At the age of four I had become accustomed to the total devotion of my mother between the hours of about 8.30am until around 3.30pm Monday to Friday. During these hours my father was at work and my seven siblings at school.

Then my brother contracted Scarlet Fever (nothing whatsoever to do with Gone With the Wind). There were some fun bits to the disease — like when his fingernails dropped off and his hair fell out. His skin turned an alarming colour and shed like a snake — but mostly life became very quiet as daytime outings ceased and the circling buzzards and large black cross on the front door kept visitors away.

With such little fanfare over my first day at school not a single photograph was taken to mark the occasion. I have borrowed here a photo of my sister who looks quite similar and wears an identical uniform.

Sickness was not fun so I decided I wouldn't train to be a nurse after all. Instead I'd become a Formula 1 racing driver.

So I asked if I could start school. My mother said yes. She phoned around to find a school uniform [found, thank you, Aunty Pat]; rang the nuns to see if there was a chair for me at the Seal's table [found, thank you, nuns], and I was duly dressed and bundled off to school with my siblings not more than 24 hours after my initial request.

I wore a tie. I had a chairbag. I felt 10 feet tall — until I arrived at a place that actually had more children than my family and the majority were bigger than me. That was a surprise.

Sister Mary Conrad was my teacher and for some reason we referred to her as Sister Hotrod although she wasn't that fast. In fact in those days nuns weren't allowed to have a driver's licence let alone a trip to the drag strip.

Sister Hotrod who appears to be travelling at such a pace her surroundings have burst into flames.

Sister C made us books out of newsprint folded in half with a staple in the middle. We had to draw a picture of our house. I did my best but left off the buzzards and cross lest Sister C think I was drawing the church instead of home. I did a couple more pictures and worried about how I was going to fill that little book.

I took the book home and drew furiously into the night ... blue houses and red houses, some with a flower garden, some with a dog and, always, the sun as a yellow triangle in the top corner of the page. I thought that book had to be finished by the following morning. My hand ached but I was going to be the best student Sister C had ever taught and then I was going straight to heaven to be seated at the right hand of Our Lord.

The last couple of pages had hurried houses without curtains or gardens, or even an ant. But I thought God would forgive me for I'd finished my book.

It was to be my one and only attempt at being an over-achiever.

The next morning I felt like a sunbeam from the corner of one of my pictures and I'm sure I glowed yellow as I walked to school. I passed the big hedge and rushed through the school gate and up the path, past the milk warming in the sun, into the classroom where I sat quietly, waiting to be held up as an example of just the sort of Catholic child the Pope had in mind when he decreed that contraception was off the list for another year.

Early house from the sun-in-the-corner period.

In swooped Sister C, her habit and veil aflow. After a quick prayer and a head count, we were instructed to get out our picture books to draw a new picture. I felt sick. I looked around and discovered the other children at the Seal's table had 23 blank sheets of paper following the house they had drawn on the first page of their book. My book was full.

"I'm finished," I squeaked.

I was finished. Sister C was furious. Her eyes became very small and narrow and she no longer had the benevolent look of an emperor penguin. She picked up my book, flicked through the pages of badly drawn houses, then threw it to the table.

I was bad, precocious and couldn't follow instructions. I had wasted all the precious hard work she had put into making that book for me. I was brazen, I was going to be skinned alive and I was only five years old.

"Go and get yourself a piece of paper from the paper box," she scrawked. I got up from my chair and hurried to the paper box by the classroom door, pursued by an angry nun whacking my bum with her ruler with each step I took. Every cheek of my body burned and the vision of myself seated at Our Lord's right hand, with lambs skipping around and a big yellow sun, quickly evaporated. I had yet to lose my vanity, learn humility and how to follow instructions delivered in a thick Irish accent.

Later that day a boy from the Seal's table picked off the rubber eraser from the end of his pencil and shoved it up his nose where it got stuck. That took the heat off me.