Chemistry lab one Friday morning in May in Presentation Brothers’ Grammar School in Feragh, a market town in West Ulster. B nurses overwhelming bitterness and resentment about the European Club Champions Final two nights previously. This fourteen year-old had witnessed with a global audience of hundreds of millions the defeat of his beloved Leeds United by Bayern Munich in Paris after a stonewall penalty was turned down and a volleyed goal by hot-shot Peter Lorimer that would have given Leeds a 1-0 lead midway through the second half was disallowed for offside (Franz Roth one of the Bayern scorers in their 2-0 win has said that it was a perfectly good goal).
His sense of burning injustice which provoked a riot by Leeds supporters at the Final is not shared by his fellow third form classmates and especially by the gloating figure of the tormentor who sings to his face to the tune of a Bay City Rollers hit of the time : “B-a-y B-a-y B-a-y Bayern Munich are the best”. The teacher leaves temporarily to go into an adjacent room for teaching materials. The red mist, or should that be the white mist, having descended, he spots his opportunity. He leaps at the tormentor; he punches him repeatedly on the head; he pulls his hair so hard that follicles are left on the floor; he kicks him; knees him. Both end on the floor with a baying mob of his classmates screaming “Oi, Oi, Oi”. He finally avenges the humiliation of being beaten in a fist fight by the tormentor three months previously; this incident itself much sought after revenge for a bloody nose inflicted on him by B two years previous.
He basks in a nanosecond of transitory reverie in view of the prostrate, blood spattered tormentor before the weights of adult authority come crushing down on him. Restrained by the teacher and dragged to the Principal’s office. The ambulance and RUC called for due to the potential seriousness of the injuries sustained by the tormentor. Both sets of parents contacted. His emotions shift to and fro from adolescent triumphalism at finally getting him to mortal fear of the law of school, state and parents. The whirlwind of school chatter goes into overdrive. “Did you hear about what B did to Mc? … He went absolutely fucking mental at being slagged off about Leeds… Mc might die or end up a cripple”.
News of the incident filters out beyond the school. The West Ulster Observer reports that fallout from the riot-torn European Cup Final in Paris appears to have spread to a grammar school in Feragh where a confrontation between two third year Presentation Brothers boys over the match led to one of them being detained overnight in the Western Regional Hospital for observation and his alleged assailant being arrested by police and given a caution.
Let us look at the possible outcomes of this pivotal event in B’s youth.
He basks in becoming a “hard”. Nobody messes with him anymore. He finally exorcises the humiliation of being beaten soundly by the weakest boy in the class. He is a hero to those who despise the tormentor. He discharges all the bitterness, frustration and righteous anger at the injustice done to his beloved Leeds United that awful night in Paris. A night where his world felt as it it had ended. He feels, to use that millennial phrase “empowered”.
But the adult world sees his moment in a starkly different fashion. He has played up before this term; shouting at and mimicking teachers and the Headmaster. This record of acting out on top of the grievous assault upon the tormentor is put to B. and his shocked parents. He has started smoking. All ways of trying to ape the masculinity of his peers; a masculinity which this clumsy, ill-coordinated PE and sports refusnik could never absorb. Decades into his adulthood, he would be diagnosed as dyspraxic and high-functioning autistic. But the language of neurodiversity and of therapy was not part of the discourse of pastoral care in this rural, all-male Catholic grammar school in West Ulster.
Let us look at the possible outcomes of this pivotal event in B’s youth.
He basks in becoming a “hard”. Nobody messes with him anymore. He finally exorcises the humiliation of being beaten soundly by the weakest boy in the class. He is a hero to those who despise the tormentor. He discharges all the bitterness, frustration and righteous anger at the injustice done to his beloved Leeds United that awful night in Paris. A night where his world felt as it it had ended. He feels, to use that millennial phrase “empowered”.
