Easter has come and gone and if you’re a student it’s time to start thinking of exams. 

So this week’s story has a touch of the Father Brian D’Arcy about it, in that it's a tale of why honesty is always the best policy in our school days.

This story starts in the late 1980s when as a boy at St. Michael’s College I decided to support Torquay United as my lower league football team.

Unbelievably as it might sound now, this was because my friends who supported Manchester United used to say that it was easy to follow Liverpool who always won things.

Those Manchester United fans were the McGirrs, from the family of coal and oil merchants just outside of Fivemiletown. We used to play football together though nowadays readers will probably know Shane McGirr for prowess in another sport.

It’s not just Shane though who’s rallied ahead in the years since then. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Manchester United rallied a fair bit as well. But the circuit has sort of evened out now between the two giants of English football.

Torquay, meanwhile, down in England’s National League South, are a shadow of their former mostly Fourth Division selves. But they did have their moments in the sun, including back in September 1987 against Tottenham Hotspur.

That September night in a League Cup game tiny Torquay faced Tottenham who had such legends as Ray Clemence and Ossie Ardiles in their line-up. The small seaside club hadn’t a hope on paper but somehow tiny Torquay stunned the Spurs.

The man who scored that night was a midfielder named Derek Dawkins, a Londoner born not too far from Tottenham and nicknamed ‘The Dude.’

To this day, he remains a legend in the annals of Torquay’s history.

And for half a season, he was a legend too in the surrounds of the Fermanagh and Western League.

That didn’t mean he played for Fivemiletown at The Valley or laced his boots for Lisnaskea or Lisbellaw, as he’d once done for Leicester City.

Nope – in the autumn of 1989 Derek Dawkins starred in the poetic pitch of an English Literature class at the top of Enniskillen’s leafy Chanterhill Road.

In an age long before it was fashionable to self-identify as something else, I was Derek Dawkins reading passages from The Great Gatsby and the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, on the A-Level syllabus of that time.

So how did I become Derek Dawkins when in the words of the immortal College Vice-President Dr. McCusker: “There is not and never has been a Dawkins in any of the generations of your family that I have ever known.”

But we’ll come back to the inimitable Doc later on. Let’s go back to that first day Derek Dawkins became a student at St. Michael’s College.

It was at what we might call a regular midweek fixture, an afternoon English Literature class.

The regular teacher Joe Quinn was absent. A substitute turned up in his place, a very enthusiastic young lady who said she’d be there for a few days.

And boys being boys, Chinese whispers grew into a game of make-believe names.

When she asked us to introduce ourselves, half the Manchester United team sheet of the late 1980s sat at one end of the class and then Liverpool at the other. Then there was me, stuck in the middle like a Stealers Wheel song.

Surrounded by a rock-solid defence of such names as Paul McGrath, Steve Bruce, Alan Hansen and Steve Staunton, I became Derek Dawkins in the middle of the park.

Personally, I blame Bryan Robson because it was his existence that kick-started the whole thing. When our sub teacher didn’t know him, she wasn’t a football fan.

The rest of that week I stayed as Derek Dawkins when we read passages from our poetry books and novels we were studying, in advance of the Christmas exams.

I’d read one verse and then maybe pass to Ronnie Whelan or bloody Bryan Robson.

Friday came around fast and we said our goodbyes to the caretaker manager.

By the time Monday came around, Saturday’s football would have been played, and we’d be back in Joe Quinn’s class reading Scott Fitzgerald before we knew it.

But when that class came around, it wasn’t Great Gatsby’s green light that I saw flashing. It was a great big red warning light that I hadn’t seen coming.

Again, our regular teacher was missing and the substitute was on his chair in the dugout.

By now there was a frantic scramble to re-identify, a ripping off of jerseys bearing the names of Robson, Bruce, McGrath and Hansen.

Very quickly, they all went back to being good old Fermanagh Smyths, McCaffreys and McCuskers.

And that should have been that.

But the substitute teacher rises up and says ‘right, time to start reading.’

Unfortunately, she remembered nobody’s name except for Honest Derek seated down at the back.

Yes, a first reading from Derek Dawkins in the Book of Trouble. And so it began and thus continued, with every weekend passing nervously as a wait on the football results.

By Monday, the substitute teacher would hopefully be gone.

Unfortunately, the league tables and the weeks rolled into Christmas. Next thing I’m seated at a desk writing about stuff like the meaning of that mystical green light on Gatsby’s shore.

And of course, I’m not writing as Derek Dawkins. So when the exams come to be marked, the teacher notes that there’s been no paper submitted by the unforgettable Derek Dawkins. And being a very conscientious woman who didn’t deserve such trickery, she went to see Dr. McCusker.

When Christmas passed, I got called into his office – hence the famous lines about there never being a Dawkins in my family.

He knew because he was a Brookeborough man and his parents had been teachers in Brookeborough School.

Luckily in a time when too many teachers in Catholic schools had a fondness for the strap, Dr. McCusker was something of a gentle man in all senses.

He let me off with a task of several hundred lines that night, stating that ‘Derek Dawkins is not my name and there has never been a Dawkins in my family'. 

Even without those lines, I’d never have forgotten Derek Dawkins as a footballer. These days, I’m a friend of his on Facebook and he’s still a Torquay legend.

I don’t know what happened to that substitute teacher but if she ever got interested in football maybe she’s a big fan of Exeter, Torquay’s main rivals!

Meanwhile that bloody Bryan Robson’s a teacher now.

And despite the childish antics that led me to into the Vice-President’s office, I’m a Doctor of Education now too.