GOING PLACES
Selected writing from the SCC English Blog, 2006-2008
www.sccenglish.ie 2
The English Department St Columba’s College Whitechurch Dublin 16 Ireland
www.sccenglish.ie e-mail: scc.english@yahoo.ie
This symbol in the text indicates further material online on the Blog
Front cover by Mikeila Cameron, V form Back cover photograph by Richard Beer Many thanks to Derarca Cullen and Peter Watts for their help with art-work, and to our former art teacher Chris Vis for permission to reproduce his cartoons from Floreat Columba (1993).
Printed by www.lulu.com, May 2008. This book is available for purchase at cost price. Š Copyright remains with the individual authors
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Contents Julian Girdham
Preface
9
Amelia Shirley
Going Places
11
Isobel Hunter
What is ‘The Perfect World’?
12
Julian Girdham
Remainder, In the Dark Room
14
David Cooper
My First Home
14
Oli Smith
My First Home
16
Emily Plunket
A description of a street late at night
17
John Fanagan
Something to Hide
18
Lauren O’Connell
Life
19
Jessica Dean
Journey
20
Anna Traill
Happy Place
21
Fred Mann
The Greatest Pleasure in Life
22
Cordelia Mulholland
Voices
24
Joseph Millar
I’m Just Going Outside
25
Molly Sanderson
A Path
26
Sophie Millar
Photos
27
Olivia Plunket
My Escape
28
Amelia Shirley
The Hill
30
Robbie Hollis
My Desk
31
Harry Brooke
Signature Tree
32
Jack Armstrong
The Tibradden Radiator
33
Stephanie Brann
The Astroturf
34
Shane Lavin
The Person I Most Admire
36
Ellie Russell
It’s Your Turn
37
Hanne Grainger
Matters of Death
38
Sophie Haslett
The Shape We’re In
39
Julian Girdham
What was Lost
40
Zachary Stephenson
Light
41
Josh Kenny
Solitude
41
Kezia Wright
Place
42
Jamie Boyd
Driftwood
43 4
Jessica Dean
House Speech
44
Josh Kenny
Beachball in the Summer Sun
46
Annabel Sharma
Two Views of One Thing
47
Rowland Cooper
Petals
48
Benjamin Russell
Five Poems
49
Tom McConville
Beware of Pity
52
Julian Girdham
Then We Came to the End
53
Deirdre Gannon
The Music of Chance
54
Noel Coldrick
MP3 Shakespeare
55
Rebecca Feeney-Barry
Review of Macbeth, Siren Productions
57
Julian Girdham
Will and Me
58
Miriam Poulton
The Merchant’s Guide to Venice
59
Ronan Swift
Personal Reading, Personal Writing
61
Ronan Swift
My Bookcase
63
Emily Dickinson
The Grass so little has to do -
67
Gerard Manley Hopkins Spring
68
Benjamin Russell
Windwheels
69
Evan Jameson
The Poem and the Journey
70
Rosanna Young
Lives that were not theirs
71
Kate Haslett
Two poems
72
Fiona Boyd
Three poems
73
Steffan Davies
Summer in the Countryside
75
Philip Kidd
The Garden
76
Sophie Millar
Night-time
77
Oyindamola Onabanjo
A Raging Sea
78
Angus Johnson
Beach Scene
79
II formers
Haiku
80
Lewis Mathews
Christmas 2004
81
Ciara O’Driscoll
December 26th 2004
84
IV formers
Book Recommendations
86
Ronan Swift
Popping Questions
87
IV formers
Book Recommendations
88
Five Actors
Preparing for Dancing at Lughnasa
89
Katie Murphy
Review of Dancing at Lughnasa
91
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Joseph Millar
An Actiontrack Daily Diary
94
Sarah O’Mahony
Chinese Cinderella
96
Julian Girdham
Family Romance
96
Fiona Boyd
Louise C. Callaghan: poetry reading
97
Amelia Shirley
Two poems
99
Joanna Tottenham
Hearts
101
Kezia Wright
Home
102
Lluisa Hebrero Casasayas Learning the hard way
103
Olivia Plunket
Two poems
105
Opeline Kellett
Those Sepia Photos
106
Ji-Won Lee
Going Places
107
Crispin Maenpaa
Shriver, Coetzee, Murakami
108
Celeste Guinness
Paton, Lee, Frank
109
Emily Plunket
The Oldest Person I Know
110
Cordelia Mulholland
Revelations
111
Hal Downer
Two poems
112
Fiona Boyd
Morrison, Plath, Banks
114
Tyrone Langham
Two poems
115
Angus Johnson
Two poems
116
Winta Bairu
Stone Cold
117
Rachel Acton Filion
Three poems
118
Celeste Guinness
Suddenly there was no noise
121
Joseph Millar
Transition Year Hike Review
123
Shannon Keogan
Two poems
124
Rebecca Feeney-Barry
The Watcher
125
Celeste Weatherhead
The Taunted End to the Dictator
126
Jessica Sheil
Going Places
127
Rebecca Feeney-Barry
Johnston, Dickens, Banks
128
Rebecca Roe
My First Love
129
John Fanagan
The novels of Elizabeth Taylor
130
Rowland Cooper
Vesuvius
131
IV formers
Book recommendations
132
Joseph Millar
Remarque, Barker, Lawrence
133
Kate Haslett
Camus, du Maurier, Tartt
134
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Poppy Vernon
Letter to a famous person
136
Sophie Haslett
An interview with Jennifer Johnston
137
Lewis Mathews
William Trevor
142
Liam Canning
Scribbling the Cat
144
Fiona Boyd
Two poems
145
John Fanagan
On Teaching English
147
Illustrations Chris Vis
pages 29, 33, 35, 95
Rosanna Reade, VI form
13, 32, 42, 79
Rosemary Wentges, V
23, 116
James Glenn-Craigie, II
128
Aoise Keogan-Nooshabadi, II
135
Zuleika O’Malley, II
49
Jamie Boyd, I
45
Eleanor Dolphin, I
44
Jay Kim, I
22, 56
Stephanie Cafolla, I
25
Katie Ridge, I
78
Rachel Rogers, I
122
Kezia Wright, I
15, 21, 69, 102
Molly Buckingham, P
19
Lilian Glennon, P
67
Bronagh McHugh, P
18
The illustrations on pages 30, 106 and 109 first appeared in volumes of The Columban in the 1920s. 7
Preface
T
his is the first volume in what we hope will be a series, collecting writing from SCC English, the St Columba’s College English Department blog. The site is now two academic years old, and in those six terms has showcased a huge variety of work by our pupils – essays, poems, stories, reviews – as well as writing by staff, and plenty of news, links and much more. In 400 posts there have been over 100 poems and 80 essays and articles by pupils. Some of this writing comes from regular work in English class, some of it is specially commissioned reportage and reviews. Traffic on the site has continued to build up steadily, and now about 25,000 visitors a year come to us from all over the world. Our recent official Department of Education inspection report stated that ‘a striking feature of the College is the many opportunities that students have to display their work’, and this book gathers and celebrates such work (teachers and Editor have had only a very light hand on the tiller). This is a capacious bag of a collection, for the most part happily disordered. There are all sorts of serendipitous juxtapositions, as first former rubs shoulders with teacher, poetry with prose, humour with seriousness. The blog itself is like that.
