Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story

by Bono

Long before my teenage life would be crushed and uplifted by the two great forces of girls and music, I developed a secret life with local chess players. Niall Byrne, from two doors up, Joseph Marks from Cedarwood Park, two brilliant boys. And fun too. As we got better, it became harder to find good games, so we started playing in adult chess tournaments. It doesn’t take a psychological genius to figure out why adult slaying was a thrill beyond any other. I loved going up against grown-ups who would start out dismissively reading their newspapers—so beneath them to be playing children. Lightning chess was a favorite. To be sitting there at age ten, annoying the face off people five times your age, chasing them around a chessboard. That was a whole other order of fun. It was dawning on me that while I could do stuff quite easily that a lot of people found hard, I found difficult a lot of stuff that others found easy. I’m not sure if it’s dyslexia, because I’d had no problems reading, but while I was doing okay at school, I was starting to get anxious that I wouldn’t excel. My quality of work had improved when I’d first arrived at Mount Temple, and I’d done better in class than at St. Patrick’s, but when Iris died, I lost all concentration. Teachers lamented my scrawly handwriting when my father’s letters to them about me were such beautiful calligraphy. They asked why I hadn’t noticed leaving complete sections out of essays or why I could do higher maths but not lower. I wa...