The buildings and layout of St. Andrew’s College became as important to my life as the cul-de-sac in which I lived. Where Cowper Drive is concerned I can conjure up a picture of each house and feel familiar with the tiniest feature of the pavements and concrete road surface on which I scootered, tricycled and roller-skated before being cleared for travel further afield.

Cowper Drive still exists. St. Andrews College moved from its Wellington Road/Wellington Place buildings to a proper school building on a greenfield site at Booterstown, further out on Dublin’s south side. Most of the physical features of the school which meant so much to me are no longer.

For safety reasons, no boy arriving by bicycle was supposed to ride through the narrow door into the yard. Like most school rules this was more honoured in the breach than in the observance. The yard was a large tarmacked area that had once been the gardens of two houses. The tarring had been done with small stones, which despite continuous sweeping, seemed ever present to cut the knees of fallers or raise dust clouds on breezy summer days.

The wall nearest the road was flanked by a lean-to bicycle shed crudely constructed of timber supports and a corrugated iron roof, and a free standing block of lavatories equally crudely constructed with bare concrete blocks and an asbestos roof – it was always cold and draughty with a distinctive acrid smell lifting from its permanently damp floor.

The lavatory block and part of what must once have been a dividing garden wall with a low concrete base and railings provided a sort of inner court whose main feature was a cold water tap attached to one of the main house walls. Doors led from this inner court into the boarders’ day and locker rooms and the main dining-room at ground level. The classrooms and dormitories were on the first, second and third floors. A bathroom block for boarders ran like a conservatory along the side of the main group of buildings at second floor level.

A school hall connected by a sloping covered wooden stairs had been built on the far side of the yard, taking the space of what must have been a third garden. This large brick construction with a timber felt-covered roof and plenty of skylights had a small stage at one end and its high beams carried the hooks from which ropes could be hung for gym classes. One wall of the hall was partly covered by the wooden memorial panels inscribed with the names of former pupils killed in the 1914-18 and 1939-45 wars. The older panels had apparently been brought from the school’s previous site on St. Stephen’s Green and all moved with the school to Booterstown.

At the back end of the yard, in what must once have been a mews, were the school science laboratories and the house of “The Sargeant” and his wife. “Sarge”, an ex-serviceman, wore a black uniform and was responsible for ringing the bell between classes, going from class to class to check the roll, and for sweeping the yard and all sorts of general portering, maintenance and cleaning chores. He was a decent, likeable character who was often the butt of all sorts of schoolboy pranks. That he managed to maintain the status of a sort of guardian angel of the yard and the school premises was largely due to the respect boys felt when he appeared with medals on his uniform at the annual Remembrance Day ceremony in the hall.

In the middle of the yard stood what was for me the dominant feature of the school. This was a large mulberry tree, the trunk propped to hold it in position.

The leaves and flowers of a mulberry tree are quite beautiful and the yard tree often produced masses of fruit, hanging on the branches or falling to the ground like large raspberries or loganberries. The fallen overripe dark purple fruit lay on the yard as handy ammunition to be thrown in the inevitable lunch-break fights. Many a mother must have despaired at the rich mulberry juice stains on their son’s shirt.

What a theatre this yard and buildings provided. Every bicycle shed, room and staircase had its special hiding places, particularly at night for the boarders. Classrooms, bathrooms, landings and the hall all had their distinctive smells and sounds. There were seasonal cycles of games and rituals. Marbles were played and conkers cracked in the small inner court. Forms of football and rugby and polo on bicycles surged up and down the yard and around the mulberry tree. There was smoking in the bicycle sheds, water bombs in the lavatories and duckings under the cold tap. As one advanced through the school the yard was transformed from a place of terror into a controlled domain where one became part of the decision-making process decreeing what games should be played, who should be ducked, and so on.

School holidays were part of an already established holiday pattern. While my first-remembered Courtown holiday had seemed exceptional, I can see that my mother and her friends took it for granted that at least once every summer you went to stay by the seaside in a hotel, guesthouse or rented house. Or else you went to stay with family or friends. By the time I got to secondary school I had spent several summers while father was still alive in the Esplanade Hotel on the seafront at Bray, Co. Wicklow, almost 15 miles south of Dublin and easily accessible by train or road. Father was never there to paddle or throw stones from the shingle beach. I went with Florence to meet him at the train when he came out in the evenings.

