I was really excited at the thoughts of going away to school. One day I dressed up in my school uniform and my parents took photographs of me outside the house. . The main colour of the uniform was bottle-green. During the week we wore gym tunics with a mulberry-red woven sash around the waist. We had pale-green Aertex blouses and dark-green pullovers. On Sundays we wore a costume (skirt and jacket) with a long-sleeved white crepe-de-chine blouse. In winter we wore a black velour hat with a band in the school colours while we had Panama hats for summer. On weekdays, head coverings were Kangol berets sporting the school badge. Once a year on Speech Day we dressed up in an expensive heavy crepe dress with a Brussels lace collar. I remember with loathing the thick black woollen knickers worn over white cotton linings. A gap appeared between them and the tops of our thick black stockings, held up by suspenders.
Eventually, the day arrived that I was going away from home for the first time. I travelled by train from Portlaoise with two girls from Mountmellick. They were two years older than I was and the headmistress had asked them to take me under their wings. The journey in those days was long and tedious, by steam train, depending on turf (peat) for fuel. Coal was almost non-existent and the Government granted every household a plot of bog to cut their own fuel. My father bought a slean, a three-cornered cutting spade, and went to work on his plot of bog. It was intriguing to watch the blocks of peat being stacked so that the wind could blow through and dry them out. At home my parents also acquired a little donkey and my father made a cart with rubber tyres on the wheels and he painted it red and green. The little donkey could trot along at a brisk pace and they used the donkey and cart to move house soon after I had gone away.
Beryl and June, the two girls who were on the train with me, seemed friendly and protective towards me. Beryl’s father was a bank manager but her mother had died when her sister was born. Many women died in childbirth at that time. June’s father was a businessman and they seemed quite rich.
Both girls played a mean trick on me, taking advantage of my innocence and gullibility. I trusted them implicitly. They told me about the science teacher and said that her name was Miss Conkey but that she had a nickname, Miss Kent, because she came from Kent! This sounded plausible. Miss Kent, as I soon found out, was her correct name, and she happened to be on duty that first night. She came in to turn the lights off and, as she tucked me up in bed, she said ‘Welcome to Rochelle. Happy Dreams!” I replied in a loud deliberate voice, “Good-night, Miss Conkey, and thanks.”
Oh dear! I wondered why there followed an unearthly silence as a chill descended on the room. My three roommates soon explained. I don’t think Miss Kent ever forgave me for that. I didn’t like being made a fool of but I would learn to develop a thicker skin as the years passed.
My three room-mates were Rosemary, Kathleen and Muriel, all members of my form, Upper Three, and girls who were unlikely ever to take advantage of a raw newcomer. There were 4 boarders and 10 day girls in my class. There were only about 100 girls in total in school, ranging in age from 6 to 18.
The building was an old Huguenot safe house and rumour had it that a secret passage led up from the docks to the basement where we had lockers for our shoes. The refugees from La Rochelle in France were said to have made their way up from the ships along the passage to safety. Whenever the air raid sirens sounded for practice, we congregated in the basement and were supposed to put our gas masks on. I suffered badly from claustrophobia in my youth and no way was I going to put that contraption over my mouth and nose. I insisted that I would prefer to die in an enemy attack rather than die from suffocation in the mask. The air raid practices usually took place in the middle of the night and one thing I liked was my sleep.
A resident gardener kept the grounds beautifully. A huge mulberry tree grew in front of the school and we believed that the Huguenots used the leaves to feed the silkworms for their silk weaving. The mulberry leaf was our school emblem. There were lots of other trees, including beech and eating chestnut, and we boarders appreciated the chestnuts and mulberries in season. Behind the main building was a kitchen garden and orchard and beyond that was the hockey pitch. Often, on our way to play hockey, we helped ourselves to fruit and ate it in secret. The large Charles Ross variety of apple was tempting and we tried to pick a few unnoticed, whenever possible.
School afforded us a set routine. Lessons lasted from 9 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon and then followed lunch for the boarders. All through my 5 years at the school the menu never varied. There was roast beef on a Sunday, cottage pie on Wednesdays, fish pie on Fridays, and so on. Breakfasts were a torture for me. As a child I was finicky about food and I never ate porridge. However, it was an essential start to the day in school and I had to sit there feeling nauseous, trying to force minute quantities down my throat. I suffered guilt because the other girls at my table had to wait for their second course till the head of the table, usually a member of staff, said that the maid could remove my plate.
After lunch during the autumn and spring terms we either played hockey or dressed up in our outdoor clothes and congregated in front of the school in pairs in a long line. Then we set off in ‘crocodile’ for our afternoon walk. Because of the war, swimming lessons were suspended during the five years I was at Rochelle. We were told that the Cork swimming baths were closed because the city’s gas masks were stored there. I was in my middle thirties before I learned to stay afloat in water.
On Fridays we had an Arts and Crafts session when we could choose our own activity. I learned to crochet and I was right proud of my humble efforts. Saturday night saw us ballroom dancing where one of a pair danced the man’s part. Thus we learned to waltz and do the quickstep and the Tango, Valetta and Palais glide, all popular dances at that time. We could wear non-uniform clothes but I had little in the way of clothes outside my uniform.
