A photo of Seamus Heaney on his graduation day is making the rounds on social media this morning, marking International Education Day with a reminder that our poet devoted much of his life to teaching. I also spent most of my professional life teaching – and learning. Like Heaney, I’m a product of Queen’s. And, like Heaney, I was what we now call a first generation” college student, the first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school.  Although university was  less than twenty miles away in Belfast, it was still away, a phenomenon Seamus Heaney explains to Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones:

Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.”

For Heaney, a university education in Belfast, was a world away from the Broagh in rural South Derry, necessitating a kind of verbal dance with his mother, when he returned from the city to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him as I can my young self – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word, weighing its impact before uttering it. My mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me to this day, “sure you know all them things.”

There were other tricky steps to learn, moving through Northern Ireland’s various dances, but once learned, they are indelible, as Tony Parker describes in his 1994 book May the Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast. Based on his interviews with the people who live there, he makes the unsettling but astute observation that many of us born and brought up in Northern Ireland have a mutual need to know, right from the start, a person’s background in order to proceed in the conversation and in the longer relationship, without saying the “the wrong word.” We know that our last names or the names of our schools, or perhaps the way we pronounce an “H” or an “A,” are also clues we use to help establish who we think we are.

“Derry” or “Londonderry?” “The Troubles,” “the conflict,” or “The Irish Question?” “Ulster” or “The Six Counties?”

In a secondary school in the outskirts of North Belfast, I cut my pedagogical teeth. A student teacher who didn’t know any better, in the parlance, “a blow-in” from Antrim, I took a black taxi to school every morning. Before black taxis shuttled tourists around, showing them the sights of “The Troubles.” On my first day in  in Rathcoole, then the largest housing estate in Western Europe and a loyalist stronghold, I held my own. On the second, I faltered when a first form pupil, showing off for his mates, asked me if I was a “Taig,” a derogatory word for a Catholic. He told me he could guess “by the look of me,” but he had his doubts. My surname was Protestant, but there was and still is some ambiguity around my first name.

At the time, if I’m honest, an honest answer may not have been the right one. There I stood, chalk in hand, knowing where I was but not entirely sure who I was. And, that’s what I told him. Thus we began a kind of partnership, knowing we had some control over went on within those walls, but not so much beyond them.

At the same time, before Home Economics was standard fare on the Northern Ireland curriculum, the school day included Domestic Science. Other than Physical Education, which I had skillfully avoided as a student with a note from my mother saying I “had cramps.” it was my least favorite subject.  It involved the planning and cooking of meals which usually failed –  in spite of quick tips on every page of the Hamlyn All Colour CookBook – baking, and, God help me, knitting.  There was time set aside for sewing, during which I learned how to finish the edges of something, presumably a blanket, with blanket stitch. I even learned a kind of embroidery, stitching all six letters of my name in green thread on a red gingham apron, all the while wishing I had been christened something shorter. “Eve” perhaps.

The Hamlyn All Colour CookBook which almost 50 years later, is still with me, leaning against a slick volume of recipes by Julia Child and Jaques Pepin. My Hamlyn, ‘Old Faithful,’ is of little practical use in my Mexican kitchen, in spite of its guide to metrication and the peppy opener by Mary Berry. Yes, that Mary Berry. A dust-collecting memento of my schoolgirl days, with ingredients and words that make more sense back home – like aubergines and Morelio cherres. Not necessarily my home mind you, but the kinds of homes where Frank Bryant’s student, “Rita” fancied herself serving the right wine to accompany hor d’oeuvres that involved aspic jelly crystals, radishes fashioned into roses, and a garnish of watercress or parsley.  Neither Piquant Herring Salad nor Sole Véronique have yet to make an appearance in my life, but, to be fair, other dishes regularly did. There was Mandarin Gâteau and Iced Coffee Sponge, and Victoria sandwich, slices of which showed up regularly in Tupperware parties hosted by mothers like mine – unashamed celebrations of plastic and its place in our kitchen cupboards. The first time I wanted to impress a boy with my fair to middling cooking skills, I turned to the “Continental Favourites” section for a Spaghetti Bolognese recipe. Years later, when I was asked to make cupcakes for my daughter’s class, I turned to #282, by any other name, a “wee buns” recipe. The boy is long gone, and my daughter’s all grown up, but the recipe is indelible in mind. I can’t bring myself to part with this relic from my Domestic Science class in 1970s Northern Ireland.

The Hamlyn was the first school textbook my mother didn’t have to back with brown parcel paper, because it came with its very own dust-jacket.  For my stay-at-home-mother at the time – the ‘housewife’ to whom Mary Berry is writing in her introduction –  “backing books” was one of her favorite jobs. By the first day of school every September, she had rolls of paper set aside for this special task.

Our teachers were fussy about the way our books were backed. There was an art to it, and so naturally it fell under my mother’s bailiwick. She started by placing each book carefully in the middle of a sheet of brown paper, and then with a few quick snips, folds, and tucks, she had it covered, ready for us to write our names on the front. One September, when my mother was ill and in Belfast’s Royal Victoria hospital, I had taken it upon myself to back my new history textbook. Of course I couldn’t do it right. Like so many tasks, my mother had made it look easy, but unlike my mother, I had not learned by watching. I couldn’t make the brown paper curl neatly under the spine at both ends, so I gave up. I went to school, my book un-backed. For this, I was subjected to a sarcastic tirade from a teacher who knew but didn’t care that my mother was in the hospital. At 60 years old, I can still feel the flush of embarrassment on my face.