Why ‘Going Places’? Well, places of many kinds pervade this collection. Of course, for any teenager, home is the most important place (even more so if you’re in a boarding school perhaps), and this book opens with images of the home and of that other crucial place, childhood. Isobel Hunter, David Cooper and Oli Smith write with photographic clarity about a place which is both vividly present in their imaginations, but also slipping into loss. Memoirs don’t have to wait for old age: as soon as we leave childhood, our imaginations recreate and try to rescue it. In Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel’s narrator Michael says of his childhood ‘in that memory, atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory’. And later in this book, Ronan Swift and John Fanagan, writing about their early reading, position their own first formative literary experiences at home (the milky bowl of cornflakes, the severed cartoon head of Macbeth). There are plenty of other versions of place here: five pieces by II formers about their favourite place in the school – a tree, a radiator, a hockey pitch, a desk, a hill; Fred Mann’s evocation of a house in Wales (score by Sigur Rós from Iceland); Philip Kidd’s queasily perfect garden (don’t look ahead to the end – and then let it undermine everything you’ve read); Lewis Mathews and Ciara O’Driscoll looking in horror from different sides of the Indian Ocean at the appalling destructiveness of the 2004 tsunami; Celeste Guinness’s branchworld; Angus Johnson’s beach scene; Joey Millar’s imagination transporting us a long way from a famous line in a Derek Mahon poem to a grubby student flat; Ben Russell’s landscape dotted with windmills; Steffan Davies’s summer 8
seascape; the Russia of Chekhov’s A Marriage Proposal; Tom McConville on Stefan Zweig’s Austro-Hungarian Empire; Vesuvius as re-imagined by Rowland Cooper; rural Donegal in the summer of 1936; Hal Downer’s room on a winter’s night; the past as seen through Opeline Kellett’s sepia photographs. And much more. And if places are omnipresent, so is ‘going’. Transition Year, as is often said, is a time when pupils undergo a series of formative transitions in their academic and personal lives (TY is heavily represented here; in the English Department we regard it is a crucial year in the development of writing skills), but in truth every year in school is a transition year. The voices in this book are of young people discovering their own expressiveness (vividly personified in Mikeila Cameron’s vibrant front cover). There are a lot of journeys here: from poems early in the book by Lauren O’Connell, Jessica Dean and Molly Sanderson to Joey Millar’s hilarious blister-inducing TY hike and Miriam Poulton’s mischievous Rough Guide take on Venice in Shylock’s time (you might get into trouble if you slip that special souvenir into a transparent plastic bag at the airport). Amelia Shirley’s opening title poem encapsulates the journeys all of us make back to our homes and our parents, and how we start to see them anew in the light of our changing selves. Rachel Acton Filion’s ‘The Path, 5.47pm’ is precisely fixed in time and place, but, like her ‘Transience’ and ‘Apparition’, any certainty is undercut by discomfiture. Writing helps us make journeys to the most important places of our minds and hearts, and builds bridges to the most important places in our lives. In a work by Emily Dickinson quoted on the blog in May 2007, the great American poet writes: There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands away Nor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry-This Traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of Toll-How frugal is the Chariot That bears the Human soul. The words in this book have made a journey too, from exercise book or laptop, out into cyberspace, and now, pleasingly, back to the printed page. The ‘frugal Chariot’ of the imagination can be a pretty sturdy ‘Frigate’. Have a look at Evan Jameson’s absorbing review of Ruth Padel’s book and note how a poem can be a journey in itself. Which is a cue to draw attention particularly to the high quality of poetry on show here, such as the prize-winning work by Ben Russell, Rachel Acton Filion, Fiona Boyd and Joanna Tottenham. Time and again what strikes me about Columban poets is their confidence with a line and their ability to end poems resonantly (two elusive skills). Looking at all the genres of work in this 9
book, and given the number of pupils represented (66), it would be surprising if there were any ‘house style’. But there is, throughout, a consistent openness and truthfulness. As English teachers we stress the value of clarity and honesty. We want our pupils never to be afraid of simplicity: Lluisa Hebrero Casasayas’s essay (in her second language) about her own journey to this place has a gripping purity and honesty of expression. Writing has a symbiotic relationship with reading, and we are always eager to share enthusiasms about books on the blog. Nothing is more likely to make one pick up a book than a personal recommendation. There are plenty of examples here, lots more online; it’s also important that as English teachers our own reading enthusiasms are on show. We have a really positive reading culture at St Columba’s, bolstered hugely by our top-class Library. Three pupils write about three contemporary Irish writers near the end: Lewis Mathews discusses William Trevor (this most distinguished Old Columban writer is 80 this month); Sophie Haslett interviews Jennifer Johnston; Fiona Boyd writes about the poet Louise Callaghan. We also publish the opening pages of several Transition Year Extended Essays (they can be read in full online; how good it is that work of such quality is both publicly available and preserved in this manner, and how valuable it is that pupils in future years can see what they can aspire to). And of course, Shakespeare features, too, in pieces by Rebecca Feeney-Barry and our under-cover agent in the Maths Department, Noel Coldrick. There’s only one piece in Going Places that hasn’t been published on SCC English. It comes at the end, a kind of English teaching autobiography, by our retiring Head of Department, John Fanagan, and commissioned specially for this book. In his essay we hear the thoughts of a man whose deep love for his subject has driven a vocational career of the highest accomplishment. I speak with unique and unimpeachable authority here, since not only have I worked closely with him for twenty-four years, but he also taught me. I too treasure the memory of those summer evenings in a sun-filled Barton Room discussing Henry James. The quality of writing by pupils in this book is in no small degree due to the culture John has unstintingly encouraged in his thirtyfive years teaching English at St Columba’s. His words are, as the man himself has been, an inspiration to all pupils and teachers who continue to work here, as we mark his going from this place.
