Another teacher, “Buster” O’Neill. How did he get that nickname? He arrived at St. Andrews late in my career, to teach Latin and Greek as the successor to Mr Davis, who had become ill. Even fewer studied Latin or Greek than studied French. Because it had been assumed that I would proceed to university I was advised to do Latin as a possible matriculation subject.

I had no interest in Latin and the few pupils involved quickly discovered that “Buster” seemed to have little interest in it either and was easily distracted.

Mr O’Neill was a big-framed man who always looked as if he had fallen on hard times. He arrived unshaved most mornings. He never wore anything other than an outsize double-breasted pinstripe suit, wearing under the jacket the most inappropriate turtleneck sweaters and, under the trousers, what looked like worn leather fireman’s boots. The buttoned suit jackets were usually bulged to bursting point by a dog-eared volume shoved down into one of the outside pockets. Hence the easiest diversion of all: “What are you reading, Sir?”

It turned out that Buster’s favourite reading was philosophy and the tomes pulled from the jacket had titles like “Epistemology”, “Ontology” and “Cosmology”. Little Latin was done and a lot of time was spent discussing questions like – I am always tempted to imitate the distinctive O’Neill drawl – “Has a dog got a soul?”

Through the haphazard process of teacher/parent decision making, both I and another classmate were being prepared for entrance scholarships to Trinity College, the older of the two Dublin universities and the only one of them taken seriously by Protestants. It had been decided that I should specialise in history in the examination to become an “exhibitioner”. One of the exhibitions was exclusively for St. Andrews boys and named after a previous headmaster. (In TCD an exhibition is an entrance scholarship and the holder of such an exhibition is called an exhibitioner. I believe these terms are still used in a number of old universities.)

I see now that, whatever the circumstances, so much was going on in my head at the time that it was no wonder I did disastrously in the exhibition examination and had to struggle to get enough subjects and marks to be admitted to Trinity. I managed on the second attempt at matriculation to remember enough Irish and Latin to bluff my way through.

My poor performance at the time was blamed on the fact that the more I tried to read for my history course the more bored I became. The few special lessons given by the headmaster, who never taught more than a handful of boys in his study, and who seemed simply to want to tell us the books with which any educated person should be familiar, were, I now realise, among the few classes I had of real scholarship level and interest.

I now believe that the disruptive turmoil going on in my head was due to loneliness and that the only person who spotted this was Jack Waugh, the family doctor in Sandycove, who became a lifeline over many years and continued as a personal friend in his retirement. Dr. Waugh conveyed to me, when I went to see him because I was vomiting in the mornings after breakfast, the message that there were times in life when you are ill because you feel on your own and that no one understands what you want to talk about and that the only thing to do is to press on regardless. From his experience as a doctor and from the war, when he had been a young medical officer in the British army, Dr. Waugh claimed the authority to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me and that I had the health and brains to do anything I put my mind to. There were to be many times in the years ahead when I would claim that authority for myself and press on through crises of loneliness.

Neither Florence nor Stephen had been to university – although Stephen had graduated from the Royal College of Organists in London – and I did not think they could advise me on how to prepare for college.

Much of the credit for my finding my way through this difficult end-of-school phase of psychological and physical stress is due to two of my sixth form classmates, Robert Tweedy and Jeremy Johnston. Robert had been in my class all the way through school and had never wanted to be anything other than an airline pilot. He was clearly targeted on passing Army Air Corps and Air Lingus examinations. Jeremy was a newcomer, the son of Denis Johnston, the playwright, one of St. Andrew’s most distinguished former pupils, or “old boys” as they were called. He had had most of his schooling in the United States, where his father taught, and had been sent to Dublin to see what he wanted to do and to do that in a context which would also prepare him for university entrance.

Largely through their families, both Robert and Jeremy seemed to have enormous numbers of interesting and knowledgeable friends. Both moved easily in the company of girls. Robert had two younger sisters and there were two girls in the family with whom Jeremy was lodging. The Tweedys organised excellent parties and I was also delighted to be invited by Jeremy to visit his “digs”, a magnificent detached house standing in its own grounds on Silchester Road, Glenageary, not far from Dundela Park.

Robert’s great contribution to my school decision-making was to introduce me to a friend of his, Peter Thomas, who was a year older and who was studying philosophy at Trinity College. We met over coffee one Saturday morning in the basement café of Switzer’s, off Grafton Street, and Peter told us both how the Trinity system of honours degrees worked and that Mental and Moral Science was a long-standing honours course in which most of the students were likely candidates for ordination in the Church of Ireland.

Jeremy’s invitations gave me some idea of the promise of post-school social life. One of the invitations he managed to get for me was to the end of school evening-dress dance at the Hall School, then an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Monkstown. Jeremy had been invited in his own right, I was labelled the Head Boy of St. Andrew’s for the occasion. The black dinner jacket I wore that night was borrowed from Uncle George and I had that massively swollen lip sustained in a rugby tackle.

There are two or three other matters to be noted in the flicker of 1956. John and I ceased to be weekly boarders. Florence had accepted that the best answer to school transport problems was to get me a motorbike and to make me responsible for getting John to school and games.

Florence taught both Stephen and me how to drive her car and put in train with Stephen the building of a larger detached house on a site known as Ard Mhuire Park being developed by two brothers on the side of Dalkey Hill above Dundela Park. I assumed this decision to move was partly linked to Grandmother’s death and the sale of her house on Manders Terrace.

That summer John and I went to camp, as had become our usual pattern with the school Scout troop, the 27th Dublin. The campsite was on Lough Erne in the Northern county of Fermanagh on an estate called Castle Archdale. At some point in the rough and tumble of the traditional camp games, I felt myself victimised. When the whole camp seemed to jeer at me as I struggled to release myself from a snare of ropes being pulled in all directions in the last game of the evening, the confusion inside me exploded. Roaring and heaving I managed to grab the weakest boy in the camp, a timid Quaker called Peter Skelton, and as we fell to the ground together I found myself punching and punching Skelton’s face and head as hard and as fast as my fists could flail. Faces recoiled in horror as I was dragged off my victim by the camp leaders.

The incident was bad enough to mar the camp almost as much as the bad weather. Happily no one was badly hurt. I acted as if I had sprained an ankle and a degree of sympathy helped to cover up my shameful and dangerous outburst. The person I frightened most was myself. I had no idea that I was capable of such temper and violence.

I have got to the age of retirement without losing my temper like that again. Was the Castle Archdale experience a factor years later in my own decision to become a Quaker?

Read more: 1957 – A Trinity Philosophy Student