Mount Temple School was a privately owned kindergarten occupying a large terrace house facing on to Palmerston Park. In its heyday it must have played a significant role in shaping the minds of the boys and girls from the Protestant families of the surrounding suburbs – families who aspired to, and were prepared to pay for, an education different to that paid for by Church and State (which was on a parish-by-parish basis, through what were known as National Schools).

What were my parents hoping to get for their money when they sent me to Mount Temple at age four? The school certainly had an excellent reputation. Its pupils were said to be well behaved and well mannered and to fit in well later when entering the leading Protestant secondary colleges. As I got to know my classmates, largely through invitations to birthday parties in their homes, I learnt how the family names were associated with the city’s business, manufacturing, professional and university life, and with the Southside’s different Protestant churches of various denominations. Although the development of the suburbs was bringing variety to the housing stock, Georgian and Victorian houses now contrasting with the modern detached and semi-detached houses of 1930s construction, I saw that Mount Temple pupils seemed to share much the same living pattern, a privilege defined by distinct bathroom, kitchen, dining-room, sitting room, and bedroom facilities, and with gardens to the front and back of their homes.

To get to the school at 3 Palmerston Park I had to be escorted over the route whose geography I had already mastered with my go-car exploit. Along the way there were the bases of walls, railings, hedges, and delivery entrances to be examined. There were the seasonal excitements of nesting birds and occasional excursions and alarms from cats and dogs with varying degrees of curiosity or pugnacity. Some days there would be a road sweeper with a massive bristled brush and a push cart into which he shovelled dirt, leaves and the droppings of the horses delivering milk, coal, bread, mineral waters and laundry in the locality.

I particularly noted the sparkling elegance of some of the laundry horses and carts, including the uniforms and tall whips of their drivers. It was especially interesting when occasionally one of the horses we passed as it stood waiting outside a house would do what my mother called “No 1”, a great steaming piss which foamed and formed a big pool and rivulets on the tarmac, leaving a rather heady smell.

Horse transport could not compete with the oil-smelling No. 12 bus, a green double-decker, which often passed by, as the route to school meant crossing Palmerston Road. I could not wait for the day when I would be brought to mount one of those vehicles at the bus stop beside the junction with Cowper Road. I knew they were Leylands because my mother said her first job had been with the Leyland agent, Ashenhurst Williams, who had won the contract to supply the buses to the national transport company.

At Mount Temple, a Miss Smith carried the responsibility of welcoming the first-year kindergarten pupils. Her classroom was the big-form room looking out on the park from the top of the three-story house. Having heaved one’s way up the high granite steps to the massive hall door at first floor level, and negotiated two flights of linoleum covered stairs inside, one was glad to be welcomed by a smiling woman in soft grey/blue clothes and with carefully tended grey hair.

Maeve Smith projected sympathy, understanding and warmth and succeeded year by year in conveying to each of her charges a message of personal interest and encouragement. Her domain was also perfectly tailored to receiving successive waves of new individuals. Each pupil had his or her own little chair and table. All around the room at a height accessible to the smallest children were blackboards and pinboards on which we would quickly begin experimenting with shapes and letters.

I still remember that at the start of the first lesson Miss Smith told us that “kindergarten” meant in the German language “a garden of children” and that she saw her pupils as beautiful flowers and plants which it was her job to help cultivate.

More than 50 years later, after my mother’s death, I found all my Mount Temple reports among her papers. I have in front of me my second report for the term ending Easter 1944. From the handwriting it looks as if M.K. Smith (HNFU) was responsible for all but three of the 16 subject headings taught. Scripture seems to have been the domain of the Headmistress, N. Sweeny, B.A.. Arithmetic is reported on by P.R.A., who must be the Miss Ashworth who took over the school when Miss Sweeny retired during my third year there. “Drill”, meaning physical education, is initialled R.J. which must stand for whichever of the green-skirted big-thighed young women visited the school weekly from the Ling Institute of Physical Training to demonstrate and supervise exercises in the huge front room on the first floor or in the back garden, depending on the weather and season.

Miss Smith’s HNFU qualification associated the school with the educational ideas of a German educationalist called Froebel. Until recently in Ireland, this approach to infant education still seemed to be regarded as “Protestant”, in comparison with the Montessori system favoured by private Catholic education. Such distinctions may well seem ridiculous in the context of any European country other than Ireland but they were real influences in the conceptual world I confronted.

One might marvel today at the idea of any one teacher teaching 13 subjects, even at primary levels, to more than twenty pupils. This achievement must be put in a perspective where English, for example, was divided into six subjects. In reading my Easter 1944 report more than sixty years later, I think my strengths and weaknesses had been identified accurately in almost every subject. Miss Smith wrote in the first column of the report: Composition (oral) “Very good”, Reading “Very good – has made splendid progress”, Writing “Much improved”, Spelling “Quick and accurate”, Literature (story) “Follows with imagination”, Recitation “Is most responsive and eager”. Yes, my tendency towards careless and illegible handwriting had already been spotted.

The main way I got to know my classmates was when we got up in pairs to draw and write on the blackboards round the room. I still remember most of those names and, although I have spent most of my professional life abroad, can occasionally recognise a kindergarten contemporary around Dublin. Some, like myself, have spent as much time away from Ireland as at home, and at least one of these, Ian Gibson, the biographer of Lorca and Dali, has acquired an international reputation. Sadly, the main place in which Mount Temple names have cropped up most frequently in the last few years has been in the Irish Times deaths notices, usually through the announcement of the death of an aged parent.

Read on: 1945 – End of the War