Sometimes I feel guilty that the clearest early recollection of a female player in my life is not of my mother. Instead, Nurse Mullins is the figure I associate with my first memories of home.

The ground floor reception rooms at Cowper Drive went from front to back on the side of the house nearest to the semi-detached partner. On the short cul-de-sac frontage, there were both detached and semi-detached houses with distinctive profiles, a luxury that was to disappear as new housing estates pushed southwards. Both 8 and 10 Cowper Drive shared a facade dominated by ground and first floor bay windows. As I got to know the neighbours I learnt that variations of detail were possible inside houses of the same exterior appearance. I also learnt that the names of houses could often tell you a lot about the owners. Our house was called “Sprucefield” after my father’s parental home in county Antrim, a Northern county.

The front dining room and back sitting room of “Sprucefield” offered a large entertaining area because the two rooms could be merged by the opening of the pair of sliding doors which divided them. I can feel myself even now sitting on the knee of Nurse Mullins, where she was parked with her back to one side of the sliding door opening. I never liked her. She seemed very old and always cried when she saw me. Apparently the tears were tears of pride and wonder – in that Nurse Mullins was given the credit for my postnatal survival.

I was born in the aptly named Hatch Street nursing home, which was at that time one of the most fashionable places used for maternity cases by Dublin’s leading gynaecologists and obstetricians. The fact that such nursing homes were associated with legendary tragedies and emergencies when mothers in labour had to be carried down narrow stairs to be rushed to real hospitals did not prevent those who could afford a good nursing home from steering clear of the city maternity hospitals. It is a fact that Dublin’s maternity hospitals and several of the city’s maternity specialists enjoyed – and still enjoy – world-class reputations. Traditional Catholic families and the mixed social and economic structure of Dublin provide a wider range of interesting cases than might be found in other European cities with a comparable level of excellence in medical education and practice.

What had put my life at risk had nothing to do with either the facilities of the nursing home or a complicated delivery, it was simply that my birth weight and size were tiny and the technical supports available for intensive postnatal care were much less sophisticated than they are today. Hence, through her skill, vigilance and commitment, Nurse Mullins was credited with keeping me alive (the first child of William John Keery, Solicitor, and his much younger wife, Florence Mary Murphy, formerly a register clerk in Guinness’s brewery.)

My only memories of my father are of a thin elderly man with a grey moustache, and with the sides of his almost-bald head creased from wearing glasses most of his life. I remember his face, which photographs suggest must have been much as my own is now, in the context of the double bed that seemed to almost fill the upstairs front bedroom. Its mahogany headboard was part of the massive bedroom suite, manufactured by Strahans, and including a chest of drawers, a huge wardrobe, and a dressing table and stool. The glass covered dressing table rested on two stacks of drawers and had a magnificent bevelled mirror in the shape of a stylised cloud.

Even though I always had a room of my own, the bedroom setting of my father’s image undoubtedly recalls my early expeditions in search of a parent. (Expeditions similar to those Justin would make to find Anne and me thirty years later.) Could the bed have already been a sick-bed, since leukaemia would carry off my father in 1946?

I always regret that whilst I can see lips moving I cannot remember a single word or sentence my father said to me. Habits and style have certainly been communicated. Gene transmission ensures that everyone who knew him, says how like my father I am. Only I know the impact made by the waistcoat of my father’s three-piece suit hanging on the trousers press stationed between the bed and the dressing table.

Infant exploration of the waistcoat and its pockets revealed a watch and chain, a folding scissors in a leather case, and what I remember as paper-wrapped lozenges. I wore waistcoats as soon as I could, going through phases of wearing my father’s watch with them until the watch was stolen in a burglary in Brussels years later. A fold-up scissors in a leather case became an essential part of my equipment as soon as I began work as a trainee journalist.

In the 1960s I discovered that the paper-wrapped lozenges were in fact Rennies indigestion tablets. Happily they have not become part of my life. As soon as I realised my own stomach problems were due simply to sacrificing meal times to work I began keeping myself topped up with snacks or tanked up with water.

Such slender connections of memory have shaped my belief in the reality of something more than material and bodily realities. There have been a significant number of instances in the sixty-three years since my father’s death, when I have seen him passing by, like that familiar face in a crowd which is there one minute and gone the next.

Read on: 1943 – Knowledge and Adventure