But the adult world sees his moment in a starkly different fashion. He has played up before this term; shouting at and mimicking teachers and the Headmaster. This record of acting out on top of the grievous assault upon the tormentor is put to B. and his shocked parents. He has started smoking. All ways of trying to ape the masculinity of his peers; a masculinity which this clumsy, ill-coordinated PE and sports refusnik could never absorb. Decades into his adulthood, he would be diagnosed as dyspraxic and high-functioning autistic. But the language of neurodiversity and of therapy was not part of the discourse of pastoral care in this rural, all-male Catholic grammar school in West Ulster.
A week’s suspension follows despite the foaming rage of the tormentor’s parents who wanted their full pound of flesh in expulsion. In the same school, in the same form year, a student effectively orphaned after his mother’s death from cancer is given an unmerciful beating in an office for acting up. His older sister is later telephoned for to take him home, bruises and injuries and all. In the vacation he receives a terse note from the school “Your scholarship has been terminated”. Such a fate would never befall B., who hails from a respected business family who are personal friends of the Vice-Principal, something that has not gone unnoticed by his class mates. The right side of the tracks you see, small town Catholic middle-class family background just like that of the tormentor.
He has learned the hard lesson that many at 14 begin to cop on to. That life often is not fair. The best team does not always win. Adults do cheat. Adults fail to live up to their responsibilities. Home life is not always an idyll. This was the age when Bill Clinton stood up to his mother’s abusive partner threatening physical consequences if he continued assaulting her. This was the age when B. himself was informed of his family’s own skeleton in the cupboard in the figure of an alcoholic maternal uncle who he never saw and never will see despite the lack of a death certificate for him. His fate will always be held up as the inevitable outcome of succumbing to the temptation of the demon drink. This was the age when B’s eldest sister would fail her London piano exam to the intense disappointment of their mother whose pianist ambitions are thus doubly thwarted. It is an age when many adolescents across his troubled country are irrevocably drawn into the claws of the alphabet soup of armed groups who plague this narrow ground. A thrashing of a Catholic boy of that age across the heater of a Belfast police station by an RUC sergeant leads him to a long career in the Provisional IRA including four years ‘on the blanket’ in the H-blocks (no not the one in that Aussie prison drama). He would eventually become one of their most trenchant critics; a truth-teller in the era to the “constructive ambiguities” of the “peace process”. A Protestant boy of that age who played Gaelic football with his Catholic chums is radicalized into joining the junior Ulster Volunteer Force after the massacre of ten Protestant mill workers on their way home from work by the Provisionals although they would never own up to this Bosnian/Iraq/Lebanon style communal atrocity. This lad as an adult becomes a moniker for terror with up to 40 murders attributed to the paramilitary brigade which he headed up.
So B. reflects. There is no battery of educational psychologists, counsellors or anger management specialists to help B. understand where that eruption of rage “came from”. There are no Child and Adolescent Mental Health Teams. School and Youth Club corridors are not festooned with “motivational” messages saying that it is good to talk. That it is good to let everything “hang out”. Decades later, B would sit with a 12 year old schoolboy with Asperger Syndrome in the counselling suite of his college patiently working with his anger and confusion with the neurotypical environs of his school. B. sees the ticking time bomb that was his younger self that day in May so long ago. According to the boy’s form teacher B.'s work prevented his exclusion from school; he defuses the bomb that exploded, so appropriately, in the chemistry lab when B. was standing unknowingly in that adolescent’s shoes. It would be a quarter-century from that day that B. receives the diagnoses of Dyspraxia (or to be clinically accurate Ideomotor Apraxia) and Asperger Syndrome (I prefer “High-Functioning Autism because of the involvement of Hans Asperger, the clinician of the eponymous syndrome, in the T4 programme; Nazi Germany’s euthanasia programme for the learning disabled and mentally ill which prefigured the modus operandi and implementation of the Final Solution.)
But such concepts were not the currency of education speak in Feragh in the mid-1970s nor indeed across Northern Ireland. Following the logic of the Eleven Plus you were either “thick” or “smart”. For B. to be expelled from the Brothers would mean enrolling at the hell-hole (for Aspie, academic B’s of this world) of St Finian’s; the local Catholic secondary modern. Now there’s where the real “hard men” hung out. Here there would be no sympathetic teachers to protect B. from the daily (as opposed to the more than occasional) regime of physical punishment from teachers and bullying “culture” of the pupils. Survival of the fittest in such a dystopia is just not an option for B. So he gladly accepts the week’s “grounding”; space to cry his heart out at the theft of Association Football’s premier club honour from his beloved team.
