Distant Gregorian echoes

My first school was a local kindergarten called Miss Carr's on Highfield Road, Rathgar, Dublin, a couple of minutes walk from home. Miss Carr was a warm, slope-shouldered woman with a soft face and a firm voice that suggested safety but command. The school was based in Miss Carr's home, a large, red-bricked Victorian house. Miss Carr taught the older pupils; the two infant classes were taken by Miss Murphy. The diminutive Miss Doherty took third class. She did not wear the regulation blue nylon, chalk-dusted housecoat, but specialised in pert suits, cherry lipstick, heart-shaped spectacles and exquisite red shoes with high heels. The hierarchy at Miss Carr's was very fluid; once you were judged ready you moved on to the next class.

Reading was very important at Miss Carr's and we were taught phonetically, now almost standard, but in the early 1960s very much ahead of its time. Many of the children who lived on our street, boys and girls, went to Miss Carr's. Thousands of children passed through her hands and she schooled two and three generations of some families. She maintained a keen interest in her past pupils - children who had left her at the ripe old age of seven!

The joy of Miss Carr's was its proximity and its familiarity. It never acquired the institutional feel of school; it was almost an extension of our domestic landscape. Not that Miss Carr didn't run a tight ship. There was much learning by rote, tables chanted in unison, lists of spelling mournfully recited. I hear them still, echoes of that distant, Gregorian chorus.

After First Communion I was sent to Notre Dame des Missions, a convent school on Churchtown Road. Notre Dame was a posh school by our lights (my two elder brothers had been sent to the Christian Brothers) and a much more daunting prospect than Miss Carr's. Firstly, there was the uniform, then there was the halfhour expedition by bus four times daily to get there and back, and it had none of the cosy perspectives of Miss Carr's - here was a real school with a purpose-built geography.

I was a quiet girl and the nuns took up cudgels to tackle my shyness. I was given tasks to do "to take me out of myself" - opening the classroom door, wiping the blackboards, carrying the tea tray to the staffroom. I was the girl who accompanied to the toilets those who felt ill - and who spread sawdust on the floor if their aim was not true. I don't know if the nuns' campaign did much good. If anything it probably made me more defiant in my shyness. But in retrospect, I see the concern that prompted it, the fear for the introverted in a social and competitive world. The remark that most frequently appeared on my reports was "must contribute more in class".

I stayed at Notre Dame through to Leaving Cert, though I found the transition to secondary school difficult. All that moving about, the complicated timetables, the airport throngs on the corridors. I was bookish and definitely not sporty. I scraped on to the F netball team; my hockey career was spent entirely dribbling on the sidelines. The deficiencies I have honed in adulthood were cultivated early in my schooldays - my chronic unpunctuality, my bafflement in the face of numeracy. But I was a swot, to use the parlance of the times. How I wished I could be one of those girls airily claiming to have done nothing, but flying through exams nonetheless. But I was a plodder; I had to work.

The teacher I best remember from that time was Sister Thomas, who taught us history and English. From Scotland, she had an acerbic wit and a finely tuned sense of irony, a quality I thought most nuns had to surrender on taking final vows. She embodied the notion that it was possible to be an individual even within the confines of an institution as all-embracing as the Catholic church. Since I was deeply ambiguous about conformity - unconsciously trying to subvert it, yet longing for it at the same time - she proved a valuable role model. She was also a fine teacher, thoughtful and rigorous.

I liked the discipline of school, the routine and security of it, but I was equally glad when the time came to leave. I had grown impatient with the long apprenticeship of it, the seemingly endless years of rehearsal. At 17, I was ready for real life to start.

Mary Morrissy's latest novel, The Pretender, was published earlier this year