Tears came again in 1953, some of them in school outside class hours, but no one read them as a sign of weakness except perhaps myself. I was beginning to recognise that I was prone to crying, and not only when sorrowing or celebrating.

I could easily push myself to tears of self-pity at moments of crisis. As I got older I came to see that self-pity and guilt were negative attitudes with no redeeming feature and I would work hard to force myself forward, sometimes trying to help others I saw suffering the same way.

Too many things came together at the same time. The first big change was mother’s decision that as John was now old enough for St. Andrew’s, both of us boys should become weekly boarders in the school. That way we would avoid the all-weather dangers of cycling to and from school and could get more out of the school’s sporting and other activities. As John and I got on well together and enjoyed group activities like Cubs, Scouts, Crusaders, and so on, this seemed a reasonable proposal and we both would grow up to look back and say we learnt a lot from being boarders. Making our beds and cleaning our shoes for a start.

The next big change was mother’s decision to move house. Until writing about it now, I never really thought about the overall significance of this.

Both John and I had come to like the sea and swimming and often went to Dun Laoghaire baths in the summer. A wave of new building was pushing out all around Dublin’s Southside and Florence bought a new semi-detached house at Dundela Park in Sandycove, not far inland from the baths. It was still just about within cycling range of St. Andrew’s, with possible bus and train alternatives. The new house offered better kitchen and bathroom space and four good bedrooms, one of which would welcome Grandmother Murphy, who could move in when her house at Manders Terrace, like Sprucefield, would be sold.

Until this minute, I never associated these moves with Florence’s announcement at the start of the summer that Stephen O’Callaghan had asked her to marry him and that she had accepted.

Florence made this announcement in the course of one of my regular telephone calls home from a call box on Morehampton Road at the top of Wellington Place. That had become my preferred box, rather than queuing for the box in the main St. Andrew’s building, since an extension of the boarding accommodation had moved my dormitory into 39 Wellington Place, a few houses up from the school’s central premises. I didn’t know what to say as the Morehampton Road traffic hummed in my ears and I stared at the A and B buttons on the scratched black coin box and breathed in the damp Bakelite smell of the receiver.

Florence moved on to tell me that grandmother was not well and that Auntie Lillian had had a serious operation. I put down the phone shaking. When I got back to No. 39 I felt winded and had to sit on the stairs. I started sobbing.

I see now that I was literally suffering from shock. Through reading Jones’ “Life of Freud” when an undergraduate, I could now probably hazard a psychoanalytic account of what was happening to me. But back then, I was just a hurt boy with a sudden sense of loss, feeling sorry for myself. The one boy who passed by before I pulled myself together asked what was wrong, and took it as perfectly normal that I should be upset by news that my grandmother was dangerously ill.

John and I knew Stephen O’Callaghan. He was the bachelor organist and choirmaster at St. Philip’s Church. Florence had taken to singing in the choir. Stephen had come to meals occasionally before choir practice. Although he tried to be jolly and talked of his life as an organist in England and in the United States, John and I had never taken to him the way we had to Uncle George or Uncle Bertie. If the truth were told, we saw Stephen, who was a big man, as a softie with some curiously odd habits.

Even in warm weather he arrived in a hat or heavy overcoat and gloves with galoshes over his shoes and an umbrella which he used as a walking stick. A hypochondriac, when he blew his nose one corner of his handkerchief would be held by a finger in his ear “to equalise the pressure”. Nose-blowing had to be followed immediately by handwashing. And Stephen was such a hand-washer that his precious musician’s hands seemed always to be itchy and he was often scratching a spot of eczema near one of his wrists. He had a hobby interest in travel and languages and was always talking about his investments. My first memory of Stephen is of his telling us over tea one day that “Babooshka” was the Russian for grandmother.

The process of adjustment, of adapting to a new house, of seeing grandmother fail, and of the arrival of Stephen as our stepfather, must have been a lot for John and me to take in over a few months. I can see that I behaved particularly badly, miming Stephen’s habits in front of the O’Callaghan family, for example.

Over the years Stephen did his best to take an interest in John and me and was generous to us. We now admit that his holiday dedication to dictionaries and guidebooks, which we had treated as such a terrible bore one summer in Switzerland, is a practice we follow ourselves. For better or for worse, Stephen’s interest in music probably fuelled our own wishes to drop out of piano lessons. Except for Christmas carols, we both tended to treat Stephen’s playing in the house and mother’s mezzo-soprano singing as an embarrassment.

Stephen certainly loved Florence. That he was to die suddenly, less than ten years later, must have been a terrible blow to her. She seemed to be able to live on and on as if neither of her husbands had existed. Anne often remarked that she never heard Florence express any view as to her feelings for “Bill” Keery or Stephen Burrowes O’Callaghan.

School holiday visits to the homes of two boarders with whom I had become friendly must have helped my adaptation to the changed family environment at Dundela Park. I went for a week to Wexford and to Clara, Co. Offaly, staying with Paddy Cook at his maternal grandparents’ farm residence and with Peter Giff in the Rectory where his father was Archdeacon. Both houses had imposing avenues up to them and a fine presence. The Clara Rectory had a particularly fine hall and imposing spiral staircase under a glassed fanlight. More importantly it had converted outhouses where the local YMCA had two snooker tables.

Paddy Cook’s father had just retired from the British Army and worked stripped to the waist in the vegetable garden as if digging trenches. His mother made prizewinning flower arrangements with blooms cut from the flower beds in front of the house. They gave a cocktail party one summer evening and interesting cars, including a green Jaguar XJ, raised dust coming up the drive. Paddy and I spent most of the day running round the fields with an airgun firing pellets at anything that moved.

We watched Paddy’s grandmother collect eggs from the hens, many were laid in a patch of nettles and briars to one side of the untidy yard. Paddy’s grandfather presided over the yard, either shouting disapproval, or expressing thanks for the smallest help, “on behalf of the working classes”. There are still times when I surprise people by thanking them with that very same formula.

The rectory at Clara was run under quite a disciplined regime. Peter Giff was an only son – Paddy Cook had a younger sister. Everything was dedicated to the Archdeacon’s timetable and silence for sermon writing was gravely important. The Bishop of Meath came to tea one day and Mrs. Giff asked me to “please be sure” to make less noise when stirring my teacup in the presence of the Bishop. I am happy that, having stopped taking sugar, I no longer have that problem.

A highlight of the Clara Rectory visit was Peter’s finding in a bookcase an anthropological study by a man called Malinowski of the sex-life of the people of Polynesia, fascinating reading.

Read more: 1954 – Sex