Sr. Jo Anne Kelly, MMM                                       Ireland                        18.03.2026

As a child we lived in a rural area in Northern Ireland and attended the local primary school.  We had two classrooms, one upstairs for the “Mistress” and the lower classes, and one downstairs for the “Master” and the higher classes. They were two great teachers. I only appreciated this later when I went to secondary school in town and realised how we had been taught to open our minds to a wide range of knowledge and to learn so much by heart, all possibly because we were small in number.

We lived close to the school, so much so, that at lunch time we ran home for the tea, homemade bread and jam that my mother had ready, and were back again to join in the playtime games.

There were five priests in our parish and each of them had schools which they visited regularly. We had Fr. Mike. He came from the town on his bicycle. We loved his visits as he explained to us what we then called “Bible History”, explained the Gospel stories and all that Jesus did when He was on earth. Once he was explaining how Jesus was preaching and healing and the people made a hole in the roof of the house where he was, to get a sick man in for Jesus to heal. Fr. Mike asked us why they had to make a hole in the roof. My brother, a shy boy who rarely offered a response of any kind, said “Because the queue outside was too long.”

I was so embarrassed by his answer and others were too. The word “queue” was our new word which we learnt because of being in wartime. There were queues for tea, for sugar, for butter, for bread, for every kind of foodstuffs but I couldn’t associate the word queue with Jesus or the Gospel. Then Fr. Mike, who, no doubt, saw our reaction, said “Yes, the man was very sick, and the queue was too long.”

On his way down from the school, Fr. Mike sometimes called to my mother for a cup of tea. On one such occasion he told her he had bought a “wee” car and was learning to drive. There were few cars around then and it was long before Driving Schools or Driving lessons. In front of our house was a small vacant space, big enough to park a car. We called it the “street”. So, the next week Fr. Mike arrived on our street with his car. He said he wouldn’t be able to manage the hill up to the school or the narrow winding road with its three sharp corners. So, he parked the car on our street and went off walking up the hill. This went on for a few weeks.

Then one day he stopped and said he would give it a try, and my mother heard the car revving up the hill. She waited anxiously to hear it coming back and eventually it did. He was quiet and she made the tea.

After a while she said “Well, how did you get on?”. He said, “She made a gallant effort to get over the hedge at the last corner, but I got her turned. The children must have been praying for me.” He was delighted with himself.!