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My childhood was filled up with the regular pursuits. Outdoors the schoolyard was a girlish arena of skipping (ones-and-in-bys, twos-and-in-bys, Dutch, and French), in-and-out the-windows, hopscotch, kick-the-stone, boys-boys, and red-rover-red-rover. Indoors there were marbles and a never-ending game of jacks with the subsidiary rounds and challenges: memory is dim but, sweep the floor? in the basket? over the hatch? up your hole? (No, surely not.) Above, beyond, and in between was music. The organizing force was Trinity College, a British system of external examinations in which children throughout the colonies could be graded and attain levels in choral singing, choral speech, piano and most memorable of all, theory.

Trinity College differed in two ways from everything else we did: it was secular, unrelated to our church-ridden world, and it was outside the command of the nuns. In a gender flip, we were brought up in a universe run by women, educated women with authority. The only men in our school were servants of the nuns: janitors and drivers. Our grey stone building was attached to the motherhouse; a passageway led from there to the Basilica, and the Basilica was joined on the other side to the bishop's residence, known as The Palace. We were part of a magnificent, sprawling granite kingdom dating to the mid-19th century. But in the territory of Trinity College, the nuns were part of a larger game, and they observed the rigid strictures in a way that made our everyday slavish attention to all things religious and scholastic seem flighty.

Everything about Trinity College had mystery and lore. In addition to the number assigned to each grade level, there was a parallel terminology: First Steps, Preparatory, Advanced Preparatory, Intermediate, and Higher Local. (What did that mean?) But it was hard to confound us with curious nomenclature, we who were brought up with a vocabulary that included mortification, extreme unction, holy orders, transubstantiation, novice, postulants, breviary, missals. What word could seem odd to us who memorized these lines from the Litany of the Sacred Heart: "tabernacle of the Most High, burning furnace of charity, abode of justice and love, abyss of all virtues, loaded down with opprobrium, bruised for our offenses, pierced with a lance, source of all consolation." It would take more than andante con moto or piu mosso to get a rise out of us.

Of theory itself, there was the appeal of getting inside a logical, complete and independent system of knowledge, of knowing strict rules, of working things out. Some people get this elation from mathematics, but the only joy I felt during algebra or geometry class was when a note came to the door saying I was wanted for an extra orchestra practice. With theory, there were the laws of harmony, and the satisfaction of seeing why the notes of a chord fit together as they did; of knowing how to arrive at this key from that key, understanding which notes fell within a particular key and which were outsiders (accidentals.) There was an excitement in knowing how to write out the harmony implied by a few given numbers in "figured bass," in knowing how to construct a major or minor scale. Within the minor scales, there were two possibilities, harmonic and melodic, each with its own patterns to be memorized and, with luck, understood. There was the delicious appeal of the rich vocabulary, like cadences - two successive chords used at the ending of a piece or a phrase. The typical "Amen," for example, is called a plagal cadence, but there are also the perfect cadence, the imperfect, the phrygian and the interrupted cadence.

Along with cadences, there was the wild and wonderful vocabulary of notation. Notes which since have gone the dull American route of mathematical description - quarter notes, eighths, sixteenths - were colourful in our Trinity College world. They were quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers and, but of course, hemidemisemiquavers. Quarter notes were crotchets, and half notes minimums. Once or twice a year we encountered the longest note of all - the whole note, curiously known as the "breve." And I haven't come yet to the Italian vocabulary used in music: allargando, fortissimo, prestissimo, allegro molto, decrescendo poco a poco, tierce de picardie. Also diminished by bland Americanization, which means Canada adopted it too, are the now prosaic "grace notes," or ornaments. To us, these were acciaccatura, appoggiatura, and mordents. No wonder the words in our spellers seemed easy. Standing alongside the wall of the music parlour, we were quizzed and drilled on these words, the same as at a spelling bee, luxuriating in the fanciful linguistic delight of such magical words. The intrigue didn't lie only in the spelling or pronunciation of these words, the whole package was like being part of a secret club. I'm reading now from scribbled childish notes in my manuscript book of perhaps the mid-1960s:

The appoggiatura takes: a) one-half of the value of a note [divisable] by two (dotted or otherwise) b) two-thirds of a long note [divisable] by three (dotted crotchet or more) c) one-third of short note [divisable] by three (dotted quaver or less)

And in case anyone asks:

The acciaccatura in Andante or faster, write as demi-semiquaver. Slower than Andante, writes as hemidemisemiquaver."

Such were the mystery and intrigue of Trinity College. If you're stuck at a cocktail party, it might stand you in good stead.

The theory examination was held on the first Saturday morning in December, conflicting every year with the Santa Claus Parade. We were used to spending Saturday mornings at school for glee club, but there was still a sneaking pleasure being in the building "after hours," as if we had been let in on a secret. We didn't have to wear our weekday uniforms, but we couldn't dress down. Jeans didn't exist then, except perhaps as dungarees worn by boys in summer or farmers in books. We wore skirts and dresses as if we were going to perform, although all we were going to do was sit an exam in a classroom.

There have been many examinations in my life: school, university, music school, grad school. Often these were held in gymnasiums with rows and rows of desks, rows so long you needed an usher to find a place. Pacing vigilantes practised the kind of policing that makes the innocent feel guilty. I was afraid to raise my head for a second for fear of being caught cheating, although I have never cheated. And I had to re-learn sneezing, reining in my dramatic convulsions lest Gestapo eyes interpret my full body writhing as a sneaky peek at my neighbour. But no exam setting could compare to the solemnity of the Trinity College theory exams, which began when we were as young as eight.

Once a year, on that examination day, the senior classroom at Presentation Convent was transformed to a sacred place, a temple to Trinity College. The room had neat rows of old-fashioned desks fastened to the floor; the desks had tops that opened to allow for storage of books and scribblers, an indentation for pens and pencils, and a hole for an inkwell. At the front of the room was the rostrum that held the teacher's desk. There were small side altars with statues of the Infant of Prague, the Sacred Heart, Our Blessed Lady. On Trinity College day, it was as if the room had been shrunk, pushed through a C.S. Lewis hole in the back wall and replaced by a brand new chamber, the atmosphere was so altered. Adding to the unfamiliarity was the presence of two boys, thought to be Protestants studying privately with some retired nun. On our diplomas, which arrived months later, this humble classroom appeared as the "Newfoundland Centre."

We waited outside the locked room until minutes before the set examination time. We entered and found our assigned places. We were used to a "no talking" dictum, but this really was no talking. What would the punishment have been if we had? Disqualified, I suppose, but as with most children's punishments, it is not the punishment that carries weight; the currency lies in what it conjures up in the child's mind. Manuscript paper for our rough work was lying on our desks when we arrived. When everything was settled, a nun would arrive at the door, pass in a package to the attending sister who, standing on the rostrum in front of us, broke the seal on a large manila envelope. The papers were passed out in silence. What I cannot remember is, did we pray? Before all our classes in school we said a prayer, so not to do so would seem odd. On the other hand, we were in secular territory and there may have been rules forbidding this. If I could track down those Protestant boys, likely they'd remember.

The examination papers were long, a single sheet printed on both sides. Some questions required naming chords, or analysing short passages of music. In these cases, the staves, clefs and music appeared on the sheet, printed with the authority of a publication, awaiting our answers. These were not papers that had been "stenciled off" with a blotchy purple ink, as often school tests were; no Gestetner or Xerox. These were printed documents, formal and intimidating. We could take nothing into the examination room except a cartridge pen, a pencil for rough work, and a razor blade to correct errors. Erasers were forbidden. We tried hard not to make a mistake, and using rough work helped, but even when copying from rough work it's easy to err. If so, we had to get the ink off with the razor blade and write in the correction. (Try doing it, in an idle moment, without putting a hole in the paper.)

The sophistication of the examination questions depended on the level. In higher grades, there was transposition, harmonic analysis and modulation [key changes], intervals and figuring, and harmony. My diploma for First Steps, taken when I was in grade two, reads:

Marjorie Doyle, Pupil of Presentation Convent, Cathedral Square duly passed in Pitch, Notes and Rests, Time, Keys and Scales with honours at the Local Examination held at the Newfoundland Centre in December 1961.

The first missed Santy parade.

After the examination, we had to leave our rough work on our desks but it was returned to us later. To add to the suspense, it was weeks, perhaps months, before the results came back.

"Trinity College's in," a girl-spy would rush to tell you in the bathroom. The bathroom, a big room with three or four cubicles and a strong smell of Jeye's Fluid and Dustbane, was like a post office in an old outport - a centre for news and gossip.

"Ohmygodbetifailed," was the usual reply, a girl smacking her forehead in horror at the thought of what might come later that day.

The theory exam, theory classes and all our music brought us to school early, kept us late - after dark, for most of the school year - and returned us there on weekends. Our school during off-hours had its own curious ambiance. Emptied of the busy but orderly population, the majestic staircases and polished wooden bannisters seemed more stately, the corridors, with their dark hardwood floors, immense. Vacant classrooms gave off an eerie feeling, as if their quotidian life had been frozen mid-moment before the rooms and corridors emptied, spilling hordes of little girls out into the daylight. The classroom doors were wide-open to the hollow corridors. There was the implied life: the smell of apple core and pencil shavings mixing together in an unemptied waste-basket. Spelling tests and progress charts hung on the walls and, according to the liturgical season, there were May altars, June altars or the Christmas Crib - replaced in contemporary classrooms, no doubt, by pin-ups of The Backstreet Boys and banners about Thanksgiving. (Thanksgiving was unknown in Newfoundland during my childhood, the concept imported and delivered unto us later in the 1970s. The unfamiliar two-part word showed up in our speller in grade four or five: Thanksgiving Day, two words, and don't forget the capital letters. But what was it?)

And passing by the classrooms, looking through the opened doors, there'd be other remnants of the weekday life, like ragged looking gaiter-bags, stitched together by harried distracted mothers. We kept our winter boots in these small drawstring sacks, hanging them on our coat hooks in the cloakroom at the back of the classroom. The gaiter-bags, made from odds and ends of curtains and cloths from around the house, turned an empty cloakroom into a Jackson Pollock gallery. There were tell-tale signs of a classroom vacated quickly: a blackboard, not rubbed off. We never used the word "erase;" it was always Str, can I rub off the board? Answer: May you rub off the board? Yes, you may. How hungry was our childhood that to "rub off the board" was a cherished task. We were not tearing off after school to waiting mini-vans that would transport us to dance class or swimming parties or Tubby Tubular climbing gyms. We hung around, looking for chores that would delay our departure. And we were all day long finding excuses to open and close the windows - eight feet high or more, raised from the bottom, lowered from the top with a ten-foot pole. It was an unwieldy pole and heavy. Sometimes a girl would be five minutes staring up, weaving, trying to navigate the hook into the hole at the top of the window, like fishing upside down.

There were other coveted duties, the best of which was "to go `round with a note." In one part of our school there was no PA system and, as there were often announcements, a messenger was essential. I always wanted to be the one chosen, out of restlessness, or a desire to get out into the corridors to find another girl to talk to. I had a vague yearning, too, to be a dutiful lieutenant - I often felt tempted to salute and bow when I would knock on a classroom door and be greeted by a girl inside. (There was competition every year to get the first desk in the row nearest the door so you could be the one to answer knocks.) Sometimes knocks brought the principal, but usually it was a girl with a note. The note, which would be passed to the teacher and then read aloud or not accordingly, might be "Jenny Foley is to go to her piano lesson at 2:00 today, not 2:30." The trouble with that kind of note was the short shelf-life - it went to only one classroom. The best notes were the generics which all classes had to hear. In my old school, now a multi-million dollar condo property in downtown St. John's - a former lieutenant-governor lives in my grade three classroom - we were spread over four floors. The real estate flyer could tell you how much linear territory and cubic space we covered when doing a note; the realtor could have used me as poster girl when flogging these units, so well do I know the territory. A note with high currency might be: "Sister Mary St. John of God would like all the money for the Monsefu mission collected by tomorrow afternoon." Or it might be a change in time or cancellation of a glee club rehearsal.

