From Greek myths to Hollywood movies, competitiveness – particularly between women – has long fascinated us. So is it a healthy desire to excel, or an all-consuming need to beat everyone else? Polly Devlin wonders …

Miss Eily McKeown was an inspired teacher at my primary school in Moortown in Co Tyrone. She had over 40 children of different ages and in different classes under her care, sitting in tight rows, yet she managed to keep us all occupied and to educate us well – in singing and art as well as geography and history and the three Rs. We were all supposed to bring kindling or a few logs to school every so often and I remember with keen pleasure Miss McKeown setting my bundle on a shelf as an extempore exhibition – was she before her time, or what, seeing art in a bundle of twigs? But I also remember the amount of time I spent the night before cutting the twigs so that each one was exactly the same length and carefully binding the bundle so that it was a perfect roll. And why had I done that? Competitiveness. I didn’t know the word at the time but I knew the way of it. I wanted to be praised and I wanted to be best even if it was only something that was going to be burned.

I remember e’en as I carried my cute little bundle of sticks that I was wearing a red velvet object trimmed with white fur called a pixie bonnet and I must have looked like a visual cliché out of a Brothers Grimm story – irresistibly tease-worthy. Frank McKee, a Big Bad Boy, was not one to miss such an opportunity. “Santy’s come early this year,” he announced  to the school yard and a peal of laughter rang round. Ridicule is not easy to suffer and I was, as they say, cut to the bone. I probably suffered about the kindling too but if I did it was worth it. Ridicule made me even more competitive. The I’ll show’ em syndrome. All that compensatory bollocks. I still crave praise, though now I can live without it – have to.

Then one day Miss McK gave us homework. We were set to write a poem. A poem! How could anyone make up a poem? Poems just were – eternal artifacts, existing forever in their rhythms and rhymes. I was in despair at the impossibility of making such a thing, but that evening I watched open-mouthed and gormless as my elder sister effortlessly wrote a poem. It began: Little Red Riding Hood went through the wood / To bring her old grandmother some very nice food. I was fair overwhelmed with envy. She was just a year older and I’d always competed with her, which she must have found wearisome, and she always won. But this poem beat all. So, gentle reader, I stole it and hurried off to school, sans pixie bonnet, and presented it to Miss McKeown as my very own inspired work. I have blanked on what my sister must have thought and done when she heard her poem being read out in class as mine. I am still horrified by my actions, but there it was – life was a challenge which I had to try to win, although ever since I’ve tried not to compete at someone else’s expense. And I think perhaps my whole life since has been predicated on competition. Indeed it was only because I entered a competition and won (the Vogue Talent Contest) that I left Ireland and lived the life I have since led.

 

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE MARCH ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW.