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I would have known nothing of all this when I accompanied my elder sister Susan for the first time to the two-storey red-brick building, opened in October 1906, which housed both St Joseph's Church and St Joseph's Primary school. Miss Mullen the head-mistress, and teachers like Miss Simpson and Miss Begley who presided over the seven groundfloor classrooms 'each capable of accommodating sixty pupils', seemed to us to be beautifully neat and well turned-out, though they must have been living on pitifully small salaries.

The one thing I remember about that first day is my mother's mysterious instruction: 'When she asks you your name, say 'Catherine Begley Callaghan'. I dutifully did so, and Miss Begley, who was in charge of Infants, said 'But that's my name!' - as was no doubt intended. My mother was really stretching the point a bit, since I was only a quarter Begley. The same teacher figures in another recollection which cannot have happened much later - when Miss Simpson entered the room unexpectedly, to find the class sitting in awestruck silence. Miss Begley had shaken out her enormously long black hair over the desk, and was busy brushing and rolling it into the 'Merry Widow' curls which were the fashion of the time. 'Well,' she said, maybe a mite defiantly, ' it's one way of keeping them quiet for a while!'

I hope Miss Simpson had the grace to laugh. But school in the early years of the century was certainly not all fun. One lunchtime my mother, seeing to us washing our hands before we went back along the road to classes, spotted a really nasty weal across Susan's palm. The parish priest chanced to come in at that moment, and his face darkened when he heard that one of his teachers had used her cane with such force on a small child. Something must have been said, because that teacher, although she never punished my sister like that again, always seemed hostile to her afterwards. All her days Susan would be the sort of vivacious person, good-looking and clever, who would attract both admiration and dislike. She never forgot how that particular teacher (I remember her name but there is no reason now to mention it) practically tossed at her a class-prize she had dared to win, and ignored her protest that it was a book for boys.

The same teacher roused the ire of other parents as well as ours. There was a famous day when the classroom door was flung open and an angry mother cried: 'Cam' oot, tabocca-legs!' (Pipe-tobacco in those days often came in the form of thin black twist.) Nobody knew the end of the story because the teacher, who was not lacking in courage, went out and closed the door behind her, and no doubt 'gave as good as she got' about the lady's erring children.

I was 'mousey' and shy myself, living always in the shadow of my elder sister, and the times when I got in the way of punishment were few and far between. I remember being called out for not paying attention in class, and vainly trying to tell the teacher what had distracted me -'Please Miss, that big hawk out there caught a wee bird!' When I got back to my seat my friend whispered -'She only gave you a wee tip - you could see her laughing!'. It was different when I and a boy called Peter Donegan were guilty of the crime of marching off the 'lines' several bars of music too soon. (No doubt the piano banging out martial music was a useful way of keeping things in control when you had the problem of manoeuvering 440 pupils - the 1908 roll - in and out of a cramped building.) I can still hear the awful voice of the headmistress saying at the next assembly: 'Have you discovered the culprits, Miss Simpson?', and feel the sting of the cane on my hand almost before I grasped what it was all about.

The pupils of St Joseph's came from a variety of homes, though probably a majority would have fathers working in the ironworks or similar places. Those from more bourgeois backgrounds, shopkeepers and so on, could be told to some extent by their dress, the boys for instance wearing starched Eton collars and better boots than others; but I do not remember any sense of envy or class-consciousness among us. My mother of course insisted that we should be well turned out at all times, and maybe that is what caused one of my little pals to tell me - 'My maw says you Callaghans are gentry.' I repeated this to my own mother, who seemed to find it very funny and said: 'God help the gentry!' You have to remember that although there were 400 pupils in the school large families like our own were the norm and we were really quite a small village community who knew each other pretty well.

I was to live in Tollcross until I was thirty and various fellow pupils will enter my story later on. My fellow-culprit Peter Donegan, for instance, whose family had a small business and who was one of the better-dressed scholars, was to propose to me in later years. And then there were the two Pierce sisters, one of whom, Cissie, remained a very close friend of mine, and who both emigrated to the States. When I first knew them Mary and Cissie stood out as particularly pretty and neatly dressed little girls who showed a lot of promise; a school Inspector remarked to her teacher that Cissie had as active a mind for a ten-year-old as he had come across. Things changed when their mother died and their father remarried, as even children like us could notice, and unlike myself Cissie left school on the day the law allowed her to and found herself a job.

