I worked as the caretaker in a small secondary school on the north side for nearly nineteen years. I won’t name it, because the school is still there and the children are grown now, but if you walked from Phibsborough towards the canals on a wet November morning, you’d know the kind of place. Red brick, squeaky corridors, radiators that clanked like old ships, and a yard where the wind came at you from every direction.
My job was supposed to be keys, bins, boilers, leaks, chairs stacked after assemblies, footballs rescued from flat roofs. But in a school, you end up minding more than buildings. You learn which child comes in late because the bus was missed and which child comes in late because nobody woke them. You learn who eats slowly because they’re chatty, and who eats slowly because they’re trying to make a small lunch last all day.
The first lunch debt I paid was for a boy in second year. He had a fringe that covered half his face and shoes held together with black tape. One Friday, I was fixing a loose handle outside the office when I heard the secretary gently telling him there was too much owing on his lunch account. She wasn’t cruel. None of them were. But the system had a red line, and his name was sitting under it.
He said, “I’ll tell my mam,” in a voice so flat it nearly broke me. I knew that voice. I’d used it myself as a boy on Moore Street when my mother told the butcher we’d come back next week and we both knew we wouldn’t.
That evening, after everyone left, I went into the office with the excuse of checking a window. I left twenty euro in an envelope with the boy’s name on it and a note saying it was for the lunch account. The secretary found it Monday and thought one of the teachers had done it. I let her think that.
After that, I kept a tin in the bottom drawer of my little caretaker’s room beside the mop heads and spare fuses. Every week, I’d put something into it. A fiver if I had it. Coins from my pockets. The odd tenner when I’d done a small job for someone on a Saturday. My wife, Maura, noticed first. She noticed everything. We were living near Cabra then, and money wasn’t falling from the sky for us either. One night she saw me counting coins at the kitchen table and said, “Is that for the school again?”
I waited for the lecture, but she just sighed and put two euro beside the pile. “Don’t be making a saint of yourself,” she said. “You’re only a man with bad knees.”
For years, that was how it went. Quietly. No speeches. No big rescue. Just a few accounts cleared before a child had to stand embarrassed at the hatch. Sometimes I’d ask the secretary, “Any of them stuck this week?” and she’d know what I meant without looking at me. She never said my name. I never asked for thanks.
The winter that mattered most was 2018, when the cold got into every wall and the yard was white in the mornings. There was a girl in first year, small as a sparrow, who used to sit on the bench near the PE hall with a book open, even at lunch. She had the sharp concentration of someone trying not to be seen. I’d seen her in the canteen queue twice, then not at all. One day I found her in the corridor, pretending to tie her laces while the smell of chips and soup came out through the doors.
I asked if she was lost. She said no. I asked if she’d eaten. She smiled too quickly and said she wasn’t hungry. That smile stayed with me all day.
The next morning, I paid what was on her account and added enough for a few weeks. I thought that would be the end of it. But at lunchtime, she came to my room and stood in the doorway. Children rarely came in there unless something was broken. She looked at the buckets, the ladder, the old kettle, and then at me.
“Was it you?” she asked.
I could have lied. I nearly did. But there was something in her face that told me she’d had enough of adults pretending not to see things.
“Just this once,” I said.
Her eyes filled, but she didn’t cry. She said, “My dad’s in hospital. My mam’s trying.”
I nodded because there are moments when words are just furniture in
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