I learned to play the piano as an extra. The music rooms were in a wing of the building where the sounds wouldn't interfere with ordinary lessons. In truth, I had little ear for music but my mother told me about how, as a young girl, she longed to learn to play the piano. Her mother asked her father to allow her to have lessons but his reply was to teach her to cook and sew as that was all a girl needed to know in preparation for marriage.
On Sundays we attended St Nicholas’ Church where Canon Darling, our school chaplain, was rector. Pupils who had been confirmed were allowed to attend St Finbarre’s Cathedral once a month for the early morning Communion service. Sunday afternoons were quite boring, spent reading quietly and in summer sitting on rugs on the grass playing a game called ‘Gobs’ with pebbles.
There were two companies of Girl Guides in school but I never joined. My parents couldn’t afford to pay for the uniform and my uncle wasn’t prepared to foot the bill for any more extras. He paid for my hockey stick and hockey boots as well as my tennis racquet and white tennis dress and shoes.
Halfway through my first term an epidemic of measles broke out and I was among the victims. The patients were isolated in one wing of the school. Each afternoon the room was darkened while we were supposed to have a nap. Friends smuggled in copies of ‘The Girls’ Crystal’ which we hid under our mattresses to read during the siesta. I remember waking up one afternoon to see the Rev. Hobson standing in front of the fire. His younger daughter, Pat, was in the ward at that time.
Shortly after I had returned to the classroom I noticed that I couldn’t read the blackboard from a distance so I was sent to the optician who prescribed spectacles for short sight. At the beginning of each term the boarders had a medical examination and we had to bring back from holidays a certificate to state if we had been in contact with any infectious disease. The school doctor was the wife of the Bishop of Cork. Twice she was called to school to see me. On one occasion I had received a terrific bang of a hockey ball on my left knee and the fear was that it would develop into what was called ‘water on the knee’. The second time she came was when I had a severe cough with a high temperature. As far as I can recollect, there was doubt as to whether it was whooping cough or tuberculosis, a disease that was rife in those days. I was given an anti-whooping cough injection and as it was the end of term I was given a phial to take to my doctor at home for the second injection. I hate needles so I threw the phial out of the train window and never mentioned it to a soul! Train windows could be opened in those days. We had a resident matron, too, and she was always dressed in her white uniform with a starched white head-dress.
The school dentist was a Mr Daunt and when we had occasion to visit him we would sneak up a certain street off the quays to buy ice-cream in the Cold Storage Company. This was breaking school rules so we made sure we weren’t found out! In those days a decaying tooth meant an extraction. Little emphasis was placed on preserving one’s teeth in a healthy condition.
The gym lesson was one I always dreaded. I was short, fat and not at all athletic. The vaulting horse was what I dreaded most. I would take a run at it and panic and just stop when I reached it, like a horse refusing a fence. To see the more athletic girls clear it effortlessly left me in awe. The addition of the springboard added to the terror. I didn’t fare much better on the parallel bars or on the swinging ropes. As I tried to climb, my arms lost any tiny portion of strength they had.
We didn’t have showers in those days and we must have smelled to high heaven after games or Physical Exercise lessons. Each of the boarders was allocated two nights each week to have a bath and each morning we were supposed to strip to the waist and have a wash. In winter we missed these ablutions out. One morning we were all standing by our chairs in the dining-room, waiting for Grace before breakfast when Miss Jagoe, our strictest teacher, called us out one by one by name and told us to march back up to the bathroom. There we had to strip under her eagle eye and have a thorough wash. The bone-dry towels were the give-away but we grew wise to that thereafter and someone would dash in and sprinkle water over the towels before we descended to breakfast. I remember Miss Kent one day in the science lesson explaining about the animals that change their colour in winter and she cited as an example the boarders of Rochelle!
The annual Sports Day was a festive occasion. Parents arrived to watch their daughters compete. Once again, it wasn’t my scene. Egg and spoon races, leapfrog, sack races, three-legged races, relay races, none chosen to suit the likes of me! My parents never saw my school. They were too far away and too poor, anyway. They weren’t even at my degree ceremony years later. Inwardly, I was so conscious of our extreme poverty.
Examinations of course featured high in school life. End of year tests gave results for form and subject prizes to be presented on Speech Day. In this field, at least, I shone. The public exams we were prepared for were the Intermediate Certificate and the Leaving Certificate. Some of us were also entered for the Synod exam in Scripture and I won two top awards in this in my final two years at school.
An outside examiner tested the junior and senior school choirs every year. I had to stand with the choir but I was told to mouth the words but not dare allow a sound to issue forth! Both of my parents were lovely singers but Helen and I were the crows in the family! Our mother sang in the church choir when she was young and our father won a prize for singing ’Oft in the Stilly Night’ on stage in a concert in aid of the Titanic Disaster Fund. My father often sang hymns as he worked. I remember my mother, too, used to sing a song as she worked in the kitchen. It went like this; ‘Oh, dear, what can the matter be? Johnny’s so long at the Fair. He promised to buy me a bunch of blue ribbons to tie up my bonny brown hair.’ My poor mother never received anything like a bunch of blue ribbons, yet she never complained. She was content to cook and wash and clean, day in day out. Cooking was her forte.
