Barmaid in the university of life

The Summer That Changed Me - 1987: Behind the bar in Caherdaniel, Rosita Boland discovered more joy in discussion and debate than in her four years atTrinity College

Contrary to most of my peers, I couldn't wait to leave my college years behind. For various reasons, I was seriously underwhelmed by university life, chiefly because the number of social graces I possessed at that time would have fitted into half a walnut. So, less than a week after finishing my finals, I joyfully high-tailed it off to south-west Kerry, leaving college life behind forever without the slightest pang.

My brother David had fixed me up with a job as a barmaid in Caherdaniel, where we had gone on holiday as a family many times, and where he had now settled. I was to share his rented house in Bunavalla, down from the glorious Coomakista Pass, and work in Ted's Bar for the summer, in Caherdaniel village.

Then and now, David remains solid-gold in the brother department, but his housekeeping skills at that point in his life belonged to the Stone Age. His other sister is a terrific cook, so he was delighted to have me along for the summer - until he discovered my housekeeping skills were about as advanced as his.

Neither of us cleaned the oven of our very old farmhouse for the entire summer - and this was an oven that had required serious cleaning before we had ever moved in. We adopted a policy of "out of sight, out of mind", and cooked on the stove-top most of the time to avoid having to look inside the oven. Spaghetti Bolognese was (and is) David's culinary speciality, so we ate a lot of it that summer, since I didn't possess any culinary specialities at the time.

Ted's was owned by Ted Butler, who came from a very old Co Kerry family. The Butlers had owned Skelligs before the State bought it from them. That summer, Jenny was running the place, while her father - big, white-haired Ted - wandered in and out of the bar with his Jack Russell permanently at his heels: the image of constancy, although we all had an inkling that the place was going to be sold at the end of season.

I was trained in by fellow barmaid and comrade, Anne Donnelly. After pulling my first pint of Guinness, I stared in fascination as the old man who ordered it actually drank it. All of it! The ability to pull a good pint of Guinness remains to date one of my proudest career achievements.

Technically, I was not a good barmaid - I regularly "forgot" to empty out and wash the ashtrays, since I loathed the smell of them so much; I was clumsy and never quite got the hang of changing the barrels; and I sometimes became horribly muddled with big rounds, but despite all this, I discovered I loved being behind the bar.

When you're behind the bar, every non-local assumes you're a bank of information on everything local. I had to talk to people in Ted's, whether I liked it not, and that summer, I literally learned how to talk to people. I learned to talk even when I didn't feel like it; how to be diplomatic when people had had too much to drink; how to chat away and start a conversation; how to know when to listen; and when to ask questions.

While I was grand at pulling pints, there were a few problem customers, the ones who came in and asked for cocktails. Cocktails! In rural Co Kerry in 1987! "Margarita? Tom Collins? Manhattan? Or how about dry white wine?" the odd hapless tourist incanted to me.

I would just look at them and laugh. If they didn't want Gin and Tonics, or Bloody Marys, or a glass of Pedrotti, they were generally on a cocktail hiding to nothing in our no-frills bar. I was so affronted by the Americans' barbaric practice of putting Coke into whiskey that I tried refusing to serve this combination, until they complained to Anne. She explained nicely to me that the customer is always right, even when ordering hog-wash.

It wasn't all work. In good weather, I swam at Derrynane's idyllic beach, beloved by our family since childhood. I hitched to the Rose of Tralee with another barmaid friend, Chiari, and we tried selling her home-made jewellery there. I took the boat out to Skelligs, where I hadn't been since I was six. I helped haul lobster pots in the early morning. I cycled my bike the four miles home most nights, often by moonlight, watching the Skelligs glinting like stone icebergs in the Atlantic. I went to some of the discos David DJ'd in the Staigue Fort Hotel. To be impartial in the village drinking politics, I also went to the competition up the road, Freddie's Bar - a lovely place with an esoteric jug collection that proved so popular with customers that it had to be moved behind the counter, since some were prone to swiping the more unusual jugs.

And our house may have been in dire need of housekeeping that summer, but at least it was full of the wildflowers that I brought home from the hedgerows: fuchsia, montbretia, foxgloves, ferns, dog-daisies.

Our suspicions that the bar would be sold lent an additional poignancy to that summer. Reckoning that it would be my first and last summer to work in Ted's, I wanted a memento of the place I had come to love. One day, while wiping tables in the top bar, I looked more closely at a Paul Henry picture on the wall and realised it was a signed print. Jenny offered to sell it to me for a token sum, as my parting gift, on condition it stayed on the wall until I was leaving.

After a day off, I returned from the beach one evening to discover Ted looking sheepish and Jenny in a fury. Left alone, Ted had sold my signed Paul Henry print, for a mess of pottage, to some tourists who had spotted it that afternoon. So if anyone out there "bought" it one summer afternoon in Caherdaniel in 1987, I'll have you know that print is actually mine, and I'd really love to have it back.

By the end of summer, I had decided that what I liked best myself to drink in a bar was Guinness: a choice which remains constant to this day. But even at 21 I suspected I possessed the soul of an old man - possibly the soul of the old man who had drunk the first-ever pint of Guinness I pulled.

The payphone rang in the bar one day in September. It was the news that my one-year working visa to Australia had come through. I left within the week, to new adventures on the other side of the world, with a rucksack full of social graces.

The summer I spent working in Ted's was not the only special summer I've ever had - or will have - but it did change something fundamental. I learned self-confidence and the art of conversation. All human life eventually walks into a bar, and during those three months in Ted's Bar in Caherdaniel, I discovered more about the joys of conversation, debate, storytelling, banter and craic than I ever had in four years at Trinity College Dublin.

Much later, when I became a journalist, it occurred to me that being a barmaid had been a brilliant training. I never had any formal journalism training, but in Ted's that invaluable summer I learned how to listen, when to recognise instinctively when someone was telling you a good story, to get in the right questions in the shortest possible time, and to be curious without being intrusive.

David stayed on in Co Kerry after I left for Australia. Ted's was duly sold at the end of that summer, and Ted himself died not long after.

Before David moved out to the house he'd built, Anne cleaned the oven for him in the farmhouse: a superhuman achievement, since this was the self-same oven that had needed cleaning before David and I had ever moved in. It was clearly an act of love: I came back from Australia the following autumn for their wedding in Derrynane Chapel.

Series concludes on Friday with Hugh Linehan on the birth of his daughter