Literacy Day

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It was the Day of the Geese, which in Ballymagaleen ranks just below Easter and slightly above the All-Ireland Final. The children of St Príomhsheans’ School for All Abilities and None arrived in a state of high excitement, that peculiar combination of giddiness and dread that comes when adults begin speaking of “tradition” with a straight face.

Miss O’Leany, in her principal’s blazer and sensible shoes, assembled them in the yard. I stood beside her with Myles, my long-suffering ghillie, and a modest old side-by-side twelve-bore, broken open, cartridges in my pocket, for this is a civilised country.

“Children,” Miss O’Leany began, in the weary tone of one who has attended too many professional development workshops, “today we are engaging in a cross-curricular, culturally responsive literacy provocation—”

“No, we are not,” I interrupted, to a ripple of delight from the older pupils. “Today we are going to kill two geese and make pens out of them.”

You could feel the staff flinch.

“Humanely,” I added. “With reverence. And for a purpose more sacred than any iPad you have ever smeared your grubby fingers across. Writing, girls and boys, is not ‘content’. It is covenant.”

Even Miss O’Leany, though she will deny it, half-smiled at that.

We processed down the boreen towards the shore, Myles shepherding the stragglers. He carried the wooden box with the tools of the trade: pen-knives, sandpaper, a small jar of soot swept from the school chimney, and a dark green bottle of viscous cannabis oil from The Hemp Collective, carefully labelled for “liturgical use only” by Constance Roache in her more pious moods.

“As we walk,” I said, “you may meditate upon the uses and abuses of the written word. Consider, for example, the difference between a love letter and a government circular. Both are made of words. Only one is capable of beauty. The other is a crime.”

“Sir,” piped a small girl, “what about texts?”

“Ah,” I said, “the locusts of language. ‘c u l8r’. ‘u up?’. Every time you omit a vowel, a monk in heaven spills his ink and swears in Latin. We shall discuss this in class.”

At the stile by the strand, the air cooled and grew still. There, half in shadow, stood the Reverend Mr William Leonard, late curate, executed by mistake a century ago and in no hurry to forgive anyone. He smelled, as ever, faintly of turf smoke and wet tweed.

“Good morning, Sir,” chorused the few children who had been paying attention in my local history classes.

“Scribere est orare,” he intoned, lifting his hat. “To write is to pray. Remember that, and you may yet be saved from careers in marketing.”

We reached the low rocks where, by ancient compact, the barnacle geese rest on their southward journey. There they were, black-and-white sentinels against the grey sea. I felt the usual prick of unease, for I like geese far more than I like most people; but a bargain is a bargain, and the villagers of Ballymagaleen have kept this one since ink was dear and paper dearer.

“Two only,” I told the children. “We do not buy ink in plastic bottles from supermarkets, squeezed out by bored chemists. We make it, once a year, and you will remember it, and so you will not waste it scribbling ‘Live Laugh Love’ on your exercise books.”

“Or graffiti,” added Miss O’Leany, who had once spent a full afternoon removing the legend “FREE THE TOENAIL FOUR” from the girls’ toilets.

“Graffiti is a noble art when done well,” I said. “But ‘Kilroy woz ere’ does not count. Now, Myles?”

Myles scanned the flock. “Two fat ones on the edge, sir. Clean shots.”

I loaded, closed the gun, and for a moment the racket of the waves and the children fell away. I murmured a scrap of an old verse—half prayer, half apology—to the God who hides in feathers and tide-pools. Then the two shots cracked out, sharp and final. The chosen pair folded, instantly, as if some invisible string had been cut. The rest of the flock lifted, wheeled once over the bay in a ragged, outraged halo, and headed seaward, honking curses in Goose.

“Observe,” I said, breaking the gun again. “No suffering. That, children, is more than can be said for most school essays.”

We carried the birds up to the grassy bank, where the work began. Myles, whose hands are as gentle with feathers as with fishing flies, showed them how to strip the primaries from the wings.

“Only the right wing for quills,” he said. “The curve sits proper in a right hand. Left-handers,” he nodded toward the few, “we shall make special pens for you later, because the world has done you enough injustice already.”

The children plucked, wide-eyed, tongues between teeth. The air filled with the smell of salt, down, and the iron tang of fresh blood. We drained that into a glass jar.

“This,” I said, holding it up, “is your red ink. Remember this when you are tempted to doodle hearts over the ‘i’ in your name. Real ink costs life.”

At that moment, the grass darkened, and a cool whisper ran up from the direction of St Pierian’s Holy Well. The Foclán Tobhar, the Word of the Well, chose its hour. It appeared—as it does—only partly visible: a shimmer like heat-haze in reverse, threaded with letters, ogham-strokes and half-formed alphabets drifting like minnows.

“Mind yourselves,” muttered Myles. “The Well’s awake.”

The children fell silent as the presence moved among them, flicking at their ears, rearranging their untidy thoughts. A boy with a propensity for filthy limericks shivered and went slightly pale. The Foclán likes a limerick, but it insists on scansion.

Back in the schoolyard we set up our scriptorium. The soot went into a great earthenware basin, the blood poured over it, the hemp oil added drop by reverent drop. I stirred with a wooden spoon older than the Department of Education, Myles adding warm water until the mixture gleamed a deep, living black-red.

“This oil,” I explained, “comes from the hemp fields above the village. It lends smoothness to the ink and, if any of you are foolish enough to drink it, clarity to your foolishness. Do not test this.”

Inside, each child received a roughly cut quill and a single sheet of good paper. Not the shiny rubbish that repels ink, but proper rag paper from a mill that still remembers the Psalms.

“You will now,” I said, “write three things. Your name as clearly as you can. One sentence you swear to be true. And one promise about how you will and will not use words.”

I walked the aisles. Little brows knotted. In the corner, Mr Leonard materialised by the bookshelf, reading over shoulders.

“‘I promise not to use the passive voice unless I can’t help it,’” he read. “Acceptable.”

The Foclán Tobhar drifted through the windows, re-forming itself in the curls of steam from the old radiators, nudging a girl who had written “I promise never to lie” to add, after a pause, “on paper.”

Miss O’Leany made her own pledge at the front: “I promise not to say ‘learning journey’ in staff meetings.” The staff clapped; the children sensed a quiet revolution.

I delivered my sermon.

“You will be tempted,” I said, “to squander your words. You will wish to become influencers, writing captions beneath photographs of your breakfast. You will be told to write mission statements that say nothing and policies no one reads. You may become civil servants, drafting memos whose chief purpose is to dilute responsibility. Resist. Your words are made of blood and breath and soot. Waste them, and you waste yourselves.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sergeant Gombeeni’s ghost of a smile in the doorway, Fr Hitchens leaning against the holy water stoup, and the Trout of Doubt making small circles in its jam-jar on Miss O’Leany’s desk, attending to the proceedings as if vetting a new catechism.

When they had finished, each child came forward and dipped their quill once more into the communal ink, to inscribe their name in the great roll-book of St Príomhsheans. The first letters, bright and wet, were crimson before they darkened.

“A red-letter day, indeed,” murmured Mr Leonard.

And so, in Ballymagaleen, the school year begins: with the crack of the gun on the strand, the soft hiss of feathers, and the slow, solemn scratching of goose-quills on paper, reminding us all that words, like geese, are not to be trifled with.