Then Germany invaded Poland

I was only four years of age when I went to the local school, St Peter's in Phibsboro. My mother had gone to the school and my uncle, Willy Lacey, taught there and eventually became the principal, so we had a long association with it.

My uncle was very involved in entertainment in St Peter's - in plays and musicals. In those days the school was a sort of a parish centre. Phibsboro would have been a village in 1930, and the school was at the centre of what might be called village life in Phibsborough. It was a very different kind of world.

One thing that impressed me about my uncle, was how he had a young lad from the higher class with him at lunch time and he was teaching him French. I think it's very interesting how in the past, when education was not freely available as it is now, teachers in primary schools helped youngsters of promise to make a start.

I hadn't quite reached my 10th birthday when I left the primary school and went off to Belvedere. It was a complete change. One thing we discovered was that myself and my brother Dan knew no grammar. It hadn't been taught in primary. So my father had to send the two of us off to my aunt, who apparently was an expert in grammar, and she got us started on the parsing and so forth, and we caught up in that way.

I was very much involved in the choir and the opera in school. I hadn't a great voice, although I might have thought I had. My father, however, had a wonderful bass voice and my mother used to play the piano. He'd sing and she'd play, so there was always music in the house. I started with the piano and I went on eventually to the violin, but both my music teachers had to register complete failure.

I have to say that my school years in Belvedere were extremely happy. Except, in the middle of that time we had the appalling tragedy of my father's death. My father died when I was in second year - I was 13 at the time.

We started school again after the summer holidays and on September 1st, 1939, we came out from school and the "stop press" was going around. It consisted of one sheet of newspaper and the sellers would go around shouting "stop press". Radio hadn't really caught on at the time so sending out the stop press was the only way of bringing people up to date on the news. The stop press that day was "Germany invades Poland".

The following year, in June 1940, a large group of us went down the west to Roundstone, where the school had rented a house for an Irish course. I remember there was some talk of us not returning to Dublin because of the fear of invasion. It was just after the fall of France and there was a very real scare about invasion at that time. We were too young to be frightened. We were interested in what was going on all right, but we didn't have any real understanding of it.

Father Matty Bodkin taught us English and he praised my essays - he was the only one ever to do so in school. It was marvellous to get the endorsement of a teacher like Matty Bodkin. I really felt he gave us a love of the English language. The other man who influenced me would have been Father Merritt. He was our history teacher and he probably had a lot to with the great interest in history I've had all my life.

I wouldn't have been regarded as the top of the class by any means but, on the whole, I was well-behaved. I did have my experiences of punishment, though. In Belvedere, teachers didn't administer punishment; a boy was sent to the prefect of studies with a note and he got whatever was coming to him. It was never excessive, but you did have punishment for misdemeanors of one kind or another. There was a very strong religious life in the school and both family and school supported me in the journey I was thinking of making. But no one tried to put any pressure on me. Even in school, it was entirely a matter of my own decision and I will remember Belvedere as being an extraordinarily friendly regime.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly