Authors: Graham Norton
Bandon, County Cork, was the place where I seemed to collect most of my childhood memories. It was the town we kept coming back to. We had a short stay there early on in our travels, and my parents obviously liked it because that is where my sister Paula and I were sent to secondary school four years later, and it is where they came to build several bungalows when my dad took early retirement from the brewery.
The town has a reputation for being a bit of a Protestant enclave – ‘Bandon, where even the pigs are Protestants’, as
the old saying goes . . . (I’m really not making that up). It is also called the Gateway to West Cork, which is a slightly upbeat way of saying a lot of people drive through it.
The first time we lived there I was about seven years old, and for some reason it was around that period that I became trouble. I remember drawing on a mirror with some of my mother’s lipstick and then, being too scared to hang around and face her wrath, I decided to run away. I solemnly packed a small case. All that would fit was a bath towel and my swimming togs. Although my flight to freedom was taking place in mid-November, I figured I’d need them when it was summertime. I strode out towards the nearest town, Clonakilty, but as it got darker and colder, my destination seemed no nearer. I decided to head back to Bandon, where a neighbour found me buying sweets in a petrol station. I still remember my homecoming and how my mother hugged me. All her worry, anger and grief transformed into an electric blanket of love.
On another occasion I decided I didn’t want to go to school. I said I felt sick.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Tummy ache.’
‘All right,’ said my mother, ‘you can stay at home, but I’ll bring you to the doctor this afternoon.’
She went downstairs, leaving me lying in bed, petrified as the awful truth began to dawn on me. I had got what I wanted but I was in a state of terror. She had done this to my sister once before. The doctor had told her there was nothing wrong, my mother realised she’d been taken for a ride, and suddenly my sister would have been better off on a school field trip to hell. I knew that I was facing a similar
fate, but I had set the wheels in motion towards my own downfall and saw no way of stopping them.
Come the afternoon, a grim-faced mother half walked, half dragged me to the doctor’s. I lay down and pulled up my shirt. He pressed his doctor-pink hands into my belly and asked me where it hurt. I felt like blurting out, ‘On the back of my legs when my mother gets me back home,’ but I played the game, letting out a random selection of ‘ows’ and ‘ouches’. He removed his raw sausage fingers and asked me to wait outside the room for a moment; he wanted to speak to my mother. I left the room with an imaginary rain cloud floating over my head. I sat perched high on one of those hard plastic chairs that only seem to exist in waiting rooms and exam halls, too scared to even swing my legs. I knew what he was saying: he was telling my mother that she was wasting time and money and that she should take her child home and never darken his door again. I would never be able to be sick again. From now on I would be sent off to school carrying my entrails in a wheelbarrow before I’d be allowed to stay in bed.
I stared at a sea of old
People’s Friend
magazines while the doctor’s voice rumbled on behind the closed door. After what seemed like several hours, the doctor came out of his office and asked me to come in.
‘Sit down.’
I braced myself and made sure not to catch my mother’s eye.
‘Well, you have something called appendicitis.’
I looked up. ‘What?’
‘It’ll mean a small stay in hospital next week and a little operation to take out your appendix.’
My mind was reeling. I weighed up the options. I could say that I had been pretending and bring down the wrath not just of my mother but also of a doctor I had just made look like an idiot, or on the other hand, I could go into hospital, get cut open and have a perfectly healthy organ removed. It only took a second. Hospital it was. Tears started to roll down my cheeks as my contrite mother fussed over me and promised me a treat for my dinner.
This is the bit of the story that sort of defies belief – surely, at some point over the next few days, I would have found a way to explain to my mother what had happened and the operation would be called off, but no. A week later my mother and I walked up the driveway to the hospital, with her telling me not to worry and me daydreaming about something going wrong so that I would end up in a wheelchair like Margaret O’Brien in some black and white tearjerker movie and everyone would marvel at how brave and sweet I was. In fact the operation went without a hitch, I got several days off school, and I went home with my appendix in a little bottle of brine. It was the perfect ending.