I was also already aware that going North was a special type of expedition. There was talk of customs men and you had to stop for the police at the bottom of the hill going into Newry. I had stayed with my aunt Edie at 10 Railway Street, Lisburn, and with Willie and Winnie Long at Killinchy, where it was Auntie Gwen who brought me on holiday. Edie always seemed tearful but was adept at making clothes for me and giving me food and sweets which were quite different to my usual Dublin fare. I particularly liked potato bread.

The Long’s house was in the countryside with two beehives on the lawn and a vegetable garden producing peas and broad beans – which I hated having to eat but loved finding within the long green fur-lined pods pulled from the carefully staked plants. I must acknowledge that Willie Long, of whom I was frightened, had laughed not shouted when he returned one evening to find that his young visitor had been stung all over after the experimental launching of a wooden stick towards the busy doorway of one of the hives.

When Auntie Gwen and Uncle Bertie set up home in a rented house in Rathkeale, we spent many holidays visiting them. John and I loved these trips. At that time it was considered a long car journey and Florence was always apprehensive as to whether or not we could get there and back without a breakdown. She always checked that her membership of the Automobile Association was up to date so that if necessary she could call on one of their mechanics who were on standby on motorcycles with all their equipment in big yellow sidecars. A route was ordered in advance and I was expected to try to read the step-by-step instructions and sketch maps which came stapled like a notebook. Such things are unimaginable now for a journey of no more than 130 miles.

That it was an adventure seemed confirmed by the magical instructions I can still remember such as, “Turn right at Birdhill P.O.” Does the road to Limerick still go through Birdhill? Is the Post Office still a landmark? I doubt it. Road traffic currently travels at three times the speed of our old Standard.

Auntie Gwen was always kindness itself and Uncle Bertie quickly became a hero to John and myself. Bertie could fish and shoot and smoked a pipe. When he took us for walks with his little dog down to the river Deale he was able to tell us about the trees and plants we passed and to talk about birds and animals, kingfishers, otters and so on.

The rented home on Well Lane was also fascinating. A small turf-burning stove was supplemented for cooking and boiling water by the use of a large brass-bellied paraffin stove called a Primus. This had to be started up by warming the burner with flaming methylated spirit, checking the nozzle was clear with a wire at the end of a metal handle, and then pumping hard to vaporise the oil in the brass reservoir. Turf was readily available because the house was beside the town’s fuel merchant. Lorries came in and out of the yard to dump loads of wonderfully smelling sods of turf into the shed where we could climb on the ricks that were dry. Workmen weighed the turf into hessian sacks which they sewed closed with strong yellow string. There was a special metal panel in the road on which full lorries could be weighed.

To small boys from the city, who had never seen such things, Rathkeale also offered lots of public pumps from which people fetched water in enamel buckets. There was a blacksmith’s forge, where red-hot shoes were pressed onto the cut yellow hooves of big horses, producing the smoke, smell and low hiss of burning horn. A market day was held each week on the square in front of the fire station. At the market I particularly liked the carts full of small, pink, squeaking pigs or “bonaves”. I watched fascinated as cows shat all over the place, leaving the square mired in greenish-brown gruel until the fire station opened and firemen in thigh boots emerged to hose down the square.

Rathkeale also had a circus field and on visits there we went to Duffy’s, Fosset’s and Rico’s shows. Duffy’s seemed to be best known for its performing horses and Fosset’s for its accompanying menagerie of smelly animals. But the one I remember best – what year was it? – was Rico’s.

There was a clown on a slack wire, an exploding car, and a young Indian woman called Koringa in a skimpy dress, like Cinderella in a Dublin pantomime, who climbed a ladder of swords in her bare feet and lay on a bed of nails as a big man took a sledgehammer to smash a paving stone she held on her chest. Koringa, who also charmed alligators and snakes, must have charmed a lot of small boys throughout Ireland.

In Rathkeale we were also exposed to other children. There were the lively barefooted boys from the cottages on Well Lane and there were the shyer children of families we were brought to visit in houses and farms outside the town. In Well Lane, on one visit, the great activity was using an old bicycle wheel as a hoop, running after it to keep it upright and learning to manipulate it. Florence was not particularly pleased when I insisted on bringing back to Cowper Drive from Rathkeale a spokeless rusty rim which I proceeded to hit noisily up and down the Dublin cul-de-sac.

Read more: 1951 – A Scholarship