I grew up in the centre of Cork city, in a grocery shop. When I reached the age of 10, my mum and dad began to be concerned about the temptations that city life might hold for a young boy at the start of the 1970s. They decided a couple of years away might be good for me.
My mother came from the Beara peninsula in west Cork, which was actually in the diocese of Kerry, so that is how I ended up going to St Brendan’s College in Killarney, Co Kerry. They reckoned I would be out of harm’s way there.
I fully expected boarding school to be a life of playing soccer from one end of the day to the other. It wasn’t. I remember the night I arrived wearing the new Cork Hibernians strip and all the other boys were in their Kerry jerseys. But there was great excitement that night. I was shown around and saw a handball alley for the first time, which I thought was amazing.
Because I was No 10 of 12 children at home, I went from being a baby in the house to being the baby of the school. This had its advantages as I was picked to light the Christmas candle, which was a bit of an honour. I loved the attention. I served as an altar boy and attended mass most mornings in the cathedral, which was close by. I once served mass for Bishop Eamon Casey.
We had to get up early, about 6:15am, after which we would trudge, bleary-eyed, down to the cathedral for mass. The food was a bit of a shock after living in a grocery shop, where you could pretty much eat what you wanted. Breakfast seemed to consist of bread, bread and more bread.
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There was a sick bay for when you had an upset tummy, where I seemed to end up quite a bit. But it might have been loneliness as much as the monastic diet.
It was a great school for sport. There were basketball courts and tennis courts and I played a bit of Gaelic football, although I wasn’t very good. While I was there, the school won an all-Ireland colleges championship. Although they were a good bit older than me, the Gaelic footballers Pat Spillane and Páidí O Sé were there at the same time.
There were two different dorms, and we first years had a smaller one than the older boys. I went back to visit the school recently and our dorm was exactly as I remembered it. There was the refectory for meals and a recreation room that had table tennis, which I was quite good at. The grounds were really beautiful, full of arbutus and streams.
Most of the boys got to go home at the weekends but, because I lived in Cork, I didn’t. We were allowed to sign in and out a bit, though. I made a couple of good friends there. One was John Steindl, who was from New York. He was here because his father was working in the Liebherr factory in Kerry. We were both city boys. He came from living in a loft in New York, so we hit it off.
There was another chap called Ciaran Keane, who was from Lixnaw in Co Kerry. Sometimes I would go to his house for the weekend and, when we came back on Monday, his mother would make sure we had a package of goodies each.
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One of my favourite teachers was Mr Dennehy, who taught French. One time, the class was asked to do a project on France. I left it until the last minute to do what all the other boys did, which was to write to the French embassy asking for brochures and literature. Because I had left it so late, I got a letter back saying there had been a run on brochures and they didn’t have any left.
In a bit of a panic, I got permission to go into Killarney. I went to a travel agent and got some brochures. Unfortunately, the pictures were mostly of girls in bikinis sitting by pools rather than of the Eiffel tower, but I cut them out anyway and put them in my project, with captions such as “French people are very beautiful” and “French girls are popular in films”. I was expecting a telling-off from Mr Dennehy, but he wrote: “Not what I expected but a great effort”.
Coming from a Christian Brothers school in Cork, I expected there to be some corporal punishment, but most of the teachers were gentlemen. However, one Latin teacher asked me to decline the noun puer, the word for girl and boy, and I mixed up the masculine and feminine. I got caned on both hands for this. While he was doing it, the teacher said: “You’re so mixed up that if you ever get to father children you won’t know whether you have sons or daughters”— expecting me to laugh at his joke while I was getting a caning.
I left St Brendan’s in 1973 and started the third year of secondary school back in Cork, but I mostly have fond memories of the place. The sounds and the smells are strong in the memory, such as the roar of a crowd of boys running down a corridor in football boots and the aroma of polish.
Creedon’s Retro Road Trip is on RTE1 at 6:30pm on Sunday