It was at playschool, and I was about three or four years old. The playschool I attended was about a ten-minute walk from my house, housed in a separate wing of a big family home with a wonderful leafy garden surrounding it. The children were confined to one part of the lovely garden when we went outside to play, and I remember looking wistfully over at the far corner in the part of the garden that we weren't allowed in. There was a bench, and the beginning of a path, but you couldn't see where it led because of the bushes and trees blocking the view. It piqued my curiosity and imagination, and I always wished I could go over and explore. Despite the somewhat defiant streak in little me, I always knew better than to try to make a run for it. I'd only get put sitting on the "bold chair", and that was boring. I knew, I'd sat on it once or twice.
My favourite things to do in playschool were sitting cross legged in the library corner, where there was a book I particularly liked about a boy who broke his arm. I'm sure to an extent I felt that this boy and I were kindred spirits, as I'd also broken my arm around that time, but I think the real reason that this book took my fancy was because it involved a hospital and I had developed this somewhat morbid fascination with hospitals and doctors and nurses. I used to make my mum tape "Children's Hospital" because it was on at 10.10pm on BBC2 and that was long past my bedtime. I also liked painting and drawing, and I remember being absolutely enthralled when someone showed me how to make pink-coloured paint by mixing red and white paint together. We also used to leap around and dance to classic ditties such as "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands" and "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and my best friend Nicole and I would join in with gusto. Fairly standard playschool stuff.
Sometimes though, we'd be roped into doing activities in small groups of four or five with one of the teachers. I hated getting involved, preferring instead to potter around doing my own thing and choosing my own activities as I happened upon them. Once we did a worksheet with a picture of a balloon on it, and the instructions read, "Here is a picture of balloon. Colour in the balloon. Count the balloon". I was having none of it. It's a balloon, I thought. One balloon. It doesn't need to be counted. There's only one balloon there.
One day, I'd been cajoled into doing a jigsaw puzzle with a teacher called Suzanne who had fuzzy dark hair and always wore jumpers, and another little girl. The jigsaw was terribly boring and I looked from the group of little boys playing over at the nature table to the clock, wondering how long it was until Mammy came to collect me.
Suddenly, a voice filtered through my thoughts. "Aisling!", it said. "Aisling! Pay attention!" Four year old me must have been tuned out for a while, because the teacher's brow was furrowed and she looked irked and the other little girl was muttering something about she how she was going to get to take all the turns I'd missed.
I remember feeling startled. Attention, I'd never heard that word before. It sounded kind of ominous. I'd never heard it said before, but its meaning was implicit. Attention. I repeated it to myself. I had to pay attention. When Mum finally came to collect me, I told her I'd learned this new word and of how I'd come to learn it. For some reason, the incident had really struck me as something significant.
Maybe because, I thought as I drew spirals up and down the margins of my land law notes, the phrase was to become a regular fixture during the next sixteen years of my life and four year old me was somehow subconsciously aware of this. Pay attention, Aisling; you're drifting off into space again. Aisling, you're daydreaming. Aisling, wake up and concentrate! Penny for your thoughts, Aisling! (My nana used to often say this to me, and I'd sometimes take her up on her offer of the penny.) Most authority figures, including teachers, parents, grandparents, and even a priest, have told me to pay attention or some variant thereof throughout the course of my school days.
Sometimes, a bit of extra attention paid would have seriously benefited me, such as during every school biology experiment gone wrong or any time I've gotten the wrong end of the stick ever. But mostly I'm glad that while my playschool teacher's words resonated with me, they didn't spook me into becoming a conscientious listener/attention payer. All those wonderful daydreams I've had instead that I would've missed out on.
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| Hallowe'en dress up day in playschool. Most of the other girls went as witches but I thought it was the ideal occasion to debut the nurse's costume I'd gotten for my fourth birthday a few weeks beforehand. Happy as Larry, so I was. |
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