It was glee club that brought us into another dimension of the Trinity College world. Theory was fall work; in the spring we concentrated on our "practical," when the Trinity College examiners "came out" from England to hear and evaluate us. These annual spring visits, which took place in the grand parlour of the convent in order to allow us to use the best piano on the premises, featured a curious tableau: child at the keyboard, nervous; foreigner at a far-away desk, scribbling; nun outside the door, listening. The value of a pass in the autumn theory exam was its use in the practical exams. When it came to the mysterious Viva Voce, the word "exempt" was marked on our reports, and we were given full marks for that section. The practical exam consisted of solos, studies, scales and exercises, ears tests and sight reading. The drawing room was huge and majestic. I'd like to see a photo gallery now of the examiners who were "sent out" each year. In my memory they were always the same: tall, gaunt, remote and cross. During the course of the exam, which probably lasted 20-30 minutes, depending on the grade level, the examiner spoke only a few words, just enough to request which scales and arpeggios he'd like to hear.

"I should like to hear f minor, please."

Think! key signature, quick, but not so quick you don't get it right.

"Very well. Now, f# minor, if you please."

Yikes! The nun who taught us was always outside, her ear bent to the door, ready to comment to us afterwards on our performance. I think I can date the post-gig slump that I later suffered as a radio broadcaster from the Trinity College exams of the early years: going into the studio, believing myself prepared and always coming out with a sense of having failed. I worked on various radio shows and for years hosted a daily CBC national radio show. I don't ever recall leaving the studio feeling satisfied; there was always dejection - "It could have been better," some inner voice chastised.

A few weeks after the examinations, report cards arrived. They were small - 4" x 6" white cards - and were divided into five sections, allowing for comments on each part of the exam. The adjudicators wrote copious comments in a tiny script, in scrawls that make the doctor's prescription look like a monk's careful calligraphy. I use a magnifying glass now to read (probably for the first time) some typical remarks:

A good speed. The performance caught the wit of the music.
Kept it going, in spite of slips
A little more RH [right hand] legato tone needed at times. Same lack of legato in scales in 3rds; but all the rest excellent
Fluent throughout and clear part-playing. Try to gain more rise and fall in climax. Do make this melody sing out strongly in cantabile tone.

These cards were soon followed by diplomas. One year, in addition to the diploma and card, there came a cash prize. When I cashed the money order, in pounds stirling, it came to about $25, but there was the honour of having won the highest mark in a particular grade in a particular category "throughout all the empire" we were told. The prize was known as The Guineas, but the diploma reads simply, "Awarded an Exhibition for achievement in pianoforte playing."

In addition to the practical piano and theory exams, there were graded examinations as well for choral singing, and choral speech. We were about 110 strong, our glee club, ranging in age from nine to 14. We were dressed impeccably in our school uniform: long-sleeved white blouses and navy blue serge tunics, with straps in front that formed a V. We had school crests sewn on the left strap and we wore blue and white saddle oxfords, with white ankle socks. We were encouraged to bring to school extra shoes or blouses that could be handed out privately by the nuns to poorer girls, so that we all looked the same. Our deportment was perfect, anything less was unacceptable. Our convent school had zero tolerance policies before that phrase was thought up: zero-tolerance for touching our hair or faces, sniffling, talking or whispering, sneezing. I have spent a good bit of my adult life sneezing - my doctor thinks it's allergies - but it is nothing more than the natural release of all the suppressed sneezes of my childhood. Teachers and parents universally deplore the junior-high age because kids are "impossible." Not only were we not impossible, we were perfect. The secret to achieving that kind of discipline can be found with the nuns who, one hopes, are busily writing guide books for parents.

