Featuring in the Leaving Cert English exam was flattering and worrying in equal measure
WEDNESDAY MORNING this week started like any other day, with a pot of tea and a stack of newspapers on the balcony and Spike the cat resplendent on the other deck chair watching birds. It hadn’t registered that on the other side of the Atlantic, tens of thousands of Irish teenagers were sitting their Leaving Cert exams.
I moved inside to answer e-mails. The heat and a squawking catbird drove Spike in soon after. There was a blur of telephone calls and interviews. I was reporting two stories at once: the fall of New York congressman Anthony Weiner and the rise of the new editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson. As I worked, I watched my Blackberry for replies to interview requests.
At 11.32am, that rare and serendipitous thing happened: unexpected good news. Seán Flynn, the Irish Times’s education editor, sent me a congratulatory e-mail. My article in praise of cats, published as an Irishwoman’s Diary a year ago, was the first question on the Leaving Cert higher level English paper.
For some reason, my first thought was of Frank McNally’s recent Irishman’s Diary about his pleasure at discovering that his use of the expression “to lose the run of oneself” was quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. This, I thought, was a comparable achievement. It felt like une consécration, not in the English meaning of dedicating someone or something to a purpose, but in the French sense – from the Petit Robert dictionary – of “confirmation, ratification, validation”.
Thirty-five thousand Irish teenagers had been, quite literally, my captive audience that morning. My pride swelled when I saw that texts by Colum McCann and Kevin Barry – real writers they, award-winning writers – appeared in the same exam. Not bad for a girl from California. Surely now they must grant me Irish citizenship...
I played my own little Oscar awards ceremony in my head.
"I'd like to thank Fionnuala Mulcahy of the Irish Timesfor requesting this article . . ." I studied the harp on the upper left hand corner of the exam paper, the only national symbol that speaks of heaven. "Coimisiún na Scrúduithe Stáit" it said. I owed a debt of gratitude to the anonymous civil servant who deemed my article worthy.
No, we journalists are not only as good as our last article, the Leaving Cert examiners told me. The written word – even newspaper print – remains. This round-about honour, for a piece I’d written on a quiet Sunday afternoon, seemed a vindication of slow journalism, of articles that cannot be researched on the internet, that take time to write and time to read.
My thoughts turned to those 35,000 young people scrunched over their texts, wearing school uniforms. I tried to imagine how my article must read to them, what I would have thought had I read it decades ago. It was too far a stretch of the imagination.
I hoped it wasn’t a chore for the students who based their answers on my text, that it brought them luck. Question A (i) filled me with trepidation: “From reading this article what impression do you form of both the personality and lifestyle of Lara Marlowe?” Crikey.
What if they thought I was a silly old fusspot, with my cat and dead writers and terrace in Georgetown?
How easy it is for animal-lovers to appear eccentric . . .
When my article was originally published, with a photograph of Spike, I sensed a special pride in the way he swaggered around the apartment. On Wednesday, I found him napping on the bed, his usual daytime occupation. “Hey Spike! We’re on the Leaving Cert!” I told him over and over. He smiled, like Julie Manet’s cat in Image 1 on the examination. Later he would be the surly alpha male of Image 2, Steinlen’s Summer: Cat on a Balustrade.
The theme of the exam paper was mystery. The objective, neutral and detached journalist in me knows I commit the sin of anthropomorphisation each
time I see my mood reflected in Spike’s. But there’s another, simpler part of me that still wonders at the inexplicable, joyous connection between animals and humans.