The school my sister and I went to was Bandon Grammar School, and it was founded to provide education for the children of the Protestant community. Set on a farm, it admitted day boys and girls as well as boarders. With hindsight, I couldn’t have asked for a better place to go to school. At the time, I didn’t like it very much and the actual academic side of things was fairly poor, but as an education for life it was wonderful. Pupils ranged from kids who lived on remote farms where electricity was on a par with space travel to Fred Astaire’s grandson and the three children of a well-known Hollywood stills photographer.
I am grateful to this school for two reasons. The first is that I had two teachers who were inspirational. Typically for teachers who influenced lives, they both taught English. One was called Cally and was feared by all. Her full title was Miss O’Callaghan, and, like all great teachers, she threw her whole being into her lessons. At times we didn’t get on – I could be spikey and rude but I think that was probably because I was jealous of her. She was young and sexy and obviously had a life. The rest of the teachers had seemingly uneventful lives like mine and my parents’, and who wanted one of those? I knew I didn’t. The other teacher was Niall MacMonagle who was a substitute teacher when Cally was off having a baby. Niall has since become a good friend, and it’s hard to imagine that he was ever my teacher, but he was and he was brilliant. What Niall brings to the classroom is energy and enthusiasm to burn. He loves books, and his blinking incomprehension of anyone who doesn’t share that love is infectious.
What both Niall and Cally gave me was permission to question everything. They taught me that there were no right answers. You simply read the text and you got out of it what you could. They also both encouraged me to perform. There was no tradition of regular school plays or drama clubs; Bandon Grammar School was strictly a rugby or hockey sort of place. I had tried to fit in early on – I had donned my rugby costume and clattered down to the pitch with the rest of them. But of course I was fooling no one. Those boys simply knew that I could not throw a ball. They were like a pack of animals who sensed weakness or who had smelt blood. It doesn’t sound like much, but it did make me feel excluded and lonely – it’s very hard to understand how alienating
it is for a boy who can’t do what boys are meant to be able to. And this isn’t about being gay or straight, it’s just about belonging.
However, once in a blue moon a play would be put on, and this was when I had my rugby moments. Suddenly I did feel comfortable, I felt confident about what I was doing. Whether it was a strange Irish one-act play or a production of
The Importance Of Being Earnest
with furniture borrowed from Niall’s flat, I loved being in front of an audience, and although at the time I thought that what I was enjoying was the acting, looking back it was probably more about the laughter coming from the audience. Debating was the other school activity that I did well at. Mind you, it was fairly easy to win. I remember once having a debate against the convent school team about punk rock. Now, as you can imagine, this was not a musical and cultural revolution that had really taken Bandon by storm – we didn’t have bin-liners in our bins, never mind in our wardrobes – but I successfully argued that Jesus Christ was the first punk rocker. How I did this I’m not sure, as I don’t remember a lot of gobbing in the gospels or any parables about pogoing, but the judges bought it and we won. The girls from the convent were livid: how dare a little Protestant boy teach them the great lesson for living in Ireland? You can’t win an argument with someone who has God on their side.
Although it was never mentioned in the prospectus, Bandon Grammar School also provided a rudimentary sexual education. All the boys who boarded lived in a separate building, a large old house called Roundhill, which was full of bunk beds. Out the back there was a room for our tuck boxes and our shoe-cleaning kits, but there wasn’t much
else. Because my parents were still living in Castlecomer, I was a boarder for my first three years at the school before my parents moved back to Bandon and I could become a day pupil. As I write this I can hardly believe that I spent three years of my life there. I’m sure that in any boys’ boarding school a certain amount of sexual activity goes on, and Roundhill was no exception – we ‘practised’ kissing, and taught each other how to wank. As the years went by the games became more complicated – who could come the furthest was the most popular, a game invariably won by the same boy, who I really shouldn’t name, but if you were in the grammar school at the same time as I was, he had curly brown hair and his initials were P.L.
