Gerard Sloane - who had
exceptional natural talent and the character and perseverance to go with it. He
became a Benedictine monk later on and as Dom Ninian Sloane played a major part
in setting up the stained-glass studio which contributed so much to the the
restoration and beautifying of the ancient monastic buildings at Pluscarden near
Elgin. But I would not like you to think that we were over-preoccupied with pupils
who showed that very special sort of promise. Some of my happiest memories of the
Greenock days are of outings Rosie and I organised for some of our girl-pupils. It
was great to see their wee faces light up with excitement as if the trip to Largs or Ayr
was the biggest adventure on earth. And there were Christmas parties and concerts
where youngsters from backgrounds not unlike my own would recite their party-
pieces: I come from the County Tyrone... The fathers of children like that would be shipyard workers who were beginning to feel the effects of the great Depression years. The signs of poverty and under- nourishment became more commonplace as time went by, though there was plenty of that pride around which had been part of my own upbringing, the kind that sent the children out neat and shining in handed-down clothes, and put food in their stomachs when mothers were going without. I suppose I knew that the misery we could see posed some real questions about the society in which we were living and the way it was run; but the talk of the menfolk about the I.L.P and workers' rights and the dangers of communism mostly passed me by. Only when the National Strike left Rosie Graham and myself stranded in Greenock did the sense of crisis really come home to us - and to tell the truth my main memory is of our indignation at being outrageously overcharged by the lady who benevolently offered us beds for the night.
Although my Art School and early teaching years took me to different parts of the city and beyond, I was still very much part of our local community or at least of that part of it represented by St Joseph's church and parish in Tollcross. The parish had always had a choir to sing the various parts of the Latin Mass, and though Susan was the recognized singer in our family I also for a year or two played a not very distinguished part in the liturgy. I don't think our group was particularly talented, and solos were the prerogative of long-established members who had captured the right to the 'Benedictus qui venit' a generation earlier and could still shake the rafters when we hissed - 'Come on, Bella, this is your bit!'
I have probably mentioned the parish Amateur Dramatics group, which Sister Gabriel from the Sisters of Charity convent at Dalbeth promoted with great energy. She wanted my handsome sister Susan as heroine of a play about the Irish patriot Robert Emmett, and so did Robert Emmett himself, a local boy called George Ward who adored the ground Susan walked on. However my mother was against Susan's taking part, perhaps because it was her last year at University, and I was drafted in instead. The play was just the sort of thing to please our first- and second-generation immigrant audience, and the marriage of Emmett to his sweetheart Sarah Curran in the condemned cell was a gift to popular melodrama. I got quite a kick out of floating about the stage in long dresses with my hair 'up' in 19th-century style, but there was some difficulty playing alongside a male lead who was in a permanent state of high dudgeon and would hardly even link arms when the script required it. The whole thing came off quite well and some of the more sounding lines remain with me to this day, but my keenest memory comes from after the final performance in some Glasgow hall, when they called me for a cast photograph just after I had removed half my hair grips. I pleaded for time to get my hair up again, but George would have none of it and pushed me into line. I didn't keep that picture.
My other talents were of course called upon for scenery-painting, both for 'Robert Emmett' and for a religious play about the martyr St Philomena in which I played the lead. I can still recite some of the lines the playwright gave to the little Roman girl on her way to martyrdom, and I was quite annoyed a year or two ago when the Church decided that the whole story about St Philomena was very doubtful, and dropped her name from the calendar of saints.
 Not all my recreational pursuits were at this cultural level. I kept up a strong friendship with Cissie Pierce, one of two sisters I mentioned many pages ago who were my contemporaries at St Joseph's. With her bright and witty ways she had always been a well-liked visitor at our house, and was one of several girls who then and later found my mother's ready welcome and good cooking something of a refuge from home lives which were not so happy. Earlier I think it was she who got Susan and me to do a stint of berry-picking somewhere near Perth to supplement our slender resources. She managed better than us the week or two of hard labour with small reward and pretty basic hostel conditions; but I suppose it was an education for us to be among girls who were up to all sorts of dishonest tricks and threw things at us when we tried to say our prayers. She was a great favourite with Papa, and his liking for someone with a bit of his own devil-may-care instincts survived the night she dressed up as a nun and had him doffing his cap and making respectful small- talk to the good Sister before he spotted the trick.
Cissie and I were regulars at the weekly dance in the parochial hall, both of us becoming quickly expert both at modern dancing and at the Irish set-dances which replaced the fox-trots and Charlestons when Fr Quillinan's steps were heard on the gravel. I suppose it could have turned my head, having the local lads elbowing each other out of the road to have me as partner, but the funny thing is that the boy I was to fall for in the end did not come from Tollcross at all and was always a reluctant and inexpert dancer. One of the locals did make a proposal of marriage - it was Peter Donegan, whose name has appeared before - and I remember saying I wouldn't dream of it and feeling long afterwards that that had been cruel and hurtful response.
Cissie had her admirers too and could be jealous about them. One Saturday night she dragged me off on the tram to St Michael's hall in Parkhead, all because some kind person had told her that her current boyfriend was going there with someone else to a swanky all-ticket gala dance. There was no question of getting in to the dance, so we slipped round the back and tried unsuccessfully to have a look at what was going on through the sooty wire-meshed windows. Daft days. But at least we got a laugh out of that one, when we plumped down opposite one another on the tram home and discovered that the mesh had patterned our noses in a style that would have done fine for circus clowns. In due time we became regulars at St Michael's Hall as well - I think it counted as a step up in the dance-hall world - and got to know the local clergy, one of whom was a brother of the man I would finally marry.
Not all that went on at St Joseph's hall was as innocuous as the Saturday night hops. One night when my sister Agnes was taking our usual shortcut across waste ground towards the hall she literally stood on a policeman who was lying hidden in the grass and who told her to move on in very ungracious terms. It was the time of the Irish 'Troubles', and a good few of the local young men, Irish-born and otherwise, were mixed up in Republican activities. One of the priests - the very one who favoured set-dances - allowed the hall to be used for drilling and, it was said, for storing weapons intended for Michael Collins' guerrilla Volunteers. I seem to remember that the priest and others were placed under arrest at one point. I do know of one young man who claimed to have taken the Volunteer oath - because I heard him boast that 'it counted above your religion if it came to a choice' - and there may have been others we did not know about. It was even said that the Scotsman who was with Michael Collins when he was killed came from our area.
Such matters did not preoccupy me very much in the midst of my personal and working interests. We had relations on both sides of the family who were strongly republican in sentiment - I recall my infant cousin Tommy O'Callaghan shouting 'Down Come Scratchem!' at the time of the Irish Conscription controversy during the Great War - but my mother was at odds with them on such things. I was more worried by the parish priest's request to help beautify his Church, which if you remember formed the upper floor of the building which also housed St Joseph's school. The result was a whole series of little angel faces floating about on the wall behind the high altar. I don't think I consciously copied the faces of my younger brothers and sisters, but there were comments about 'hearing Mass with a lot of wee Callaghans looking down at you'. As far as I know the wee Callaghans continued looking down at people until they were demolished with the rest of the building a good few years ago, but a postcard survives of the old sanctuary with my fresco filling the space behind the altar, and the ugly dividing lines which one of the curates insisted on adding with his own unskilful hands.
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