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The dust jacket of my Hamlyn is relatively intact, bearing only a few tears and the odd smear left behind by buttery adolescent fingers. I can clearly recall how my mother pored over its photographs when it was brand new,  delighted to find so many cakes and sweets she already knew how to make without as much as a precise measurement, let alone a “method” like the one we had to painstakingly copy into our Domestic Science notebooks – in fountain pen. She had set aside one day a week for Baking Day. I loved it. Every Friday, by the time daddy came home from work, all the square Tupperware containers and biscuit tins left over from Christmas were lined with greaseproof paper and filled to their brims with irresistible confections –  caramel fingers, melting moments, fudge cakes, shortbread, and butterfly buns.  And every Sunday after dinner, we could choose from an apple or a rhubarb tart, Pavlova, Trifle, a Victoria Sponge, or a Swiss Roll.  I am surprised we still have our own teeth.

Although she had copied down many of these recipes, which I stuck inside a book for future reference, ma never took much notice of them. She took only one precaution while baking and that was to warn in advance my dad, my brother, and me not to slam the backdoor. Especially if there was a fruitcake baking “Don’t you bang the door or the fruit cake will collapse in the oven!”  I have resisted the urge to fact-check this. If Irish mammies say it, it must be true.

I once called her for her boiled cake recipe – a version of Irish Barmbrack which she used to make every Halloween. I remember for luck – or because her mother had done it too – she’d bake a sixpence or a thruppenny bit inside.  With pen and paper at the ready, our transatlantic phone conversation went as follows:
My mother: Och, Yvonne, sure you know yourself, you just put your ingredients in, boil them, and then let them cool.
Me: But what are the ingredients?
My mother: Long sigh.
Me: I’m writing this down.
My mother: OK. Just add your egg and your flour, put in your margarine, sugar, and a cup or two of black tea, all your cherries, raisins, and sultanas. Be you careful when you bring it to the boil. Let it cool and then throw in two or three eggs. Stir it all up and pour it in your loaf tin. Throw it in the oven and that’s your boiled cake. Now for a fruit cake, you just cream your butter and sugar in the mixer until they are nice and fluffy. Put in your eggs and your flour and all your fruit. Stir it all up and throw it in the oven. It will take longer to cook than the boiled cake. Use a slower oven.

I reminded my granddaughter not to bang the kitchen door, but I was none the wiser other than to tell you if this were a fruit cake/Barmbrack throw-down with Bobby Flay my mother would have won hands-down. I also know my Domestic Science teacher would have dismissed ma’s “method” as highly unsatisfactory without a list of ingredients and numbered directions that included the weighing of things copied into notebooks by girls – only girls – in the classrooms of segregated schools. 

For those of you still paying attention, 93 percent of Northern Ireland’s children still attend segregated schools that overwhelmingly educate children from only a Catholic or a Protestant background.  It wasn’t until I was a college student in Belfast that the fight for integrated education was just beginning.

There were no boys in Domestic Science, nor were there any girls in Woodwork, Metalwork, or the exotic-sounding Technical Studies.  There were, however, some grown ups who had noted the fundamental unfairness of this situation and pledged to remedy it. They had some clout too, because along came The Sex Discrimination (Northern Ireland) Order of 1976  making unlawful the inequality of access for boys and girls to all areas of the curriculum. Landmark legislation, this enabled boys and girls, in the same classroom, to partake of Craft, Design, and Technology, although it would be another 14 years before a National Curriculum would be implemented. 

Along with these efforts to make Domestic Science and Technical Studies curricula more gender-neutral, was the work that continues in 2024 to confront the fact that schools in Northern Ireland were segregating Protestant and Catholic children.  Since 1974, All Children Together (ACT) had been imploring churches and government to take the initiative in educating children together. In 1981, a small group of Belfast parents dared to change the course of history, to force the issue, to confront aloud what happens to the heart of a country and the identity of its children when they are educated in segregated schools. Ordinary Catholics and Protestants, we already knew what happened. It was time for change, to demand an answer to questions such as this, asked in 1957 by  Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Lester Bowles Pearson:

How can there be peace without people understanding each other, and how can this be if they don’t know each other?

As I learned in Rathcoole, there are few better places to learn about one another than in the classroom.

In 1981, Lagan College became the first integrated secondary school in Northern Ireland to offer such a space for boys and girls, Catholics and Protestants. Named for the river that runs through Belfast, Lagan College, under armed guard, opened its doors to 28 children. It is different today. According to the school’s website, as of September 2022 here are 1455 pupils on the Lisnabreeny site with more than 200 staff.

A 21st century school, its curriculum includes Home Economics. All students follow a course in the subject, the central focus of which “… is the consideration of the home and family in relation to the development of the individual and society. During the three years, they will address the areas of Diet and Health, Family Life and Choice and Management of Resources. A wide range of practical cookery is built into each unit of work, so that pupils can develop a range of important skills.”

That sounds more important and doable than the Domestic Science of my youth, which leads me back to where I started, to the Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book and to Northern Ireland – a place apart of which I will forever be a part.

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