Julian Girdham, Editor, May 2008.
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English Teachers, 2006-2008 Liam Canning John Fanagan Deirdre Gannon Julian Girdham Frances Heffernan Evan Jameson Ronan Swift
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Amelia Shirley Going Places
S
itting in the back seat of the car, The world outside becomes a blur
Of colours messing with my eyes. This road seems familiar, These woods, this side of the valley. I’ve been here before, A long time ago, perhaps. As we swerve round the corner, Old Barry’s pub appears ahead, The field belonging to the Fosters becomes clear. Mother looks back and smiles at me, As if reading my blank expression, As the happiness it was. We’re going home. III form. Poem of the Week, December 6th 2007
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Isobel Hunter What is ‘The Perfect World’?
W
hen I was about seven or eight, I was asked this same question. ‘Circle Time’ was a common forum for primary school children. In this forum we would discuss our personal issues, all whilst sitting in a circle.
One particular circle time sticks in my memory. We were asked what we would have as our perfect world; we came up with a number of contrasting worlds. All our own definitions of perfect, all very different. There were of course, those of us who were very selfish at that age. One boy (my first boyfriend in fact), said that in his perfect world, he would be the best footballer in the world and change little else. Even then I believed him to be far too opportunistic. The ironic thing about the boy however, was that he was hopeless at football and didn’t seem to enjoy it whatsoever. My best friend Sian wished that in her perfect world there would be a greater knowledge of Down’s syndrome. She said that all learning difficulties would be easy to tackle. All Down’s syndrome children would have a school to go to. Sian’s perfect world reflected her and her thoughtful nature. This of course had no relevance to me at the time. I didn’t find out until two weeks later that her younger sister Clare had Down’s. Mark, a rather camp boy, said in his perfect world there would be no twins. Mark had a twin brother, a brother who had given him a bloody nose half an hour earlier. The most popular girl in my class wished in her most trendy fashion, that in her perfect world she would be famous. Her perfect world would be full of glitz, rock stars, glamour, limousines and apple martinis. She believed the cosmopolitan life would be perfect for everyone. The perfect world of Jack, was one where all children would be taught ninja skills in school. All children would also have to learn Mandarin in a New York accent. This as you may guess, was at the height of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles craze. He also said that in a perfect world we would eat just pizza and kill all the bad guys, all before 9 o’clock. One of the boys said in his perfect world there would be no war. His father had died tragically in the Falklands War when he was very young. The boy was rather introverted and he got bullied a lot. I still feel endlessly sorry for the boy and regret not having made more of an effort towards friendship. Even then however I knew I couldn’t change human nature. War was part of it. Some of the other perfect worlds were ridiculous, such as a world made of chocolate, a real magic school bus for every school and a world where 13
everyone had super powers. I did point out that this would probably be similar to the regulations of our world. We would inevitably end up with police forces with superpowers and laws to limit their use. For instance, no superpower use before you’re 18, or only using two powers a day. You may wonder what I imagined as the perfect world. It seemed Karl Marx had made some impact on my eight-year-old self. I wished everyone was equal; that the world would share the wealth and that there was no discrimination. My perfect world? Well, it already existed. Life was easy as a child. Up until my ninth birthday I lived in the perfect world. Life’s troubles were trivial things like who would win Sports’ Day, would I be invited to a birthday party and would my pocket money buy me skittles or sherbet lemons? Looking back, I would say that my childhood was my perfect world. I understand that childhood is jaded with promises such as Father Christmas and ‘Happy ever afters.’ I think a part of me misses that, the realisation that becoming an adult wouldn’t be part of my world. My perfect world was so perfect because I was just so happy. I didn’t have to worry about divorce, cancer or exams. So if I could make the perfect world, I would bring people back to the happiest points in life and leave it at that. That and destroy all mushrooms. I despise mushrooms. V form. January 20th 2008
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