The arrival of a sibling is supposed to be one of the great shaping experiences of life. The drama I recall is not the arrival of John as a creature of flesh and blood, but rather the arrival of a cot alongside the double bed in the front bedroom.

If I had been lucky to survive a low birth weight, John was apparently lucky to survive a simultaneous infection of measles and whooping cough shortly after he had been brought home from Hatch Street. Part of this domestic drama was my first visit, or first remembered visit, to a doctor’s surgery. I was taken for an injection to a house on Rathgar Road, perhaps to be inoculated against whooping cough. An illustrated book on fire and fire engines was produced to distract me from the threatening needle and the instinctive awareness that it was going to hurt. I never understand why so many doctors and dentists say “This is not going to hurt” just before plunging needle or drill into tissue they know damn well will set the nerves jangling.

Happily, however, the book on fire and fire engines had a much greater impact than the whooping cough injection. For years and years I thought the profession I would most like to follow would be that of a fire-fighter. Anything to do with fires fascinated me. Particularly when working years later as a reporter on the Shields Gazette in South Shields in the North-East of England, I loved the fact that the newspaper office was beside the town’s fire station. Apart from covering many stories involving fires or false alarms, I learnt a great deal about fire-fighting from talking with the firemen who spent a lot of their day cleaning and polishing the fire engines parked ready for action on the fire station forecourt.

You always get great pleasure from having that little bit of extra knowledge that no one else around you has. I love explaining to people that the fact that three big engines have just sped by with lights flashing and sirens going does not mean there is a massive blaze somewhere. I know that cities are divided into automatic turn-out areas so that any alarm from a heavily populated high-rise apartment area means two pumps and a turntable ladder. I know also that firemen prefer not to wear rubber boots for fear of standing on something very sharp or very hot at a serious incident.

(Firefighting, like so many careers, is blighted by low entry qualifications and low salaries, except at the top where many local fire chiefs are professional engineers. Few young men and women going to a university level engineering course are aware of the possibility of eventual employment in the fire services. In an area like South Shields where there were docks, ship builders, ship repairers, coal mines, factories and a dangerous river-estuary coastline with steep cliffs, a fire department needs special tools, equipment and skills. Attention to detail is a key aspect of fire-fighting and fire prevention. I greatly admired, for example, the way in which the South Shields fire chief sought to obtain in advance the plans of every ship due to dock in his area. Trying to put out a fire on a stricken ship you do not know must be among the most hazardous professional enterprises one can imagine.)

1943 could easily have been the year when the Dublin fire brigade left the neutral “Free State”, dashing to Belfast, crossing the border into the belligerent United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to help put out the fires started by a German air-raid aimed at the city’s shipyards. It was also a time when my father listened to the voices of Prime Minister Churchill and Lord Haw-Haw crackling on the wireless. Could anyone in the English-speaking world of my generation be unaffected by the impact of some of the great speeches by Churchill or Roosevelt? For example, how often have I said over the years to myself, to the children, or to staff apprehensive about change: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?

I have always tried to push fear to one side whenever something I believe in is threatened. I have not systematically sought confrontation. I have often regretted speaking out or realised later that it was either unnecessary or ill advised. There have often been times too when I was wrong to underestimate risk or danger. No such consideration bothered me when in my third year I took off on an expedition which led to a police alert. I had simply been bored.

One of the things maids did was to take me for walks. The pram had been succeeded by what was called a “go-car” or push-chair. I was already at a stage when I could walk quite far and was only pushed along in the go-car when I got tired. The most familiar outing with the maid was to Palmerston Park, an attractively organised public park serving primarily the residents of the Dublin South-side suburbs of Ranelagh, Rathmines and Dartry.

It was not far to the park from Cowper Drive. A footbridge at the end of the road crossed the railway line to a choice of routes along tree-lined roads past a range of well-kept houses and gardens, some of them among the city’s most desirable properties. In the park there were benches offering conversation areas where maids would congregate with their charges, confident that those children old enough to walk and get together would amuse each other. Equally oblivious of any possible ugly consequences, I must have had an afternoon when no amusement offered itself and the maid seemed totally absorbed with her friends and in no hurry to return to base. So I simply decided to go home, pushing the go-car in front of me.

Clearly I successfully navigated the road crossings, pavements, and footbridge heading back to Cowper Drive. It must have been a quiet afternoon because when I sought to call on playmates in the cul-de-sac there was no one at home. My recollections, which are surely a reflection of my closeness to the ground at that age, are of contemplating a little slug on the doormat in the porch of a neighbour’s house from which there was no reply, and of looking at a snail under the lavender in the flower bed facing me when I squatted on the step at our own hall door, finding no answer there either.

The waves of panic and relief that broke out around me when mother, returning home, was shocked to find me unaccompanied, and the distraught maid, who had reported me missing to the police in Rathmines, breaking-down on finding me safe and sound, left me completely unmoved. What was the fuss about? I had just done what I wanted to do and was happy to amuse people by describing in detail what was, apparently, some kind of unusual feat.

Undoubtedly it was a feat. Although plagued all my working life by an inability to remember numbers, I can still remember the Cowper Drive telephone number, 91013. I listened to my mother giving the number to the police when she telephoned Rathmines to say that I had been found.

Read on: 1944 – Kindergarten