I know it’s hard to believe, but even I needed tips. From an early age I had exploited God’s great gift, my penis. I had developed an extremely special and slightly medieval way of playing with myself. If I got an erection I would deliver a series of brutal karate chops to my member until I got that ‘funny feeling’. This led to great discomfort and some quite bad scarring, so imagine how delighted I was to have that technique made obsolete by the teachings of those wiser than me in the dorm.
It is important to remember what innocent times these were. I can’t imagine boys being so open with each other now, but we were like a big house full of puppies. It’s only in the telling that it takes on a creepy feeling; at the time it was definitely sweet.
It is against this backdrop that a relationship between two boys, both called Charles, took place. The Charleses were from small remote farms in far-flung corners of the country, and they shared a bed every night for the six years they were
at school. It is so difficult to explain why everyone from the cruellest bullies to the teachers’ pets at our school indulged this eccentricity. I think in the end most people were just quietly in awe of the strength of their feelings. I often wonder what happened to the Charleses after school. At the time, the only thing these boys might have known about being gay was that it rhymed with hay. I imagine each one is spending his life as a bachelor farmer, living with his mother or sister, working hard all day, maybe having a pint down the pub but not talking to people much. There must be times, though, as they lie awake late at night listening to the creaking of the house, when they can remember what it was like to be wrapped in the arms of another warm body, to be surrounded by love. When I finally told my mother I was gay, her first response was, ‘Oh, it’s such a lonely life.’ For the Charleses I’m sure that is almost certainly true.
It was also in Bandon that I spent my teenage years, mostly watching TV and reading. I loved being whisked off to the highways of California or the glamorous apartments of New York. At the time there was only one television station, called RTE, which started its broadcasts around 5.00 p.m. and then packed up shop around 10.30 or 11 p.m. As a result I watched everything that was on with no content or quality filter. True, I enjoyed
Charlie’s Angels
a lot more than
Mart and Market
, the weekly programme that reported the price cattle had fetched in various markets around the country while showing cows walking in a circle, but I watched them both with equal attention. I even sat through
An Nuacht
, which was the news in Irish. The only four words in the whole programme that I understood were ‘
Agus
anois an aimsir
’, which meant ‘And now the weather’ and
signalled that the end was nigh and soon I could be enjoying Farrah Fawcett or Carol Burnett.
I wasn’t popular at school but nor was I unpopular. Memory has a way of distilling and distorting things, but my overall impression of those times is of waiting – waiting to leave. I had looked through the windows of books and television and immediately decided that the life I was living, this life of marriages, funerals and the price of land, was not my beautiful life. I’m not sure, but I think that if anyone remembers me from school, they wouldn’t say I was unfriendly or unhappy, just a bit distant, unengaged.
The first time I felt anything approaching ‘life’ happened to me was when I ventured out into the world in the summer of ’79. The intermediate certificate, the Irish equivalent of the O levels, was over and it would be another year before I left secondary school, so in order to improve my French my parents agreed to have an exchange student to stay with them as part of a school scheme. The plan was that the student would spend a month living with my family, and then I would head off alone with him to spend a month in deepest, darkest, ‘this tastes funny’ France. I was terrified at the idea.
On the day of the exchanges’ arrivals, Cork airport was full of parents with sullen-looking children holding up hastily made name-boards. Mothers conducted hushed conversations (‘I just hope they’ll eat something’, ‘I know someone who had one last year and he refused to eat anything but cheese for a month’). When the
étudiants
finally shuffled through the arrival doors we held our breath and gripped our clumsy signs. Leather-jacketed greasy yobs and teenage girls wearing enough make-up to cover the presidents’ faces
on Mount Rushmore announced themselves to nervous families. There was no sign of our student. But then, like Peter O’Toole in
Lawrence of Arabia
, Jules strode out, blond and clean, as polished and perfect as any model in an ad for Farrah slacks. It seemed impossible that we, the Walker family, had won the French lottery, but we had.