h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In school I was the annoyingly bright boy. By an accident of timing I was two years younger than most of my class, but I discovered a knack of getting straight into a new topic. Observing the discomfort of others, I managed to get a tiny hook into whatever problem was being presented, and the slightest of purchase allowed me to produce answers quickly.

In my fifth year in Mountjoy School (now Mount Temple) we had a French teacher who took a dislike to me. For several weeks, his first words on coming into the classroom were "Robinson, out." He was tall, with a long face and a good head of grey hair, and slightly superior to the other teachers: he was an educationalist, and had written books on the subject. Rotten teacher though, that is to say no better than the rest.

At the end of fifth year we were to sit the Leaving Cert exam, the Irish state exam that gave most students their final diploma, and a few their university entrance. It was meant to be taken in sixth year, but our headmaster had discovered a wheeze whereby we could take a special cert in fifth year and spend sixth year on those subjects that needed improvement. My friend Fred said to me one afternoon "I've been looking at the syllabus, and to do honours French you only have to read two extra books--would you be on for it?"

So we read the Racine and whatever the other one was, and a few articles about them, and when the exam came we put up our hands for the honours paper. Nobody had done honours French in our school before, but this was the state exam and nobody could stop us. When the results came out, both Fred and I had scored exactly 60%, the honours mark.

Tom McEligott never mentioned it, our headmaster never mentioned it, we never mentioned it. This was 1963, and our attitude to school was not the collaborative effort it seems to be now.