I served under some outstanding headmasters in my teaching career, certainly in Australia. Becoming a headmaster in the Irish system however, was as likely to be down to political affiliation as pedagogical excellence.
There were many schools in those days in which the headmaster had little ambition beyond the need to keep inspectors happy while he served out his few years to retirement.
I have one particular head in mind. His most mordant critic was his secretary, possibly because she regarded his dour personality as cover for an uncertain mastery of his job.
'He goes about as if he is holding up the roof,' she would complain, and indeed he did have a way of shrugging his shoulders as if he was moving some heavy load from one to the other. But for all that, he had not completely lost the common touch and could behave like a human being in ways that surprised.
Which leads me to our head of English, a man who had risen to that position through seniority. I will call him Paddy though that is the least likely name he would have been given by his once affluent merchant family.
He was a mediocre teacher, even if that is the unreliable opinion of a colleague who has great sympathy for what must go on in an English class — all that marking of essays and dealing with the musings of bores like Eliot and Joyce. Life can be much easier when you can get by with, 'Did you get the answer in the back, Mullins? No. Then you are wrong. Do it again.'
Anyway, Paddy had a weakness not uncommon among the literati and which may well have been a reaction to the rigid pieties of his Tory background. There was a notable difference, however. In his case, the consumption of alcohol caused him to become tiresomely scrupulous, seeming to lose the capacity for dissimulation and verbal artifice that are necessary qualities for life in the modern world.
During the course of a few drinks he once explained to me that he was determined to take his senior classes to a performance of Waiting for Godot. 'How can they understand Beckett,' he reasoned, 'if all they have is words on a page?' I could only wonder how the rest of the audience would cope with the slow handclap and cries of 'Why are we waiting?' coming from his bored students wondering whether anything