In the yard at the convent Tom looked around for someone to play with, but only the girls from the island were there, whispering in a corner. If Sister Sullivan saw him she’d say he should sit in the classroom and go over his spellings or his tables even though, when all the others arrived, they’d be allowed to play about outside until the bell went. ‘Didn’t I tell you to go to the classroom?’ Sister Sullivan had reminded him crossly once, after he’d run out to join them, and Tom had felt that that was unfair. He sat on the ledge outside the cloakroom, with his schoolbag beside him, his presence hidden from the windows of the classrooms. He wondered why Sister Sullivan looked at him in that dead way sometimes, as if he had done something wrong. Sister Sullivan was the oldest of the teaching nuns and considered to be the crossest.

‘I like the dog,’ Sister Teresa Dolores said later, standing by the blackboard. ‘Now, give me that perfectly, please.’

The class tried to translate the sentence into Irish, but were not successful. Sister Teresa Dolores deplored her pupils’ efforts and wrote the correct version on the black-board. They repeated it all together, and then repeated it again. Sister Teresa Dolores hung her chart up on the blackboard, with a picture of a rabbit on it, and a picture of a black cat and a blue door and a window. Her pupils learnt the Irish for these nouns and adjectives, writing the words down in their jotters. When the bell went they forgot them.

Father Pierce came that morning, a special visit, to examine them in catechism. ‘That’s a great dress you’re wearing,’ he said to one girl, and enquired about a boy’s glasses, asking him if he could see better these days and then trying them on himself to make the class laugh. Father Pierce had something to say to everyone. ‘Your father made a great job of the table in the rectory,’ he remarked to a boy whose father was a French polisher. ‘There isn’t a man in County Cork can get a gloss on to a table like your father.’ He inclined his head, slowly wagging it in a complimentary way. He was a big, laughy man, his smooth black hair brushed straight back from his forehead, shiny with the oil he put on it. ‘There isn’t a man in County Cork,’ he told a girl, ‘can cut out a clerical suit like your uncle in Castle-martyr.’ He made Joey Feerick sing a verse of a song. Joey Feerick was another John McCormack, he said.