There is a photograph of me at about the age of eight or nine in a Hopalong Cassidy suit sent by cousins in America, a shot taken by my father the photographer (of ‘The Quality Studios’, Main Street). In it, I am radiantly smiling, showing my big new teeth: a boy who has been rendered beautiful by something his father said to him which had, for once, struck the right note. Usually in childhood photographs, I look pensive, distant.

The man who had the power to transform me into a radiant smiling child rarely exercised this power. And why so rarely, when it is so easy to make a child smile? What reservations did he have about me, what rententiveness did he nurture to the point of rejection? Don't ever raise your voice to me again. You're here to cause me a damned sight of trouble like the rest of them. So said my father the Master, in the classroom, publicly, in front of the assembly of thirdto sixth–class children, in the rural two–teacher school where he was principal, big fish in a small pond, with such a capacity to inflict damage.

Words I never forgot. And what did I feel the day they were spoken? That was a day in autumn when leaves were showering from the trees, and at breaktime the children ran wildly ecstatic in the wind, clutching at leaves as they ran, and I ran with them not to be different; something told me ‘Run with the others, hide this misery of an unwanted child, this desolate grief that cannot express itself or shed itself in tears. There is no one to turn to: run, run and shout and gesticulate, mimic that wild abandon, clutch like the others at falling leaves.’ My father, in one of his long–lasting moods, stood at the school door, watching, not seeing.

Under the rubric of lessons in General Knowledge or Christian Doctrine (in those days, it was hard to tell one from the other) my father shared his apocalyptic fears with his pupils. Wars and disasters, the growth of Communism, speculation about the Third Secret of Fatima, The Irish Catholic 's prophecy of Three Dark Days which would descend on earth in 1960, when the powers of darkness were to be loosed on the world.