Grammar Lessons

Brother Boniface loved Francis Albert Sinatra. He always referred to ‘ol blue eyes with his full title. He would breeze into the classroom in the morning and DOBE DOBEDOBEDOO himself into his chair. Then it was up to the board with a sum. It was usually a ‘hard’ sum. He vowed to turn us ‘pumpkins’ into human beings before we would be let loose on the world and God help the planet on that day. But we didn’t know for sure what a pumpkin was. None of the class had ever seen one. Or if we had then we didn’t know it when we’d seen it. For all we knew, it could have been a codeword in a secret agent message. There were secret agents everywhere in those days. A person had a right to be suspicious, sure enuff.

The word on the street was that Boniface had a mystery secret.  And what’s more he spoke in an American axident, just like an FBI agent on the telly did. DOBEDOBEDO. Francis Albert Sinatra.

That could be a secret code for Chalmers. He was the class ‘swot’ and Boniface’s favourite. Not so Kelly. All the teachers despised Kelly. We all loved Kelly and not Chalmers the ‘swot’. If Boniface was to describe Kelly in a phrase it might have been, ‘I’ve got you under my skin’. He told the class this at least three times a day. Kelly was an irritating itch to the teachers and especially Boniface who suffered from itchy red blotches under his skin, every now and then. Sometimes these flared up overnight.  And he would see real red when Kelly irritated him with his ‘tomfoolerie’.

 ‘Bare-faced duncery’ is what Boniface called it. 

In the afternoon Boniface would hum around the desks like a wasp. We would be scratching our heads over hard sums and algibra. Don’t mention algibra. No way. Don’t mention the end of the world. We rubbed and scratched our browses and the rubber on top of the pencils would be nearly worn out with scratching. And the sum books would be polka dottted with smudges. Kelly’s sum book was more like a dark night. It was black with a slice of moon and a few, pale stars.

Chalmer’s sum book was as neat as the plot of Mission Impossible on T.V. But to the rest of us ‘pumpkins’, sums was like trying to figure out who the double agent was on the Man from U.N.C.L.E. That was on the telly too.

Brother Boniface would sail up to the board and hey presto! DoBEDoBEDoBEDO. He had the sums done quicker than you could say hey presto! Heaven was a mystery -and so was this. It was a mystery known only to Chalmers. And maybe the F.B.I. too, for all we knew.

Then Boniface would say, ‘now Kelly, come up here and show us what you’re made of’.

‘Kelly.’

‘Me, sir.’

‘Yes you, Kelly. I don’t know another Kelly around here so you?’

‘Me Da is Kelly sir, and me Ma is Kelly too sir ‘cos she’s married to me Da.’

‘Kelly!’

 ‘What’s the problem now Kelly, this isn’t the rope.’

When Boniface referred to the rope, it meant the hanging one. Some of the time he called it the noose.

DoBoDoBEDoBEDOO. Francis Albert Sinatra.

Boniface knew all about ropes and nooses as when he was in America he’d been a chaplin in a gaol. I’d bet me bottom penny that they thought that Boniface was a right ol’ Charlie over there.

‘Now Kelly, he would say, add ‘a’ squared plus ‘b’ squared plus and Boniface sounded like a tired wasp - or a lunatic bluebottle. And the woolly balls were growing like furry rabbits in our heads.

As per usual, Kelly would fail to perform and would end up with six of the leather as he padded back to the rear.

‘Now, who will be next’, says Boniface.

Boniface’s beady eyes would scan the rows of blushing pumpkins like a politician looking for a vote- or a cereal killer looking for a victim after breakfast. The F.B.I. would never figure that one out.

So, he calls the pumpkins up one by one and row by row and then he puts the cherry on the icing of the leather when he says.

‘Ah, Chalmers, how about you?’

Up comes Chalmers, beaming like the sun at high noon in Africa and runs off the answer - like hey presto!

‘Now Kelly’, and Boniface looks with a blotchy smile at Kelly as he hands Chalmers a big fist of Lucky Numbers sweets. He digs for them in a huge bag of that he keeps in his desk.

‘Now, Mister Kelly, this is what you get if you know your sums.’

