A man moulded by the mountain and its people
The little boy sat on top of the grassy bank opposite the school gate on a height overlooking Lough Allen to the east and the long valley of North Leitrim below. There in the distance, the church spire protruded up from the filigree landscape of hedge and field and the little ribbon street of houses that made up the village of Drumkeeran from where blue smoke rose high from far chimney pots that tailed into the distance on this bright September morning.
He had walked with his older brother and sister up through the meadows his father had cut with a scythe in the August before, in through the upper gate and past the holly bush, walking with ease by the shorthorn cattle, who knowing each little child that passed their way, sat nonchalantly, chewing on their cud as the boys and girls took a breath on the headlands to gaze out to the far side of the lough and the little houses dotted along the hillside opposite.
Over the foot stick they climbed whereupon they caught sight of the line of white nappies blowing in the breeze fornent McHugh’s who came running across the street to join with their neighbours, the McTiernans as Mrs McHugh waved them on the last pull of the hill. There he lagged behind, lonesome of himself, glum in the face as they reached the top of the stoney road and joined with the others outside the gate of the two roomed Monaeanatieve school on top of the mountain.
‘Arragh what is wrong with you? Why are you looking so sad?’ his sister asked, and after a while a coaxing he told how the big boys had said to him that the new teacher that was coming to Monaeanatieve had a desperate reputation for being cross … and there like a vision coming over the top road from Drumkeeran was the young teacher on her high nelly bicycle, fair of face with a kindly smile and as the young Eileen Curran put her foot to the road, noticing the boy sitting on the bank with his head bowed low, she took him by the hand and led him to the door of the school whereupon he looked over his shoulder and reassured the others with a wink of his eye. ‘I don’t think she’s going to be too bad’.
It was the beginning of a life in education, a life spent continually learning, forever feeding his insatiable appetite for knowledge whether it be Greek mythology, the etymology of German words, European Politics or Canon Law; this was the morning, as he entered that little school house on the side of the mountain, that the world of academia opened up for him. Little did the teacher, who still lives hale and hearty to this day in Drumkeeran, know that day what life would bring for the little boy, that he himself would become a teacher like her, in fact one to become President of St. Patrick’s College, Cavan as she led by the hand in through the door of the two roomed school house.
At home he did his fair share of chores but he was slow and ponderous, often found gazing through the holes in the galvanised sheets that roofed the byre at the stars above as he milked the cow in the early morn, so long he spent at it, that the shorthorn cow oftentimes forgot he was still there, so much so, that she’d go to lie down and bring him to his senses.
He watched his father climb the mountain on foot in the afternoons to meet with an open back lorry that would bring him and other men of the locality to work the back shift in the coal mines in Arigna. The boy often lay awake until his father came in through the door at night, his face blackened with coal ash, soaked through from the pelting rain, raking the embers, to warm himself and bring the kettle to the boil. There was one night that stood out in his early memory, the night his father found him coughing in the bed below having come in the door from work, he took him in his arms and placed him before the fire on a settle stool in the kitchen and there as he sat beside the boy, his father made him a mug of hot tea as the two sat watching the sparks fly up the chimney, a simple moment in a lifetime but a memory that lasted all the years, of a man and boy as one, suspended in a moment, father and son, as the boy, having warmed himself with the hot tea turned to the man and asked, ‘How does me look now Daddy?’
The mountain and its people influenced the life of this boy, indelibly, for all his years; they moulded and shaped him in to the man he was to become and he thought on them often and the sacrifices they had made so that he who was ‘good at the books’ might have the chance they had not known, to pursue a love for learning. It was this witness of hardship and sacrifice that motivated the young John McTiernan to in turn change the course of lives through education and to infuse his students with this love of learning. He remembered all too well the harshness of the school he came to as a twelve year old boy, having won a scholarship and endeavoured as a young teacher to soften the edges of this institution, now a hundred years old.
He introduced the basement clubs, pool, snooker, table tennis, computer games and a tv room to sit back and relax in, all to enrich the lives of students. He established the infamous concerts that were periodically held in the assembly hall where up and coming bands such as ‘The Apaches’, ‘Clannad’ and nearly, just nearly U2 played. There were school trips to Germany, European days and the introduction of German on to the curriculum, as an English teacher he whetted our appetites for love of vocabulary, opening our eyes and ears to the wonders of prose and poetry.
But the years have passed quickly by and as they are apt to do, one decade has borrowed another and the boy now a man, has come to end of his life’s work. In his mind’s eye he sits back upon that stoney bank on the headland of his youth, looking out over the waters of Lough Allen and Drumkeeran to the east and there he will see the path by which he has travelled o’er the footstick, past holly bush and there standing at his shoulders, those who have influenced him, men and women who eked a living from these rushy fields and who dwelt along every mile that he has walked thus far, who live now only in the shadows of his mind, proud of the little boy who has garnered much and in turn has given much and who can turn to each and ask, after a life well spent ‘How does me look now?’
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