Page 23 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 3 Spring 2014

The author reflects on the independence she
gained by spending her Sixth Form year in Ireland.
By Rosemary Mahoney ’79
In a conversation about the six books of nonfiction
I’ve written, an interviewer recently commented that,
as a writer, I seem to have made a point of providing
myself with “rich experiences.”
She went on to remind me of some of what I’ve done
as part of the research for my various books, includ-
ing rowing a boat across the Sea of Galilee and camping
alone on the beach below the Golan Heights. Another
time I slept in a goatskin tent in Kenya alongside four
Samburu tribesmen and two baby goats. I walked 500
miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago, rowed a
small Egyptian skiff 120 miles down the Nile alone, and
walked 125 miles from Winchester to Canterbury along
the old Pilgrims’ Way, pitching a tent in small graveyards
as I went. (No one had the nerve to approach the tent,
and I never slept so well as I did those nights among the
English dead.)
As part of the research for my latest book, For The
Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches From the World
of the Blind, I allowed two blind Tibetan teenage girls to
demonstrate their navigational skills by blindfolding me
and leading me through the city of Lhasa for an hour.
Not long after that, while teaching an outdoor class at a
school for blind adults in a coconut jungle at the bottom
of India, I found myself herding seven blind students out
of the path of a cobra that had slithered out of the tall
grass and intruded upon our class.
When I conceded to my interviewer that I enjoy being
in unfamiliar surroundings faced with unexpected chal-
lenges, she asked me how I developed that draw toward
adventure. I thought back to the first unusual experience
I had undertaken in a foreign country and realized it was
as a student at St. Paul’s School.
I spent my entire Sixth Form year in Ireland studying
Irish Gaelic. At the end of the previous year, I had written
a proposal for an Independent Study Project; I would audit
courses for six weeks at Trinity College in Dublin, then
continue my studies in the tiny village of Dunquin, at the
end of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, where the
Irish language was still in daily use.
I wrote to a woman in Dunquin who housed students
while they practiced their Irish at the local grade school.
The woman, Mairead O’Donnell, agreed to take me in,
and the grade school offered to let me sit in on classes.
With a few more exchanges of letters, my plans seemed
to be in order. I presented my proposal to the admin-
istration at St Paul’s – Virginia Deane, Bill Oates, and
Philip Burnham. They considered it, called me in for a
meeting, asked some questions, and decided to authorize
my plan.
Thinking about this now, I find it astonishing that the
School allowed me to go. It was 1978. I was 17. It wasn’t
an exchange program or a certified year-abroad group
I was joining. I had concocted this loose plan myself
under the aegis of no formal organization. I had essen-
tially asked St. Paul’s to let me go off across the ocean
by myself for nine months and allow me to find my way
about in a completely casual fashion in order to study
Irish Gaelic, a language about as useful as Aramaic. What
strikes me most is the enormous trust the School placed
in me. I didn’t know it then, of course, but what they had
given me was the chance of a lifetime.
Travel always brings surprises. No matter how well
you may plan ahead, things often don’t work out as you’d
hoped. For me, this remains part of its appeal – the
adaptability and the resourcefulness it requires. In 1978,
there was no Internet, no such thing as a mobile phone
(or even a cordless one), and an international phone call
was extremely expensive. My only practical means of
communicating with my family and the School would be
through handwritten letters.
As it turned out, my stay in Dublin – during which I
lived with a family in the suburbs – was relatively
uneventful. I attended my classes at Trinity College. (I
confess there were a few days on which I was not dutiful
and chose instead to ride the city buses from one end of
of Trust
Mahoney with her host, Liza Mitchell, on a return visit to Dunquin. 23