Maeve Binchy by Piers Dudgeon Read Free Book Online Page A

nun to walk like a nun, apparently. Real nuns don’t so much walk as glide!
    Mother Immaculata’s phrase, ‘the good name of the school’, was one used relentlessly to motivate the girls at Killiney, notably in sport, which also accorded great popularity if you were any good. Maeve said she was hopeless at games and even refused to vault the horse in the gym for fear of some injury. She also ducked out of hockey whenever she could, generally in the company of another girl. Together they used to hide in the toilets rather than go onto the hockey field, and then make a quick getaway. Otherwise, as Maeve wrote with winning caricature, it was a question of standing around on the pitch, looking like a sack of potatoes in her green uniform tied in the middle, legs blue with cold, hoping that the action would remain at the far end of the pitch. 11
    The games mistress was at a loss as to how to get her to participate in anything at all until she hit on the idea that her height could be put to use on the netball pitch. Maeve was unusually tall, six foot or more as a teenager. All she had to do was hangaround the net, wait for a pass and dunk the ball in – easier for her to do than not. She became a lethal striker and for two years actually made the school’s 1st VII netball team.
    There were protests, however. Some schools refused to believe that so tall a girl was young enough to be playing for the team. They may have had a point: there is a discrepancy of one year between Maeve’s declared age and the one indicated on her birth certificate. No one will say for sure when the change was implemented , or why. Was it an attempt by Maureen to give Maeve the best chance of success in life following a long absence from school? Did she miss a year due to an extended bout of glandular fever, as one of her friends suggests? Whatever was the case, Maeve remained a year younger than her officially recorded age for the rest of her life.
    More significant to Maeve than sporting success were writing competitions in magazines, which girls were encouraged to enter because here was another opportunity to show the school in a good light. Maeve remembered in particular one Christmas winning a prize in a magazine called
The Pylon
, subscribers to which (for a few pence a year) could proudly call themselves Electrons. To be an Electron and enter a writing competition was terribly important. Like being good at sport, it showed ‘school spirit, girls!’, while winning meant being fêted by staff and girls alike.
    Maeve won this particular competition with a story about a girl called Jane, who wanted to be a missionary and teach the natives in Africa. Jane succeeded by beating the natives out of their own customs and forcing hers upon them. The win stuckin Maeve’s mind because of a particularly prescient remark made by her father when he picked her up that day from school. ‘When you become a writer, you will always be able to say this was your first work.’ 12 When Maeve did become a writer she thanked God that the story had not survived!
    Maeve had begun to subscribe to activities that promised a certain amount of status and popularity in the school, and to show less interest in those activities that didn’t – like academic work, for example. When she first arrived she had been expected to go the academic route and not, like some of the others, substitute domestic science for Latin and maths. She was a bright girl and found it relatively easy to come near the top of the class, but school reports described her as lazy. She grasped things well, but then became bored and soon lapsed into a daydream. In later life she gave the reason that being at the top of the class wasn’t a mark of status at school. It wasn’t nearly as important as being good at games, for example, or winning a writing competition.
    Seeking status is perfectly normal behaviour among children but here it looks like becoming a definitive motivation, and one wonders why.