She’s a Galway girl. Though Florence Grace has spent most of her life in County Wicklow and clearly feels at home in Dunlavin, there is no escaping her roots. As a teacher, she has influenced generations of local people with her knowledge and understanding, a much-respected personality in her adopted neighbourhood. Along with husband Seamus, she has raised a family here and set up a household in the pleasant countryside south of the village.
et, in conversation with your reporter, she finds that she can hark back with clarity to her own childhood in a very different time, in a very different place. And now, some of the experience of her 72 years, in Galway and in Wicklow, has been distilled into a book for children – ‘Class Act’.
Let’s start at the beginning, in the shadow of the Slieve Aughty mountain range, somewhere between Gort and Portumna. Florence (née Boland) makes no extravagant claims for Ballinakill, which she recalls cheerfully as ‘The Bog’, where a child of the fifties was expected to haul and drag turf. The family had land, enough for a handful of cows, and her father worked in forestry to supplement the meagre income from farming.
Her mother she remembers as a good cook, serving up fine meals to her and to her young brother. Though spartan by the standards of the new millennium, it was a comfortable enough life, backboned by a dose of ambition.
The future teacher did not like primary school much herself – “the teacher was cross and he used the cane”. In retrospect, she has some professional sympathy for the unfortunate man, the only adult among a clatter of children who covered every age from four to teenage. Holding everyone’s attention was a severe challenge for the master, while listening to the same voice carrying the same message term after term for eight years was a trial for his pupils.
Florence’s maternal grandmother, who lived three miles away, had a shop and her visits remain vivid in the mind’s eye. Granny would arrive wearing her trademark apron and shawl, distributing sweets from deep pockets and bringing (ah, the luxury of it!) a block of ice-cream.
When the time came to move on from the national school, Florence was sent to Loughrea where the Mercy nuns strove to make ladies of their charges: “I was three years boarding in Loughrea – but I wouldn’t stay any longer,” she says. Perhaps the best, the most memorable, part of her time there was the love of literature fostered by Mother Thomas. The English teacher’s great claim to fame in later years was that she had taught ‘Country Girls’ novelist Edna O’Brien.
The three years served, Florence managed to persuade her parents that she would be able to cycle the eight miles to the Mercy day-school at Woodford: “I associate the bicycle ever since with freedom - and there were boys in the class.” Again, English rated high in her curriculum, not least because the subject was directed by a teacher (a man! fancy that) who encouraged reading, steering her towards Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn.
A girl capable of digesting such highbrow material was clearly destined for a career beyond The Bog. She harboured thoughts of becoming a journalist, but her letter to the ‘Connacht Tribune’ elicited no response. Florence did not fancy being a bank official or a nurse, while University College Galway was beyond their financial reach.
The way she tells it, teacher training at Carysfort College in Blackrock was not necessarily an easy option. Carysfort meant moving to Dublin, a place which had hitherto been practically as remote as New York or New Delhi. The furthest point on her childhood horizon was Galway and she still remembers vividly the excitement of coming through Oranmore and seeing the sea. She and her brother built sandcastles on the beach at Salthill, while their mother loved to root around among the tat in Woolworths.
Florence’s view of the world in her youth was confined to her rural backwater with the bicycle setting the limit of her ambition. Hers was nevertheless a world that had culture and ambition, with plays presented in the parish hall and visits of the Royal Showband to nearby towns to look forward to. A car had to be hired to take Florence, accompanied by her parents, to Blackrock for the interview at Carysfort.
There was a postal strike on at the time, she remembers, leading to some concern about how they would find out whether she had secured her spot as a trainee teacher. So, it came about that on the way home her father pulled the hired car up in some Midlands town – probably Mountmellick.There she found a phone to ring the college: “They said yes, you have a place. I was so excited. Going to Dublin was like going to another world.”
Florence Boland became Blaithnaid ní Bheoláin or TC 296 who emerged in 1970 as a probationer teacher, open to offers from schools. One of those offers came from her home parish but she wanted to spread her wings, so the real choice lay between Summerhill in Meath and Dunlavin in Wicklow. In the end she plumped for Dunlavin, mainly to stay close to her college buddy Mary Kavanagh: it turned out to be a good and lasting choice.
The school in the village, built in 1954, was relatively up-to-date and principal Tom O’Neill was supportive of his latest recruit. Nevertheless, nothing could really prepare a 20-year-old woman to face the 46 little girls and boys of senior infants and first class.
“I probably didn’t sleep for six months, worrying about how much damage I was causing them,” she muses. When she did nod off there was the nightmare of visits by the cigire, the formidable school inspector, who came to criticise rather than encourage.
After her stint in Dublin, Dunlavin seemed to be a quiet spot but she and Mary – “two young wans straight out of college” – determined to liven the place up. They organised a party in the Imaal Hall, with Matt Owens agreeing to act as DJ, which set tongues wagging.
In May of 1971, Miss Boland attended a marquee dance run by the soccer club, where she met local publican Seamus Grace. Before too long she became Missus Grace, who taught in the school for 30 years, rising through the ranks to become vice-principal. Much of that time was spent residing over the pub before the move to the couple’s present home. The marriage was blessed with five children – Claire, Caitriona, Eimear, James and Maebh - with seven grandchildren to follow.
As a teacher, Florence was keen to try new initiatives, starting a school library and encouraging pupils to write poems for anthologies released at the annual arts festival. She was gearing up to teach grandchildren of the original 46 when her time in front of the blackboard was cut cruelly short by an agonising condition called fibromyalgia.
Work became impossible against the background of mysterious, repeated, debilitating pain for which she has never discovered a cure. Pharmaceuticals such as paracetamol have unpleasant side-effects, but at least homeopathic remedies provide some relief.
A mind such as Florence’s could never be fulfilled by sitting at home feeling sorry for herself. She kept her creative juices flowing by setting up a writers’ group with John Lynott which met monthly in the cellar under Grace’s pub to compare notes. She submitted short stories recalling childhood and an occasional poem for peer review.
The sessions ceased in 2007 with Seamus’s retirement from the licensed trade but were revived eight years ago, this time upstairs in the same building. Once more they came to a halt, due to pandemic restrictions, but the group re-emerged recently once more, stronger than ever.
Their miscellany session, alternating readings with music from the Milltown Singers, co-compered by Ita Roddy and Florence, proved a popular hit at this year’s arts festival. And Florence also found inspiration in lockdown to diversify her writing into composing a tale of mystery and magic, illustrated by Gina Carroll from Grangecon.
‘The Secret Labyrinth’ was originally intended for her grandchildren but somehow morphed into a fundraiser assisting the autism unit at the village school. The success of the project has led on to second literary undertaking, one which has a serious underlying purpose. ‘Class Act’ is the story of a young Traveller girl who finds herself bullied in school and finds friends among other often marginalised groups to deal with the problem.
“I was bullied myself as a child because I was fat,” she says as she ponders the motivation behind ‘Class Act’. “This was not an easy story for me to write.” The illustrations were supplied by Lucy Deering, one of her former third class pupils. The author hopes that the book will find a readership among schoolchildren and that it will provoke a constructive conversation in classrooms around Ireland.
In the meantime, as she waits for the writers’ group to resume their meetings in autumn, another book is forming in her mind. Retired she may be, but Florence is certainly not resting on her laurels.