And his grin glistened with a gold embossed smug.

‘Now boys I’d like to enquire about what you all do in the evenings.’

‘Muldoon, how about you?’

‘Me, sir, what about it, sir?’

‘Yes you, Muldoon. What do you get up to of an evening?’

‘I do be having to go for messages, as me Ma is sick sir.’

Boniface’s eyes nearly popped into the next parish. Sums and algibra was one ingorance, but the English language never. If Boniface was a fanatic for sums; he was a total killer lunatick for English. He loved to draw perfect horrid-zontal lines on the board with coloured chalk. 

‘I do be going on messages for my mother she being sick an all,’ says Muldoon.

Boniface tries to ingnore this as he starts to simmer underneath like one of them kettles that sing. The strawberry blotches are growing wild on his puss. Boniface’s eyes light on Malone who’s chewing lickerice - as his mouth is purple ‘an black looking.

‘Malone what do you do in the evenings? Boniface tries to relax. He settles himself nicely in his chair waiting for the calming reply.

‘I do be playing football sir’, says Malone

‘You do what?’

‘I do be playing football,’ repeated Malone.

Chalmers was always the last resort when the pumpkins were driving Boniface’s blotches to the surface. Chalmers would always make him happy. Boniface stuck his hand into the Lucky Numbers and was grabbing the biggest fistful ever, to give to Chalmers.

‘Chalmers, give them all the proper answer.’

‘I do be doing my sums,’ says Chalmers, not knowing that he was now the biggest ingnoramus.

Boniface ran his bony hand through his greasy, His eyes looked like Doctor Frank N. Stein from the horror picture, at the frustration of all this.

‘It’s an infernal contagion. That’s what it is’, he ranted. He began to get real, bad mad.

This beats everything. I’ve seen men on death row, with nothing, no schooling, no life, no freedom, nothing, nothing whatsoever. What’s more, they were one and all lately for the noose and all of them had better syntax and grammar than that. And this in a country where Shaw, Yeats, Wilde.

His voice had become a low hiss, like a snake’s tongue. It was as if his throat had caved in under an avalanche of ingnoramuses. ‘If those men of literature were alive now, they’d be saying the rosary in their graves and crying for Ireland’s youth.’

Boniface said these words like he was saying holy prayers.

Then his eyes fell like a wolf on Kelly the scapegoat, and the red strawberries lepped on his face as if they were nervous mutts. ‘Kelly, he roared, ‘what pray tell me is the answer?’

I looked over at Kelly, afraid for him, as Boniface had never been so angry.

But there was a strange light in Kelly’s eyes.

‘I do my sums in the evening is the sentence that Mister Chalmers should have constructed,’ says Kelly nonchalantly.

Who’d have believed it?

This was a kettle of a different horse, a dark horse, and a very dark horse indeed.

DoBEDOBEDOBeDo. Be the Japers!!!

There was amazement all round, but Boniface looked as if Doctor Frank N. Stein’s monster had gargled his throat. Now that the world had turned upside down before his eyes, he seemed like a poor fool who’d seen a vision. Or he was like Kelly’s auntie or uncle who had took too much to the poteen. Then the bell went and we all piled out for home. Saved by the gong. Boniface looked weak and grisly like a nettle after weed-killer as he slouched to the teachers’ room for a smoke.

Tomorrow would be another day. DoBeDoBeDoBeDoo. Francis Albert Sinatra.

( Part 2 )

Syntax and Grammar

The next morning we all waited for Boniface to arrive. But, Boniface was late, very late. After a bit, Brother Ailbee came in and gave us some work to do in our exercise copies, and left us to our own devises. We called them our ‘customs and exercise’ copies. Kelly said that ‘customers and exorcists’ copies were a better description. 

Then, Muldoon started messin’ with Rafferty.  They were playing a game of ‘letting on’, that they were Musketeers and Napoleons with all sorts of sabre tattling. DoBeDoBeDObEDoo.

DoBeDOBEdObEdO

Then, in he comes, like a strawberry bed in bloom. Boniface sits down and arranges his desk in a silence. DoBedobedo. ‘Now boys, today I’m reintroducing syntax and grammar into the curriculum. Anyone able to give me a definition of these two words?

