An Irish Boarding School and Other Disasters —
A Brief History of Bad Behaviour
Richard grew up at a time when an influencer was a middle-aged man in corduroy trousers with a pipe in his mouth and a cane in his hand… when being woke meant that your dormitory prefect was ringing a bell and screaming in his ear… and the only trans that ever came up in conversation was the Trans-Siberian Railway.
Sand in Strange Places is about growing up in civil strife-torn Northern Ireland in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and life in a cultural backwater, filled with religious zealots and country & western fuelled Stetson-wearing alcoholics, mired by small town myopia.
And… Richard’s growing desperation to escape the place.
Richard presents a brutally frank but often humourous account of his childhood and adolescence, learning to survive the worst that a boarding school education could throw at him; one which involved narrowly escaping expulsion, and surviving the threat of having his testicles cut off by a British soldier.
He gives a frank account of the physical and sexual abuse he was subjected to at his preparatory school… supposedly one of the top schools in Ireland (now long closed).
He narrates how – as an only child – he negotiated the demands, expectations, hard love, and ultimately disappointment of parents who regarded parenthood as an investment of time and resources – and one which required unconditional payback.
He relates how his journey from short trousers to flannels took him from academic neo-prodigy to academic failure.
And he shares with the reader the often-bumpy sexual road that takes him from boyhood into manhood, his brief but capricious rock’n’roll career, and how he achieved the recognition that only two other writers (Oscar Wilde and Sam Beckett) managed to achieve.
Yet, despite all his customary negativity, Richard maintains a deep affection for the country of his birth.
But there’s no way on God’s green earth that he would ever go back to live there again.
In summary – if you like your cliches – Sand in Strange Places is a tale of sex, booze and rock’n’roll, set against the backdrop of the Troubles and the clutches of filial despotism.
PRAISE FOR RICHARD’S MEMOIR
“I’ve always considered him [Richard] to be a complete idiot – this book confirms it beyond reasonable doubt.” John Smith, (former) friend.
“There is way too much information about really… like, gross stuff that I’d rather not know.”
Rosie ********, daughter (and former beneficiary of Richard’s will).
“This book is written by my English teacher. Before I am reading it, I am thinking he is unusual but practically normal. How wrong was that what I had been thinking.”
Mikhail Smirnoff, Ukrainian ELF student, and Space Cadet
PREFACE
Some of you may not agree with this – and you may well have a point – but I feel that my ability to communicate and to entertain with the written word has matured with age.
The trouble with is — that should that improvement continue — by the time I write something really decent I will be dead.
And because when I’m dead I won’t be able to write anything at all — let alone improve my writing — I thought that now might be as good a time as any to record the formative events of my early life.
This work of recollection is principally dedicated to my two remaining children — Rosanna Joy and Cameron (I’ll have to check his middle name), and also to my deceased son, Jake.
They have too little recollection or knowledge of my parents to have much of an understanding of their heritage, and this is my principal motivation for writing this.
But if you don’t know me, and are wondering why on earth you bought this book, I will take you on an introspective but eventful journey through my schooldays, and very slightly beyond, in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and how the events of that time coloured my life.
And a lot of it’s about sex.
*
I’m going to start, dear reader, by breaking one of the golden rules of writing: never open with a question.
Worse still, I’m going to open with two.
The first: where do I begin; and the second… where do I end?
Let’s take the second question first. And before you scuttle off to send this back to Amazon, or whatever avaricious conglomerate has superseded it by the time I complete this tome, this does have certain relevance.
You see, none of us — unless of course we plan it — know when we are going to die. Therefore, having completed my memoir, my best and most propitious years – unlikely as it seems – may lie ahead.
But that’s a problem for another day; a pilot doesn’t speculate overmuch about landing when he’s preparing for take-off, so let’s start at the very beginning, and see where it leads.
I was born at 11:05 on the morning of the tenth of December 1955, in Johnson House, the private maternity wing of the Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast.
What I should add to that is that I had chosen my parents extremely well, and this was for two reasons.
The first was that they were somewhat elderly by conventions of the time for rookie parents, and that in no small way contributed to the fact that they would have no additional offspring. My father would have gladly have sired prolifically, for he was the second youngest of a family of six boys, and had enjoyed the feral cut and thrust of family life. My mother – named Joy for no discernible reason – was an only child herself. And for her the experience of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood was one which she later confided, she had absolutely no desire to repeat. And – although I have no evidence for this – I would suspect that the experience of conception bore no great attraction. Therefore, one child was sufficient, perhaps even superfluous. Consequently, I was destined to remain an only child, and for this I will be eternally grateful.
Secondly, when I arrived into this world via Caesarean Section, it was with a proverbial silver spoon in my mouth.
My father’s year of birth was destined to coincide with the sinking of the Titanic. He had just the one Christian name – Ferguson – as by the time of his birth, his parents had presumably run out of inspiration. Fergie, as he was widely known, was a diligent and ambitious worker. There is little doubt that his quest for recognition and success was driven in part by my mother’s predilection for finery; but it is also true to say that being branded an academic failure at Sullivan Upper School had stoked the embers of his furnace of desire to prove himself.
Therefore, by the time of my birth, Fergie was well down the carpeted corridor that led to the door of the boardroom of York Street Flax Spinning Company, Northern Ireland’s preeminent linen firm, and employers of thousands of Belfast men who wore the orange sash on the twelfth of July.
I will discuss both Fergie’s capacity for earning money and Joy’s capacity for spending it in more detail later, but let’s just say that by the time I was born, Fergie was worth a bob or two.