Auntie Gwen’s wedding was a major event. It isn’t just the photos, showing me standing in front of the newly-weds posing with their best man and bridesmaid, that created the memories. I know I was brought to Our Boys in Wicklow Street to get my first grey suit and that Mr Doran gave me a special haircut in Jules at the corner of Kildare Street and St. Stephen’s Green. I must admit though, I had forgotten about the confetti yet the photos show me clutching a box tightly in my hands.

Auntie Gwen, who I think had been working in a Dublin bank at that time, married Robert Jackson, then a sub-manager in the National Bank Branch in Rathkeale, Co. Limerick. I remember the best man’s name was Wolfe, but that is all. The bridesmaid was Marjorie Swanton, already known as Auntie Marjorie, a girlhood friend of Florence and Gwen, who worked in an insurance company on Dame Street. Her brother, Calvert Swanton, was an organ fanatic who was another bank employee. Undoubtedly he had played for the wedding in the Murphy’s Church of Ireland Parish Church, Christchurch, Leeson Park, about 15 minutes walk from Manders Terrace.

The surviving album photographs show that the reception after the wedding must have been held in Manders Terrace. I no longer recognise all the faces. All the women were wearing hats. It’s nice to see mother smiling and holding on to John.

Grandmother, a big woman, was clearly pleased with the occasion and was proud of the space the house offered. The old terrace house had had a wooden bathroom added which projected at the back from the first floor. In summer it made a nice overlay for part of the garden. The garden had seemed enormous. It was long and narrow with, at the end nearest the house, small areas of lawn and flowerbeds surrounded by low box hedges cut by paths of beaten earth and gravel. These paths petered out into a wilderness dominated by a massive pear tree. The smell and the feel of a box hedge is something I still love.

That wedding was a specific, major family event.

My school reports and chronology are the background to what must have been a key period of preparation for my move from kindergarten to secondary school. Florence had chosen St. Andrew’s College, a Presbyterian foundation, for my secondary education. No other boy from Mount Temple went there, the others went either to boarding school or to another of the well-known south-city Protestant boys’ schools, like the High School or Wesley College. The choice of St. Andrew’s was probably due to the fact that at least one close friend of Florence’s had already sent an older boy there and was pleased with his progress.

Florence had also decided that the obvious thing to do was to organise things so that I could cycle to and from St. Andrew’s, less than half an hour away and accessible then by a route with little traffic and just two relatively busy road crossings, Sandford Road, which was the extension of Ranelagh Road, and Morehampton Road, which, once crossed, allowed easy access from Herbert Park down to the school’s yard entrance on Wellington Road.

As an experienced tricycle rider, I had easily graduated to a small bicycle, known then as a fairy cycle, before being given a real second-hand bike of the shortest frame available. Florence had found that in a family called Wilkins living on Merton Road, on the other side of the railway, there was an older boy, Leslie, who cycled every day to St. Andrew’s. He was enlisted through his parents to accompany me to and from St. Andrew’s during my first term. Although this must have been a drag for Leslie, who could cycle much faster on his bike with larger wheels, his name is not on my mental list of those who at one time or another sought to bully me.

The final Mount Temple report verdict was “Very good – has always been a very keen and responsive pupil”. My verdict is to be hugely grateful for the school’s emphasis on drawing, painting and handwork, and on nature study. The fact that in Palmerston Park, just across the road from the school, there was a rich variety of trees and flowers meant particularly that classes held there in the summer encouraged pupils to draw trees and plants and to understand their structure and how they changed from season to season. My knowledge of the names of trees, and the ability to identify them acquired at kindergarten, has stood me in good stead all my life. I was able to sail through the first outdoor woodcraft tests in the pack of cub scouts I had joined. Later it would reduce the work required to do more advanced scout badges. Even now this early knowledge still helps with quizzes and crosswords. (How is it I never know the names of trees and plants in French and that my children never seem to have learnt much about the specifics of their natural environment?).

Classwork in St. Andrew’s quickly revealed that Mount Temple’s teaching of mathematics and the Irish language, particularly important in state exams, had not been nearly as effective as in the National Schools from which most of my new classmates came. This was a handicap from which I should easily have recovered but somehow never did. When, years later, a symbolic logic course at University introduced me to the principles of mathematics it was no longer relevant to seek to build up my basic mathematical knowledge. Nothing ever managed to propel me culturally or intellectually into a reasonable knowledge of Irish.

Read on: 1949 – Secondary School