It was long before the time of radio and few echoes from the big world entered the classrooms of St Joseph's, though I remember my deskmate Bella Cairney teaching me the latest 'hit' that her elder brother had been singing:

The day-to-day life of the classroom must have been like that in most schools of the time, though I have an impression that Miss Mullen was anxious that good pupils should get more than the 'three R's'. She seemed a formidable person to us, but my sister Susan could recall how in later years she would invite promising ex-pupils like herself to her home, and show great interest in their lives and their studies.

In some ways it was her deputy, Miss Simpson, who left most impression upon myself. I heard it said much later that she and her sister had been extremely able pupils at one of Glasgow's convent schools who could have done other things but chose to give their lives to teaching in schools like ours in the East end of the city. I know there was a lot of poetry in her classes and bits of Shakespeare, and that we were all encouraged to have tickets in the local library and to take out books weekly. I had read one or two Dickens by the time I left Primary school, though I recall being completely put off by 'A Tale of Two Cities' when it was a set text in secondary school, and never really finishing it. But my love for poetry never left me, though I would be hard put to it to say which of those I can still recite I learned from Miss Simpson. 'The Lady of Shalott', perhaps, with which I used to enthrall my children when they were small:

Even now I recite poetry to them on car-journeys, though recently they had to remind me who the author was of one I particularly love - 'When you are old and gray and full of sleep..' I had forgotten that it was by Yeats, and was written for Maud Gonne, somebody I saw in the flesh once, a very tall old lady in black addressing a crowd in a Dublin street. Perhaps that piece would have been too contemporary to have come from the Miss Simpson days, though I don't know - she was probably quite up-to-date in her reading.

Miss Mullen's efforts to broaden our interests extended, surprisingly enough, to getting us to play cricket. That comes back to me for the usual reason things stick in the mind, because it gave me an embarrassing moment: the ball knocked down my wicket first thing and the boys laughed uproariously at me because I wanted to put the bails back on and have another try.

Certainly there were concerts. I must have been very small when I recited :

Schooltime: Summer Holidays. When did I first spend a summer holiday in Donegal? A good few years ago I wrote an article for The Donegal Magazine describing one particular, extended holiday we Callaghan children had in the land of our parents when I was about eight years old, and I shall put in that story later on. Go to article. But I am sure that Fanad and my mother's people's farm at Tullynadall was already very familiar to me at that time, and scattered recollections suggest that from an early stage our parents found the resources to pack us off in summer on Lord Leitrm's little ship the Ganiamor, which plied between the Broomielaw in Glasgow and Mulroy Bay in Donegal. The old pier at Leatbeg, a mile or two from Tullynadall, was the Ganiamor's last stop before it reached its mooring-place on the Carrigart side of Mulroy close to Manorvaughan. The pier is still there, and on my latest, possibly my last, Fanad visit it was one of the spots which brought back to me heartbreaking memories of the dead whom once I loved.

There is Uncle Larry, the man of the house at Tullynadall, laughing as he lifted us and our small bits of luggage up into the farm-cart. He would be father to us in the weeks that followed, since our own father would only be with us for a few days at the Glasgow Fair. I remember my toddler sister Agnes reaching up her wee arms to him at bedtime and crying 'Lub me Lally!'; she already suffered from a sore back - it was to give her trouble as she grew up - and wanted the feel of his big hands massaging the ache away. And there was another dafter moment at the pier, on the sad day of farewell, with three or four of us crying and wishing he could come with us - and he asked a friend to see to taking the cart home, bought himself a ticket, and came the whole way to Tollcross with us 'for the run'.

Agnes was a great favourite with everyone, then and afterwards. ('Aunt Aganess' was to be far and away the favourite visitor for my own small children in the years before she went off to the States in the Queen Elizabeth with thousands of other 'GI Brides' to join her American husband Joe Barry.) My Callaghan grandfather, whom I recall as a tiny leprechaun of a man, bright-eyed in a wizened face, not well able to stir from his chair in the chimney-corner, would say to his son: 'You know, Tommy, if you would leave the wee one with me I think I would still be here when you come back next summer'. I can hear his high-pitched old man's voice still, telling stories of the Famine times and of the coffin-ship that carried his family to America. The sights he saw in childhood never left him - the sheeted bodies of those too weak to survive the voyage going down into the sea, and the crowded hot city streets where his family laboured and saved to get the passage money to take them back to where they belonged. He was a link with an Ireland that is now found only in poems and history-books, and when wee Agnes was next in the house at Fanavolty the chair in the chimney-corner was empty.

