mns  2005-07-01 20:29  Miscellaneous Pieces   

When I was a child, the principal of my school, who was also our geography teacher said, 'We will not buy a globe until the world has settled down.' I can still recite the countries of South America as taught to me by her, and recently I was quite startled to discover that long before I had ever started school some of the countries she taught me had ceased to exist.
There were other teachers, thank goodness, but without a doubt the crème de la crème was our Latin and History teacher. She never actually said 'the
world is your oyster girls,' but she demonstrated that it was.

She travelled.

For most of us, travelling was a summer's fortnight in Kerry or Donegal, or a month locked up in Irish College outside Dublin. But Miss Binchy was practising on taking the world by storm. Borders did not deter her, nor foreign languages bring her down. I was concerned about her during her travels. School without her would have been unbearable. Her trip to Israel where she worked in a kibbutz - that left us almost speechless, because who of us had heard of a kibbutz, let alone knew how it functioned?

'Read Leon Uris. He will give you a greater understanding,' she said, as we contemplated Miss Binchy up a ladder picking oranges. She brought that kibbutz into the classroom - the heat, the sweat, the laughter, evening meals shared - the long hot summers of adulthood that could, that would be ours if we learnt our Latin and read our history.
We made notebooks, packed with facts and fiction.
'Illustrate them,' she said after we had made up potential pre-famine potato recipes, and our notebooks were coloured with turf fires and people brandishing pikes, and Oliver Cromwell pointing to Connaught.

She took us to Warrenpoint. We were allowed to use the dodgems, which inspired us into hiring rowing boats, which we took out in groups and used as dodgems on the lake. The other teacher with her said, 'don't fall in.'
Miss Binchy said, 'Have fun, but don’t fall in!'

She brought us to Wales. On our departure from Caernarvon we convinced the bus driver that she was already on board, and off we set, hearts pounding – how would we explain her disappearance when we arrived back in Dublin?
We watched her run after the bus and wondered what she was waving at us, until someone pointed out that it was our tickets for the ferry. Sick with laughter we contemplated our fate – to stop the bus and let her on or to drive on merrily to Holyhead.
The bus driver saw her in the mirror and he pulled in. By the time she got her breath back, she had almost forgiven us and it was hardly ever mentioned again.
Another time she took us to meet an Italian broadcaster who had an apartment on Mespil Road. 'This is the life!' we thought, as she sat on a sofa with him drinking coffee, and we in our gymslips and knee length socks with our ties at half-mast sat cross-legged on his floor sipping orange juice.

Once, as I stood outside a classroom door, having been most unfairly ejected by the maths teacher who seemed to think I had been whistling the National Anthem (I who can neither whistle nor sing), along came Miss Binchy and took a look at my pale face, 'You will grow up,’ she said. ‘I promise. It won't always be this awful.'

I have often thought that she got us at the right age and that's why we are hers forever, but then I look at her readership and know how many other hearts she captured afterwards. She hadn’t even reached her prime when we knew her.