With hindsight, I date full recovery from my tearful introduction to St. Andrew’s, from my wider fear of the bustle in the playground, and from the initial shock of my introduction to rugby, at two years into secondary school.

There seem to be two reasons for this. The first is that I came top or near top of the class in most subjects and was often called on by classmates for help with homework. The second was that I was a year younger than most of the boys in the class. While this placed me at a disadvantage in weight and size when playing with classmates, since sports teams related to age – under 12, under 13, and so on – I found myself playing rugby with boys from the class below.

With my additional year’s experience of the game, and that experience having been won in confrontation with players much bigger than I was, I became quite a handy team player and as I went through school found myself being nominated as captain of a number of teams.

Because of my academic performance, the school’s headmaster suggested to Florence that I should sit the annual scholarship examination. While this examination was primarily intended for the boys of families who would not be able to pay St. Andrew’s fees and had reached the end of the National School programme, it was also open to boys already in the school.

Although adequately provided for for the foreseeable future, Florence’s income as a widow was, of course, a fixed income. I quickly saw that it would be helpful if I could win a school scholarship and, indeed, felt that it was my duty to do so.

When the scholarship results came out mine was the first name below the winners, all of whom had come from outside. Analysis of the results showed that it was a poor performance on the scripture paper which had pulled me down. Apparently it was well known that the Presbyterian candidates had a much better knowledge of the Old and New Testaments than other denominations. Here again, age worked to my advantage. I was just eligible to repeat the scholarship examination a second time and, boosted by Sunday School texts Florence borrowed from some Presbyterian friends, I duly became a proud scholarship holder.

It was also around this time that I began to understand that religion was an important personal matter. I had known that I was a Protestant and that Protestants were very different to Catholics. I also knew that Jews were even more distinctive, with a Saturday rather than a Sunday sabbath and a big festival once a year when they ate special bread. (On Cowper Drive the Barron children always offered everyone “matsos” biscuits at that time. These were thin and crispy like a more refined version of a Jacob’s water biscuit.)

I never thought much about the different types of Protestant or what they did. I knew that in my mother’s friends and contacts, among my kindergarten and secondary school contemporaries, and in the Wolf Cub pack I had joined, there were Presbyterians, Methodists and Brethren. On Sundays everyone went to their own church, or in the case of the Brethren, their hall. John and I went with Florence on Sunday mornings to St. Philip’s Church on Temple Road on the other side of the park from Mount Temple School. We were taken out after the first hymn by teachers or minders to Sunday School classes in the adjoining parochial hall where the cub pack met on a weekday evening.

In general, I found Sunday services at St. Philip’s incredibly boring. The highlights of the year were the Harvest Festival, Christmas and Remembrance Day services. At the Harvest Festival the children brought up to the altar gifts of fruit and toys to be given to an orphanage and the church was specially decorated with sheaves of wheat.

At Christmas there was plenty of carol singing. On Remembrance Day there was a trumpeter to play the last post and reveille beneath the war memorial stained glass window at the back of the church, a window with a realistic representation of a soldier in uniform that I much admired.

Mr. White who stood with his family in the pew in front of us always played an active part in the Remembrance Day service, wearing miniature medals pinned to his suit. He was a broad-shouldered man whose head and neck fused in rolls of flesh and John and I often found the most amusing way of passing our time in the service was to watch those rolls rippling and rising and falling as Mr. White knelt to pray or stood to join in the canticles, psalms and hymns.

At kindergarten and Sunday School I always enjoyed the bible stories and the hymns chosen as suitable for children – “All things bright and beautiful”, “Onward Christian soldiers” and so on. I was good at remembering the words.  Although I often did not understand all the words of the prayers and the collects of the day which were used in the Sunday services from the Book of Common Prayer, I found I could join in the reading aloud of the congregational responses and over time became fondly attached to the sound of the old-fashioned language.

I also admired the people who read loudly and clearly the Sunday “lessons” from the Old and New Testament. In Sunday school I was the first of my age to be asked to read aloud too. The best known passages seemed important and mysterious. The Nine Christmas Lessons associated with the annual carol service in Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the BBC broadcast from Cambridge, to which my mother listened religiously throughout most of her life, came to be understood by me as a coherent statement of the origins of Christianity.

The idea that religion might not only amount to being baptised and going to church but might involve a personal relationship to God did not come through St. Philip’s. It came through a group called the Crusaders which met on Sunday afternoons in the hall of Adelaide Road Presbyterian Church. I was brought there initially by friends of Florence’s and later could cycle there on my own.

At Crusaders everyone was well turned out in their Sunday best and the young men and boys gathering there tackled different hymns and choruses with a vigour unknown at St. Philip’s. The leaders and preachers were not clergy and told dramatic stories of people in desperate situations being saved by prayer and divine intervention. I remember particularly the story of a dying submarine crew, trapped on the ocean bed and singing the hymn “Abide with me” with their last breaths, when one of the crew fainted and, in falling, hit a lever which brought the stricken ship to the surface.

Sundays at Crusaders made you think about how you lived your life, particularly whether or not you were a sinner, and they certainly encouraged you to pray and read the bible. Above all, where I was concerned, going to Crusaders on a Sunday afternoon was a huge improvement on the dreadfully boring visits I would otherwise have to make for afternoon tea with mum’s elderly friends.

John, who was too young to join Crusaders, was always glad to see me home again. We shared a bedroom, listening on an old radio between our beds to BBC programmes about special agents or detectives like Dick Barton and Paul Temple, or tales of ghosts and other horrors told by “the man in black”. We were often frightened by these and John sometimes called in Florence to check that there was nothing moving behind the curtains. We also listened to the top ten popular songs on Radio Luxembourg. Until a few years ago, whether in Ireland, the UK, or Belgium, I always followed such chart shows on radio or TV believing that the overall tone of the latest trend in popular music is a reliable indicator of how young people see the world.

Read more: 1952 – A Rugby Win