He has learned the hard lesson that many at 14 begin to cop on to. That life often is not fair. The best team does not always win. Adults do cheat. Adults fail to live up to their responsibilities. Home life is not always an idyll. This was the age when Bill Clinton stood up to his mother’s abusive partner threatening physical consequences if he continued assaulting her. This was the age when B. himself was informed of his family’s own skeleton in the cupboard in the figure of an alcoholic maternal uncle who he never saw and never will see despite the lack of a death certificate for him. His fate will always be held up as the inevitable outcome of succumbing to the temptation of the demon drink. This was the age when B’s eldest sister would fail her London piano exam to the intense disappointment of their mother whose pianist ambitions are thus doubly thwarted. It is an age when many adolescents across his troubled country are irrevocably drawn into the claws of the alphabet soup of armed groups who plague this narrow ground. A thrashing of a Catholic boy of that age across the heater of a Belfast police station by an RUC sergeant leads him to a long career in the Provisional IRA including four years ‘on the blanket’ in the H-blocks (no not the one in that Aussie prison drama). He would eventually become one of their most trenchant critics; a truth-teller in the era to the “constructive ambiguities” of the “peace process”. A Protestant boy of that age who played Gaelic football with his Catholic chums is radicalized into joining the junior Ulster Volunteer Force after the massacre of ten Protestant mill workers on their way home from work by the Provisionals although they would never own up to this Bosnian/Iraq/Lebanon style communal atrocity. This lad as an adult becomes a moniker for terror with up to 40 murders attributed to the paramilitary brigade which he headed up.
So B. reflects. There is no battery of educational psychologists, counsellors or anger management specialists to help B. understand where that eruption of rage “came from”. There are no Child and Adolescent Mental Health Teams. School and Youth Club corridors are not festooned with “motivational” messages saying that it is good to talk. That it is good to let everything “hang out”. Decades later, B would sit with a 12 year old schoolboy with Asperger Syndrome in the counselling suite of his college patiently working with his anger and confusion with the neurotypical environs of his school. B. sees the ticking time bomb that was his younger self that day in May so long ago. According to the boy’s form teacher B.'s work prevented his exclusion from school; he defuses the bomb that exploded, so appropriately, in the chemistry lab when B. was standing unknowingly in that adolescent’s shoes. It would be a quarter-century from that day that B. receives the diagnoses of Dyspraxia (or to be clinically accurate Ideomotor Apraxia) and Asperger Syndrome (I prefer “High-Functioning Autism because of the involvement of Hans Asperger, the clinician of the eponymous syndrome, in the T4 programme; Nazi Germany’s euthanasia programme for the learning disabled and mentally ill which prefigured the modus operandi and implementation of the Final Solution.)
But such concepts were not the currency of education speak in Feragh in the mid-1970s nor indeed across Northern Ireland. Following the logic of the Eleven Plus you were either “thick” or “smart”. For B. to be expelled from the Brothers would mean enrolling at the hell-hole (for Aspie, academic B’s of this world) of St Finian’s; the local Catholic secondary modern. Now there’s where the real “hard men” hung out. Here there would be no sympathetic teachers to protect B. from the daily (as opposed to the more than occasional) regime of physical punishment from teachers and bullying “culture” of the pupils. Survival of the fittest in such a dystopia is just not an option for B. So he gladly accepts the week’s “grounding”; space to cry his heart out at the theft of Association Football’s premier club honour from his beloved team.
Say what you like about VAR; it has surely prevented repetitions of incidents which could have had such life-changing consequences for B. and the tormentor. Please never tell me “it’s only a game” not least because a Bayern fan was left without one eye as a result of the crown disturbances that were the direct consequences of the referee’s cowardice in capitulating to the entreaties of Kaiser Franz Beckenbauer (Bayern and German captain and later coach) to disallow Lorimer’s goal.
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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