‘Which two words is that?’ says Kelly.

We all knew which two words that Boniface meant. But, Kelly got away on a technicality on that one. Anyhow, mind reading wasn’t let as a belief, so nothing could be proved against Kelly. ‘I’m going to ignore that Mr. Kelly. The words in question are syntax and grammar.’

Boniface screeches the words on the blackboard with a new piece of chalk. That new chalk was sounding like the madhouse. It was getting so unbearable that in my mind’s telly screen I could see a skinny mousy old lady screaming like she was after seeing the ghost of her dead granny. ‘Anyone able to define syntax,’ says Boniface. He was looking around like a periscope searching for land in the seas of ingorance. ‘Syntax. Syntax, syntax, anybody give me a clue. 

Boniface was boring a hole in our patience.

I was thinking along religious lines, thinking that maybe the Man Above was putting a tax on wicketness. A kind of sin tax . It was sort of like what the V.A.T man did. Maybe, that would put a halt to whoever it was kept on robbing my piggy bank blind. After all didn’t the catec schism say that God made the world an’ all that, and that he knew all things past present and to come, even your most secret thoughts and actions. That part was a tough one and how he could have made that slick headed Chalmers was hard to believe. If this ‘sin tax’ came in, then be japers a lot of cats would be let out of coalholes.

Then, Kelly says all matter of fact like that ‘the definition of syntax is as follows: the arrangement of words in the sentences and phrases of language and also the rules governing this’.

You could have heard the breeze drip over the inside of a bawlers tongue. It was silent as the grave in the class. It was undeclared war. The peasants were revolting.

So Boniface lands on Kelly, asking him about ‘finitives’ and ‘conjunctines’ and all about tenses and passive verbs and what have you.

 But Kelly the school dunce knew all the answers, and he was winning the war. It was all so far beyond the rest of us that it seemed like a conversation from the next universe, such was the speechifying.

There he was, the Van Go of syntax, rattling it all off as if it were the price of bulls eyes in Mac’s sweetshop beside the school. Boniface was livid with strawberries, but he composed himself and retreated temporarily by saying, ‘perhaps that enough for today’.

By the looks of it, it was going to be a great year for the strawberries.

Maybe Kelly was a double agent after all. Since Kelly lived with his aunt and his uncle, maybe he was the Man from UNCLE. Kelly’s Ma and Da were both in the repair house for the drink and the nerves, and Kelly was with his aunt this year.

I caught up with Kelly on the way home.

‘What’s Ilya Kuryakin’s favourite food,’ I said.

‘Strawberries and cream,’ he said.

‘So you’re e an U.N.C.L.E. agent too!’

In those days if you sent in nine crisp bags to the factory you’d get a secret agent kit. To ketch an impostor or an enemy agent you asked the ‘top secret’ question about strawberries and cream.

Then Kelly said something unexpected.

‘I believe in love,’ Kelly said. ‘I believe in love. But it doesn’t really exist in the world.

‘How do you mean? I pleaded. ‘If it doesn’t really exist then how can you believe in it?’

‘I could tell you’, said Kelly. =

‘What is it? I want to know.’

Kelly bowed his head and a tear trickled down his face. I looked at him and the sight was the most lonesome thing I ever saw. And I thought then that if Kelly was right then the whole shootin’ gallery of the world was in a state of tragedy. And they didn’t even know it.

Then he said: ‘I miss me Ma and Da. She would give you strawberries and hugs and sometimes me Da would give you a few coppers for sweets in Mac’s shop. I miss me Da’s smile and the laughs with him. He was good at jokes. It’s not the same with me aunt and her ‘man’. They drinks a lot and stay up late and I get…Kelly stopped talking and ran off home.

‘Kelly, Kelly,’ I said. But he was gone like the snows of last winter.