At Rochelle we had cookery lessons once every fortnight. I recall apple snow and toad-in-the-hole. The boarders were allowed to eat the dishes they made as an extra at teatime. I learned my love of cookery from my mother. Needlework was a different kettle of fish. I hated it and my buttonhole stitch resembled a spider. I would pass a whole hour standing in the queue for the iron in order to press a seam. As I approached the head of the queue, I would slip back a few places so by the end of a lesson I would have achieved nothing. My mother wasn’t much of a needlewoman, either.
On Saturday mornings we had an Art lesson in the gym. Mr Sheehy was our teacher. He had what we would now call a ‘beer belly’ so there was no danger that we might have any romantic feelings towards him! We sat on chairs in a circle around the room and the subject we were to draw was placed in the centre, something like a teapot on a biscuit tin. We learned to measure perspective using our pencils. I was hopeless at free drawing and painting but good at geometric drawing using ruler and compasses.
Each night we had a two-hour supervised study period where we did our homework in silence. Music practice was done by rota in this period.
Throughout my five years in Rochelle, we enjoyed many outings. I remember one afternoon when the Mayor of Cork, a Mr Dwyer, invited us to visit his rose gardens. He was a member of a family who manufactured woollen garments. He was a young man and as we admired his roses, he cut one for each of us and presented it to us with ceremony and charm. As I received mine, a beautiful yellow bloom, I felt a great thrill. I expect we were becoming aware of the opposite sex and enjoyed such a romantic gesture.
One boarder in the class above mine was involved with an Irish army officer, not at all a boyfriend one would at that time consider acceptable for a Protestant schoolgirl! We watched in awe as the two of them walked up the school drive to the Headmistress’ rooms. The man was introduced as her uncle and he asked permission to take his ‘niece’ out for the afternoon. This was a relationship beyond our comprehension! We considered it to be really daring, the stuff of fiction!
I mentioned previously the two girls from Mountmellick. It was probably in the summer holidays of 1941 that Beryl invited me to her home for a day. I borrowed a bicycle and cycled to Mountmellick where I had lunch with Beryl and her father and younger sister in their spacious home. It was a big house, owned by the bank and it had a large walled garden with peaches and cherries, luxurious fruit beyond my experience. After lunch we went to pick June up from her home. She lived in a lovely, spacious, luxuriously furnished house. We found the family drinking their after-dinner coffee in the drawing-room. June planted a kiss on her Dad’s bald head and said she would be home in time for tea. She was supposed to be going with Beryl and me to a waterfall but she had a boyfriend called Keith and he was waiting along the road for her. They rode away together while Beryl and I went on our way without June. Again I couldn’t fathom how someone that young could be going out with boys and unknown to their parents. Beryl visited me in Abbeyleix later on and on our return to school I was shocked to be told that she was telling others how poor we were. I felt this as betrayal.
Miss Jagoe lived in Cork and one Saturday afternoon she took us to her house and let us loose in her orchard to eat the windfall apples. We ate ourselves sick and picked some choice fruit from the trees. We always seemed to be longing for something different to eat. Friday night was tuck shop time and we were allowed to spend sixpence from our savings. Trouble was I often didn’t have any money in my account. Thompsons cake shop and Hadji Bey’s Turkish Delight shop were attractions whenever we had permission to go into the city. I remember the pyramid cakes in Thompsons.
Those of us who lived at a distance from home had to stay in school for half-term unless someone invited us to her home. Three half-terms, in particular, I remember. Clare Bird lived on a big farm not far outside the city and she was the first to invite me for a half-term. On the Saturday there was a Regatta and four of us entered the rowing race. The second race was well underway before we were even halfway around the first one. Over the loudspeaker we heard a voice telling ‘those girls in the boat’ to get out of the way at once! We felt right idiots! At the beginning of my second year a new girl, Hazel Elkin, joined our class and one day she spoke quietly to me and said that her mother wanted her to bring one of the boarders to tea and she asked me if I would like to go. Thus began a friendship that has lasted to this day, I spent some lovely weekends and half-terms with Hazel and her parents. The third home I stayed in was Beryl’s aunt’s and uncle’s lovely bungalow and that was when her younger sister asked me to go with her. Jean died a few years ago but I think Beryl may still be alive. On leaving school she became an air hostess with a small airline operating from Lydd in Kent. She became a heroine when a fire broke out on board and she risked her life staying on board till every passenger had been evacuated safely. I wrote to her and she invited me to visit her in her flat in Ladbroke Grove. Several hostesses shared the flat. Beryl later became a skiing guide and instructor in Switzerland.
I have so many lovely memories of Rochelle and I am happy that I was a pupil there. I had always believed that I would be among the girls to go on to University but that was not to be. Apart from my parents growing poorer as the war continued, my uncle got married in December 1943 and he would thereafter have family commitments so he was not prepared to pay my way through University. My story will continue in a new chapter.