It was harvest time, around the first of September, and Jack Fallon was ten years old and working in a field in East Galway. There was no radio in the house. His mother came down to them with the tea, and she had news with her. The Germans had gone into Poland.

“My mother came with the tea, and that was her news.”

He thought it was great. Not because of what it meant, because at ten years of age he had no idea what it meant, but because it was news, and news did not arrive often. Five years later a headmaster walked into a classroom and announced that it was over, and Jack says he could not tell you whether they were glad about that or not.

A family of nine and a walk through the fields

Jack was born in 1929, in what he calls the sheep raising part of Ireland, out in East Galway. There were nine of them in the family. He was four when he started at the nearest primary school, which meant a walk through the fields to get there, and he stayed nine years.

After that came the Franciscan Brothers. He remembers an education with a great weight of responsibility placed on it for restoring the Irish language, which he says now has not proved very successful, and Irish compulsory the whole way up, in the national school and in the secondary school after it.

Of the war itself he mostly remembers rationing, and a strange feeling of being detached from something enormous happening a short distance away. Ireland was neutral. England was being bombed night after night. It did not reach them. He says they did not take it seriously. He also says he had no idea at the time what neutrality even meant, though he formed a firm view about it in later life.

A missionary calls

He got his degree, and he got married, and then a missionary priest put a question to him. Would he be interested in going abroad.

Jack asked where. The answer was Ghana, which under Kwame Nkrumah had just become the first country in Africa to gain its independence. His wife’s brother had been in the RAF and had been out that way, so it was not a complete blank to them. And there was another reason, which he gives without dressing it up. Life in Ireland was narrow, and they wanted out of it for a while.

They went, and they stayed four years. He taught at a teacher training college in Bogoso, in the west of the country, where students did a two year course with one clear aim in front of them, which was to come out qualified and get a job in the primary schools. He found no trouble at all with discipline. He was in Northern Nigeria as well before he came home.

Nobody expected him to learn the local languages. The whole point of him being there was English.

Boyle, 1966

He came back and resumed national teaching, and in 1966 he came to Boyle and managed to get a house on Marion Road. That is sixty years ago this year.

It was not a straight line into St Joseph’s. He taught for four years in the Ballymote direction until that school closed for want of pupils, which left him without a job. He went to Dublin and got two years in a secondary school run by a Jewish headmaster. Then word came that there was a vacancy in St Joseph’s in Boyle, and he was told it might be a good idea to come back. He applied, he got it, and he stayed twenty one years.

Around 1988 a lad called Carlo Cretaro sat in his fifth class.

“I never felt myself very comfortable”

Asked whether he enjoyed those twenty one years, Jack calls it a good question and then answers it far more honestly than he had to.

“I never felt myself very comfortable as a national teacher. Never.”

He says he could never get down to the level of thinking of the children in front of him, and that he was not relaxed in a classroom. Part of that he lays at the door of his own travelling. He had changed abroad. He had got more liberal, and he had got used to a different way of teaching entirely, and coming back to an Irish primary school after that was a readjustment he never fully made. He suspects he was more relaxed than the other teachers, and probably too friendly, and that the children were not used to it.

It is a rare thing for a retired teacher to say out loud, and it is the most interesting few minutes of the episode.

Zambia, and then China

Most people retire and stop. Jack retired and went to Zambia for two years, and then to China.

“I was a kind of a wanderer. I was that way by nature. I wanted to expand my horizon.”

He liked China very much. He found the people there very helpful and very friendly. He took to the food and the culture without any bother. He says he got quite used to teaching students from other countries after Ghana, so none of it came as a shock, and that opportunities to go and teach somewhere else always seemed to come to him easily. He does not know why. He says there are characters in literature who were like him.

The garrison town

Once he was settled in Boyle he turned to the town’s own history, and specifically to the Connaught Rangers. The reason was partly geographical. The barracks was just down from him, at the back of Marion Road, and it sat there as a kind of a challenge.

So he studied the history of the First World War and Boyle’s part in it, and the group organised trips out to the battlefields, which he describes as marvellous and which gave him another excuse to travel. His own reckoning is that well over a hundred Boyle men went out and did not come back. The Connaught Rangers Room in King House is the place to go if you want the detail of it.

Letters to the Irish Times

Jack has been writing for most of his adult life. There were fewer than ten broadcasts on Sunday Miscellany on RTE, a programme he was very taken with, and there is a substantial collection of letters to the Irish Times built up over the years.

Not history, as it happens. Contemporary affairs, and his own view on whatever had become an issue in the country at the time. He still writes, though he reckons the editors have had him for long enough that they do not print him as often as they used to. He says the writing has been useful for keeping in touch with things, which is a fair description of what letter writing is for.

Sixty years in

Asked to describe Boyle in a few words, he says he has found it very agreeable and a nice place to live, that he has found the people friendly, and that he regards it as a very historical town. When the Arts Festival started up he took an interest in that too.

Asked for the single biggest change he has watched happen in Ireland across ninety six years, he does not reach for technology, which is what most people reach for. He says the secondary school.

“It opens up their minds.”

His argument is that second level education made young people aware of what is going on in the world, and gave them the room to work out what is in their own minds. Coming from a man who spent forty years in classrooms and did not always enjoy them, that is worth sitting with.

One last thing

Carlo asked him at the end whether there was anything he wanted to raise that they had not covered, and Jack picked something small and entirely practical. There is no public water supply where he is. You depend on a well. He has been through summers with very little rain where the well went dry.

His wish is that the town supply would be extended out a certain length from Boyle, to safeguard people against drought. Ninety six years, four continents, two world wars in living memory, and the thing he wanted to put on the record was the water.

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:13 A family of nine in East Galway
• 01:01 Born in 1929
• 01:15 Ten years old when the war began
• 02:19 Rationing, and a country that felt detached
• 03:36 The morning the news came with the tea
• 04:53 Neutrality, and what he made of it later
• 05:41 The Franciscan Brothers and compulsory Irish
• 06:32 A missionary calls, and Ghana answers
• 07:59 Four years at a training college in Bogoso
• 09:28 Coming to Boyle in 1966
• 10:04 Sligo, Dublin, and the job at St Joseph’s
• 11:39 Twenty one years in the classroom
• 12:06 On never feeling settled as a national teacher
• 13:12 Zambia after retirement
• 13:42 China, and a country he took to
• 15:02 Adjusting, and the language question
• 16:39 Travel when travel was not easy
• 17:22 Coming home a different teacher
• 17:55 The Connaught Rangers and a garrison town
• 18:49 Trips to the battlefields
• 19:10 Citizens Information and saving King House
• 21:09 Letters to the Irish Times, and radio
• 23:09 Sixty years in Boyle
• 24:19 The biggest change of a lifetime
• 25:02 A wish for a public water supply
• 26:17 Wrap up