Most of the girls couldn't read music, so we learned our music "off by heart." We had good ears and good memories. We counted (keeping track of the beats required for each note) without any visible sign we were doing so. I tried using my toes. I'm sure the dramatic toe cramps I suffer today, embarrassing for companions walking along the street with me, come from trying to train my toes to move individually through long melismatic passages (many notes sung to one syllable) of Gregorian chant. One day I realized toes weren't necessary, that it was easy to count on your fingers discreetly with the Presentation Convent clutch. This was the required hand position for glee club at my school: the left hand turned palm up and cupped slightly, the right hand neatly folded across it palm down with the fingers overhanging the left-and. The two thumbs interlocked, serving two purposes: they held the hands together and they formed a cross reminding us of you know who, and how he died. The neighbouring school - the competition, as it were - was run by Mercy nuns; they had their own way of doing things down there. In the Mercy Convent clutch the left hand was held the same as ours, but the right hand was cupped and placed in the left, palm up. This is a curious distinction and was perhaps a source of great wonder to adjudicators who came from away year after year to judge these choirs. Was the distinction based in some philosophical, religious or social difference, or did it reflect some sort of territorial truce worked out by our founders in 19th -century Ireland? In any event, the Mercy bums were singing without the benefit of the cross.

At our Christmas and spring concerts we had parents in the audience; in the music festivals we had competitors and the general public as well. In the Trinity College exams there was an audience of one. We performed in the basement auditorium of our convent school for one person, an examiner from England who sat at a table about half-way down the hall, listened, and wrote. It seems odd, but as with many aspects of childhood, it's only odd in retrospect; it was normal enough at the time. We followed a syllabus with test pieces so, as we stood in our little hall singing for a generic, no-name stern-looking Brit, other colonial children around the globe stood similarly singing the same pieces, for another generic. In April or May, with the biting St. John's wind and the inevitable sleet storms reminding us that spring in Newfoundland always mocks the calendar, we would walk to school, descend to the auditorium and practise over and over Linden Lea or other pastoral works of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Finally the great day would come. We stood in the auditorium, scrubbed and brushed, groomed and ready. Our St. John's voices mixed a charming townie lilt with a hint of ancestral Ireland, but we brought to the blend a haughty broadening of our vowels, in deference to those delicate English ears. And then, having never seen an orchard, much less a spring, we would ask with wide-eyed excitement, earnestly, as if we really cared:

Have you seen an apple orchard in the spring, in the spring?
An English apple orchard in the spring?
When the spreading trees are hoary

With their wealth of promised glory
And the mavis pipes his story in the spring, in the spring.

Have you seen a merry bridal in the spring, in the spring?
In an English apple orchard in the spring When the bride and maidens wear
Apple blossoms in their hair
Apple blossoms everywhere in the spring, in the spring.

If you have not, then you know not in the spring, in the spring
Half the colour, beauty, wonder of the spring
No sight can I remember half so precious, half so tender
As the apple blossoms render in the spring, in the spring.

Did our innocence and charm bring a tear to his eye, our sweetness stir up memories of an evening stroll from his youth? Or did he simply perform his journeyman's duty, commenting on the purity of our vowels, the execution of our consonants, and the musicality of our phrasing?

Trinity College was different from everything else we did. Yes, it was secular - no incense, sanctuary lamps or Latin here. But the absence of the church wasn't the only difference. It was so … so English, as opposed to the Irish essence of our day. It was a world intact. Examination papers arrived in big parcels from worlds unknown; they were packaged up and sent back there for grading. Reports and diplomas followed next. There was a detachment about this system, an absoluteness, an infallibility as if it all belonged to a disembodied world. The Land of Oz, Alice's Wonderland, and the North Pole were vivid to us, we knew those landscapes and their people. Trinity College was something vague and foreign, an entity unto itself out there somewhere, like an early version of cyberspace.

These days an adjudicator speaking in front of large groups, must entertain; restless parents with an eye on their watches and a hand on the cell-phone ringer, wait eagerly for a joke or anecdote to brighten up the business of musical commentary. If the whole team of Trinity College examiners had a scrap of personality between them, we never knew it. Names? Don't know. But twice a year the reports, theory and practical, would come back with the rubber-stamped approval of Mr. Myers Foggin. I picture him snoozing in his London club, an after-dinner port at one side, a cigar burning itself out on the other. His young secretary passes him a ream of diplomas.

"Mr. Foggin, sir," the secretary says in a precise Oxbridge accent. "Here are the results for NEWfinlind. The convent did well again, sir."

"Thank you, Edward. And how did Tasmania fare?"