The rain dripped on me like a Chinese water torture as I walked home. I was thinking about Kelly and what he said. He was deep, terrible, awful deep. When you talked with Kelly, you would have to ask yourself why? I mean was there any point in anything? That wasn’t comfortable. Not comfortable at all. He seemed to know things that no one knew. Kelly called the world a ‘big why’? You could get afraid talking to him. He once said out of the blue that a lot of people weren’t doing justice to themselves or others. Everyone was convinced that they were right and others were wrong. He said, ‘that if you really looked at it that most people believed in hell rather than heaven, and there was no God as cruel as humans’. The more he believed in God the more he suffered and the more terrible were the things he saw. You had to choose to suffer to forgive and be just in this world. Kelly’s Da had got shot in the noggin in some old war and done time and he’d kinda shake and freak and fall down now and then. He took pills as if there were no tomorrows, but they didn’t always work. And Kelly’s Ma used to say after a night with the stout that his Da was only a Fine Failure after all. His Da was very political and he’d get very annoyed about that. Everyone in the street could hear the row but no one would say anything. Sometimes if things got real, real bad, then Kelly would be threatened with the cruelty man – whoever that was.

According to Kelly it was all about ‘crass politics’. 

‘. The whole shootin’ gallery is Fine Failures in some way or another. You kinda got the drift from the way Kelly talked that he wasn’t really talking about politics but about the way people were inside themselves.

 Kelly was deep all right. As deep as the river. And some said that there were places in the river had no bottom at all.

That night I was tossing and turning in a strange dream. All that I remember was Kelly standing in the schoolyard and he was talking about the ‘birthday party’. A bright light shone all ‘round him, and then he just vanished like he was a genie from a funny bottle. I woke up with a sore head and a feeling that something was wrong somewhere, somehow.

There was nary head nor tail of Kelly the next day. Boniface DoBeDoBedOed the roll call. When he called Kelly’s name, Muldoon forged Kelly’s voice real good. So Kelly was marked in ‘till the bell rang. Then the sun shone and we all ran for Mac’s shop.

‘Where’s Kelly.’

‘I dunno’.

‘Jones said he saw an ambulance going up the street when he was coming to class.’

‘Ya don’t say.’

‘Did he see who it was for?’

‘Nope, he was turning the corner before he could see where it stopped.’

A creepy feeling crept up on me. I was all geese and pimples everywhere.

‘It was hardly for Kelly was it?’

‘Hardly, it was probably old Mister Maher with one of his turns.’

A grey cloak of cloud was draped over the sky like an old ragged blanket. It threatened one of them deluges like in Noah’s ark. It felt like a warning of things that were to come. It was an omen, so to speak.

Boniface announced the news the next day. Ailbee stood beside him as he gave the terrible news. Boniface looked as if a swarm of wasps had attacked his face. And his voice was solemn as a bishop on Good Friday. It was all sackcloth and ashes, miserable as Monday morning. Death had nabbed a victim for his lair in the graveyard. Death was a fox and everybody was chickens. And Kelly was deader than a strawberry blotch.

The news gradually came out in dribs and drabs like the rain came sometimes.

The whole parish was up in a heap with the disturbance and shock. All the old ladies were blessing themselves and talking sorrow more than was usual. They said novenas for the repose of Kelly’s soul, and they drank small bottles of porter. The poor innocent chap.

Kelly’s coffin was the center of attention at the requiem mass. All the teachers came up and prayed for Kelly and said what a wonderful boy he was. Mister Murphy talked on about his love for animals. Mister Rogers referred to his good humour. Brother Edward said how kind he was, and on and on it went. It was a crying pity that they didn’t tell Kelly this when he was on planet Earth. If they did then maybe he’d still be in the land.The class sang hymns that rose to the rafters in despair and fear. There was no Boniface there. Someone said that he had taken ‘poorly’ and would be out for some time. It was time for a boy’s eyes to be opened and really see.

Afterwards I walked home up our street. I wandered past Mac’s shop, past Kelly’s house, past the school, past Chalmer’s place, past the hurling field, past Muldoon’s pigeon shed, past the whole wide world - or so it seemed. There was a bitter taste oozing in the spit of my mouth. 

Kelly had made me see. The innocent was coming wise. And the things that I saw were terrible to ponder and none could tell me otherwise. The big ‘why’ of the world was getting clearer now.

‘Forgive me for hating them,’ I said.

And the rain dripped like tears from the skylights of heaven.