I have never doubted that my schooldays, particularly my secondary schooldays were the unhappiest days of my life.
I was a student in Christian Brothers College in Cork and trained in a regime by teachers who, with some exceptions, supposed that the only way to get us to learn was to apply frequent and painful beatings with a leather strap.

As a result we were a fairly subdued lot, never prone to any display of revolt.
I can remember only one moment of anarchy in my time in secondary school.

It must have been in about 1965, I was 16 and we were in fourth year, about to sit the inter cert.

On this day the brother in charge of us, (whom I will call Brother de Sade, a particularly nasty sadist with a joy in corporal punishment), had to leave us for a time to our own devices.
He gave us the usual reams of work to do and left with the usual threats-“Any boy foolish enough not to have this finished by the time I get back can be assured that I’ll take the skin off his hands”

It started off easily enough.

One boy started to whisper the words of an american rhyme which had become a hit that year.

“My mother told me , If I was Goody
That she would buy me, a rubber dolly”

Then something strange, exciting and miraculous happened.
All the boys in the class started to join in with the words
still sotto voce but louder because of the numbers.

“My auntie told her, I kissed a soldier
Now she won’t buy me, a rubber dolly”

But then something even more thrilling happened.
One of the boys, and it was one of the swots, one of the quiet ones,
(I can even remember his name, he was called Anthony Fleming!) started to raise his voice for the chorus;

“Three Six Nine, the goose drank Wine
The Monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line”

Then we all joined in, gradually getting louder and louder;

“The line broke, the monkey got choked
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
Clap Clap”

At that stage brothers, teachers and passing startled boys started to congregate outside the door, peering at us in wonder.
Some of the teachers made valient efforts to calm us down, to silence us but at this stage we had totally become empowered;

“My Mother told me, If I was goody
That she would buy me a rubber dolly”

And then we began to realise that we were not alone.
That other classes along the corridor were starting to sing too!

“My auntie told her, I kissed a soldier
Now she won’t buy me a rubber dolly”

The door of our classroom was flung back with a crack and Brother de Sade swung into the room.
He banged his leather on the desk with a noise like a pistol shot and scarlet in the face becgan to scream at us to stop.

He hadn’t a hope in hell, we weren’t finished yet.

“Three Six Nine, the goose drank Wine
The Monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line”

and then the whole secondary school together

“The line broke, the monkey got choked
And we all went to heaven in a little row boat
Clap Clap“,

And then. as if carefully orchestrated, we stopped.
We sat down.
Brother De Sade was left floundering and ranting and purple faced.

Now, and this is the strangest part of the whole episode, I have no longer any idea what happened next.
There really was no way we could all have been beaten, but, even if we had, it would have made no difference.
We had tasted freedom and were now immune from pain.
It was, without doubt, my very best moment in school.