A successful journey on a long hard road

Kells teacher's memoir looks back on life and learning

Retired Kells teacher, Christopher F McCormack, has published a memoir as well as two more collections of themed poetry.

'The Hard Road: A Memoir' is described as “a tribute to the individual and collective memory as it pulls together into a form of significance those memories of times past.”

These include his growing up in Corbally, Co Westmeath; his Carpenterstown National School years; the daily cycle-grind to the Gilson Endowed School in Oldcastle; the Dublin years which introduced him to the world of work and university; his teaching years in Kells; family life; and his return to adult education.

Christopher says the title of the book is both a reality and a metaphor.

“As reality, it depicts the hard road and steep inclines of the drumlin hills that characterised the road from Corbally to Oldcastle. It is also the metaphor of the difficulty in securing a secondary education as a gateway to university in an era before free education and free school transport which is now taken for granted.

He adds: “Despite its difficulties, the book depicts an age that had its joys and simple pleasures and displayed the heroic service by others for others, an age in which faith and mystery were reconciled and which my new poem – The Faith Dance – seeks to capture.”

'The Hard Road: A Memoir' is a blend of prose and poetry (Christopher has published five collections of poetry in a series since 2021). He was born in 1936 in Corbally, close to Corbally in Co Westmeath, and his grandmother was a Plunkett from Castletown closeby, possibly connected to St Oliver's family from Loughcrew, said to have been driven from there during the Cromwellian plantation.

His father, John Joe McCormack, and mother, Annie Hughes, were both from typical small farm holdings, devoted to mixed farming, with a couple of cows, some few dry stock, with a section of the land devoted to animal grazing, and a small area reserved for potatoes and vegetables, and for the upkeep of the house. A pig or two were kept, and a flock of hens, as well as turkeys and geese for the Christmas market.

The writer's early years coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War and the emergency war-time rationing. From 1940 to '49, he attended Carpenterstown National School, sent along by his mother early as he kicked up such a fuss when his older brother Michael started without him. He just managed to pass the entrance exam for the Gilson Endowed School in Oldcastle, seven “Irish miles” away, which he attended from 1949 to '54.

Despite the hungry 1950s, and the emigration exodus, there were some small signs of incipient economic recovery around Oldcastle, he recalls, reflected in BD Flood's lorries carrying sand and blocks from the quarries. There were a few cars on the road, so few that you knew their individual owners (the subject of a poem 'I Knew Them by Their Cars').

After school, he was offered a position in Addressograph-Multigraph Ltd in Clare Street in Dublin, run by William Dunne, whose brother, Patrick, was local curate in Fore.

The addressograph side of the business consisted of the supply and maintenance of a range of addressograph machines.

The smaller models stamped addresses on envelopes, labels, invoices and statements and such, while the multigraph business comprised printing and letter press work. They had clients in the food, tobacco, confectionary, motor, banking, transport and newspaper industries - most of the big firms across Dublin at the time - as well as government departments and religious orders.

With Sean Lemass and TK Whitaker embracing a new era of economic expansion in the late 1950s, McCormack attended the School of Commerce in Rathmines to study book keeping and economics, and with the €15 prize money from his economics examination, enrolled for evening classes in University College Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace, taking English, Irish, history and economics as his First Arts subject to help fulfill his ambition to become a teacher. In his final year at UCD he switched to day lectures, and contributed to a series on education in the Sunday Press newspaper from the perspective of a student. His Higher Diploma in Education saw teaching practice in Sandymount High School.

On graduation, he was offered a position at Sandymount, but to test the jobs market and be close to his aging parents, he placed a notice in the tuitions column of the Irish Independent. He had three replies, and accepted an offer of a permanent teaching position from Br Fox of St Joseph's CBS in Kells, arriving in time for the academic year beginning September 1963.

“Here I was destined, indeed blessed, to spend the remainder of my life,” he writes.

Romance blossomed, with Una Skelly, a domestic science teacher with County Meath Vocational Education Committee, who lived a few doors up the street from his digs on Carrick Street.Just engaged, he was lucky enough to win a Honda 50 motorbike in an Evening Press caption competition, and promptly sold it to pay a deposit on a site for a house. They were married in Kells in August 1966 and immersed themselves in the life of the town, with Christopher even taking up hurling with Kilskyre for a time, before helping to establish a Kells club.

Family grew, with the arrival of Michael, John, Jim, and Anne Marie, and Kells CBS became part of St Ciaran's Community School in 1988, when Una joined the staff. Christopher spent just over another decade teaching there before retiring and returning to the classroom himself at 63 years of age. Back in UCD, but now at Belfield, he took a Diploma in Education Studies course. He was awarded an M Ed in 2002, and the PhD in 2010.

Returning to education “broadened my horizons and enhanced my zest for life in all its forms,” he writes.

Twelve grandchildren arrived, and Una was delighted to share in their lives before she passed away in November 2023 after a two-year illness. Christopher's poem 'The Tabula Rasa' attempts to capture the joyful active energy her life exuded in the home and the spiritual comfort in the prayers of the dying that surrounded her death.

His two new poetry collectons are 'For the Birds – Poems of the Natural World', and 'Saints and Scholars - Poems of the Early Monasteries'. In 'For the Birds', Christopher attempts to articulate a series of sense impressions of bird life gathered over a lifetime of interaction with the natural world in a variety of settings, from the sights and sounds of the corncrake, cuckoo and curlew in the midlands when he was a youngster, to closer-up engagement with robins, willie wagtails, thrushes, blackbirds, crows and swallows in his garden on the Cavan Road, Kells.

'Saints and Scholars' seeks to capture in verse something of the life in the early monasteries, influenced by the ancient Irish saints such as Finian of Clonard, Fechin of Fore, Brigid of Kildare, Patrick of Armagh, and of course, Columba of Iona, the 'poet, statesman and scholar'.