In 1963, when I was about fourteen and in second year in Christian Brothers College in Cork, the class teacher informed us one day that Christian Doctrine, which was what our religious education class was called, was on that day going to be taken by a visiting priest.
At the appropriate moment we were taken over by an elderly and, as I remember him, rather ethereal, priest.
For the next forty five minutes he gave us a talk about the birds and the flowers and yes he even mentioned the bees.
I distinctly remember he spent a particularly long time telling us in great detail about how flowers were pollinated.
Every word he spoke passed lightly over my head.
It is a wonderful monument to the way us children of the fifties were raised that we had not a single notion that the man was actually attempting to teach us the facts of life.
That is all except one of us.
There was one boy in the class who was particularly small, so small his mother had kept him in short trousers while all the rest of us were swaggering about in “longers”.
This particularly child had a father who was a lecturer in the university and this status had kept him from the more advanced bullying techniques practiced both by the boys and the brothers.
When the strange priest had finished his oblique lecture he surveyed the class with satisfaction and James, as I will call the short trousered boy, broke out into loud hysterical tears.
This astounded the rest of the class, who had assumed that they had just attended a natural history class, but was totally appreciated by the , now gratified, priest.
He put his arm around James’ shoulder and murmuring soothing words led him out to the class teacher.
The rest of us boys were left even more mystified.

The following summer a fourth year boy, in two or three brief sentences, gave me a thoroughly accurate description of the details and consequences of the sexual act.
I didn’t feel in the least like crying.
It was several years after that again when it suddenly dawned on me what the priest was trying to achieve on that day.
I don’t think he had any idea that he had communicated his message to only one boy.