Have great fun at school. There is one fellow, nicknamed ‘Babylonian Dick’ with whom I am ceaselessly fighting. We are like two young bears, always quarrelling and arguing with the greatest good-humour. I go off into fits of laughter, even when at home, on thinking of the tortures we inflict on each other. ‘Dicky’ Lenihan, the Irish teacher, and ‘Pa’ Keating are two characters such as Dickens or ‘The Spectator’ would delight in, and every day there is some new joke current about the doings or sayings of one of them. ‘Pa’ is, I am sure, over sixty, since he taught my aunt Wally ((Walburga (Wally) Swertz was born in Cork 15 Jan 1881 to Hans Conrad and Walburga Swertz, the eldest of their nine children. She became the first professor of German at University College Cork in 1911. She went to Germany for the summer holidays in 1914, and was unable to return home when the world war began in August. She lived with her aunt Matilda Swertz in Krefeld, taught in a secondary school standing in for a teacher doing military service, became ill in 1917 and died of tuberculosis on 12 Jan. 1918 aged 37.)) when a girl, but he is still as sharp as an eagle, and has an extraordinary quaint and humorous manner about him. ‘Dicky’, on the other hand, is middle-aged, and not so sharp. Our chief delight is to flatter him in all manner of ways, and he, apparently at all events, takes it all in. ‘Dicky’ teaches Irish and ‘Pa’ maths.