I don't think we ever stayed with my father's people, but we must have walked over past Kindrum Loch to their house fairly often; indeed that was the road crowded every Sunday with all the Massgoers from our side of the parish. (Seventy years afterwards I put my memory of this - long skirts and bowler hats and chequered shawls - into a scraperboard sketch which hangs in my home.) Curiously enough wee Agnes was the cause of a little bit of bad feeling between my mother and her in-laws. Susan and Mary and myself she had called after grandmothers and an elder aunt according to the unwritten rules which governed such things in Donegal, and the next girl ought to have been a Julia, after my father's sister Giley in Fannavolty. The family story is that when they were wrapping the new infant in her shawl to bear her off to St Joseph's church for christening, my mother, still too weak to be up and about, would not hear of Julia as her child's name. She pointed to a holy picture on the bedroom wall with the words: 'Call her after her' - 'her' being Agnes, Virgin and Martyr. Perhaps there was more to it than a taste in names. Giley had been in Scotland, 'doing' for her furnacemen brothers, before Tommy's young bride arrived, and the story was passed down that she got Sunday suits for them on hire purchase and left Rosie with the debts to pay off. On Giley's side all was not forgotten forty years later, when I paid duty visits to my old aunt with my own children. Giley was genuinely anxious to be updated on the whereabouts and doings of the Callaghans, but there was always that other sister whose name she could never quite remember... My maternal aunts - the Maggie and Grace who ran a race in their father's rhyme - were much closer to us, naturally, and played mother to us in their own very different ways at Tullynadall. (That place-name, by the way, is not the mouthful it looks - locally the second syllable is never pronounced.) I have sometimes thought the contrast between them was not unlike the difference between Susan and myself: Maggie the tall Spanish-beauty type with a rather imperious nature to go with it, Grace younger and smaller and more amiable, and maybe with more fellow-feeling for small nieces on their holidays. I remember once furiously complaining as Aunt Maggie none too gently got me stripped for what I considered a quite unnecessary bath. It was to no effect at all that I quoted my mother, then lying ill in Glasgow: 'My Mamma said we were to be let run wild - this isn't running wild!'

But that was only one moment in a holiday life where we had an enviable freedom and variety of experience on the little farm and adventuring with our many cousins and friends around the lochs and hills. My second cousin Katie Begley from Ballyhurke was a particular companion although a year or two older than myself. In later years, as Katie Blaney, she had always a great welcome for my young family in her home in Rossnakil. It was she who was with me one day at the shore of Kindrum Loch where my grandmother and aunts rinsed out the family washing in the soft fresh water of the loch. The great wooden washtub upended on the pebbles was a temptation to us and it wasn't long before it was right way up and floating gently among the reeds at the loch's edge. The idea of getting in and making a proper boat of it was too scarey for us, but we made a great game of pushing it off with all the strength of our little arms and then bringing it bobbing back in again by lobbing stones beyond it. But of course as the evening breeze freshened we found to our dismay that the tub suddenly seemed to have a will of its own, and that our panicky efforts with bigger stones were falling short and making things worse.

It is strange how moments like that stay in memory and come vividly back three- quarters of a century later: the despair and terrified guilt of two small girls watching the tiny speck which was the family washtub disappearing in the gloaming away up near the little white church at Fanavolty. I was too frightened to break the news to anyone at Tullynadall, holding in my guilty feelings until bedtime came and I could have a good cry in the darkness.

That was what changed things. Through the thin wood partition my sobs reached the ears of kindly Aunt Grace, who came to take me in beside her in her own bed, and firmly wanted to know what was troubling me. 'Me and Katie floated the tub and sent it away down the Loch,' I said, and burst out crying again. Then the bed started shaking and shaking, and there was a moment when I thought Grace was as distressed as myself, before it dawned on me that in her odd grown-up way she was finding the awful thing funny.

As far as I remember nothing disastrous happened to either culprit, and the washtub was returned the next day by two very worried men - I remember they were called 'the Stiofans' because their father's name had been Stephen. They had naturally feared when they found the empty tub near Kindrum that a venturesome child might have been drowned; so they were mightily relieved to hear my Tale of a Tub.

So we lived two lives each year in those times before the Great War: the Tollcross life of school and streetgames and church on Sundays in the same building where we learned our lessons all week; and the Fanad life in summer, sharing or pretending to share in the haymaking and turf-saving and milking and the other tasks of the farm, and entering into the different games and escapades of the shy, active youngsters who all seemed to be our second or third cousins. The Great War of course put an end to the Donegal holidays for the time being, and with seven children to feed and clothe and Susan and myself moving on from Primary school my mother had to think hard about some other way of giving us a summer holiday.

Susan and I were both still at school at that stage, unlike so many of our companions for whom the top class in St Joseph's was the point of entry to the world of work. So I must take a step or two back, before the beginning of the Great War, and say how that came about. To read more about my schooldays click hereTo return to the top click here.