ALMA MATER

School with the Sacred Heart of Mary sisters was austere enough but intellectual curiosity was encouraged, Katharine Bulbulia recalls:

MY SCHOOL YEARS were spent with the religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary - first in Roslyn Park, Sandymount, Dublin, and later at Ferrybank Convent in Waterford. I started at Roslyn Park as a four-year-old on the day it opened back in the late forties.

The school was in a beautiful Gandon building, a magical place, and as a result I've always had a love of classical architecture. I have fond memories of a charming nun called Mother Stanislaus, whom we called Santa Claus.

As I approached my teens I was becoming rebellious and my parents decided that I would do better at boarding school. So they sent me to Ferrybank. Being removed from everything that was familiar was a big wrench.

However, my spirit of adventure, won through. At the time I was overdosing on the Chalet School stories and I imagined similarities between my life in Waterford and the girls at school in the Alps.

On the whole I enjoyed my time at Ferrybank but from time to time I found the discipline difficult to take. The lives we led were not that dissimilar to those of the postulants. We were expected to take our meals in silence in the refectory. Only if the headmistress said "Benedicamus Domino" and we replied "Deo gratias" were we allowed to talk. Our dormitory cubicles were called cells like those of the novitiates.

I was often lonely and cold at school but learning to endure privations has stood to me in later life. Although the school was in many ways rigid and conformist, the nuns were good, decent people who fostered intellectual curiosity. There was a great emphasis on reading and both schools had excellent libraries.

I did my Leaving Cert when I was 16. By then I was enjoying school 50 much that I began to wonder whether I had a vocation. Any girl who was considered a likely candidate was sent to talk to Reverend Mother. My family were less than enamoured of the idea. As a compromise they suggested that I spend a year doing something else and then make up my mind. I remember Reverend Mother saying that it was like putting out a precious flower to be trampled upon by the world.

As soon as I left Ferrybank, the idea of being a nun evaporated. I spent a year in St Mary's College, Cathal Brugha Street, Dublin, studying household management and then went to UCD to do old and middle English and French.