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However, she yielded at that stage - I expect there was pressure from Miss Mullen - and off I went to Dowanhill in the summer of 1915 wearing the white blouse and shapeless blue serge uniform of the school. At least I think it was blue, and that it was during our time that the change was made to brown - allegedly because one of the Sisters overheard a passerby comment on the neatness of 'those little orphanage girls'.

Whether the story is true or not, I do not think it is unfair to say that at Dowanhill the idea came through that class distinctions were to be accepted as part of the natural order of things. It was not just that some of the girls sitting next to me came from big houses and talked with 'Kelvinside' accents - but there was a feeling that such pupils were looked on more benignly than others and that the school atmosphere itself was hostile to some elements of our Irish-immigrant, working-class background.

Whatever their personal histories the religious sisters who taught us all seemed to speak the same form of carefully 'elocuted' standard English. We mimicked them hilariously in secret, and invariably referred to them when out of earshot as 'the Bins' because of their eccentric pronunciation of the word 'been' - 'Girls, what have you bin doing?' And with this style of theirs went attitudes which definitely antagonized people of our sort. Blue hair-ribbons were encouraged on St Andrew's Day, and I think even red on St George's, but there was an explicit ban on green for St Patrick's. This outraged even girls like myself, who hardly understood what the 1916 Rebellion was all about, and whose mother was a Redmondite who always said: 'You should be loyal to the country that gives you your living'. Great was our glee when on St Patrick's Day itself Grace Boyce (whose parents came from Downings in Donegal, not too far from Fanad) threw up her desk lid just as Sister Elizabeth entered and sent cascades of green ribbon all over the classroom floor. No doubt she got one of the famous talkings-to which were the Notre Dame equivalent of Miss Mullen's cane - but no doubt also she thought it was worth it.

I remember being fond of French and not at all fond of Latin, and liking poetry as much as I had in St Joseph's; but I'm afraid the personalities of the teachers - not all of whom were nuns - had much to do with such preferences. I believe that when people nowadays ask me to recite 'Home thoughts from Abroad' or 'The Lake Isle of Inisfree' I find myself unconsciously imitating the voice and gestures of my English teacher of all those years ago. Not that I was at all subject to the girlish 'crushes' which seemed to affect some otherwise sane fellow-pupils. I felt enormously silly being dragged down two extra streets on the way home by my domineering elder sister because 'This is the way Miss McAllister goes for her train!'

It is the funny things that stay in my mind. I see myself as one of a row of girls standing in the music room, trying to sing one of those awful 'Fa-la,fa-a-la, fa-la,fa- la,falala' choruses - and being glared at -'There's-a-girl-not-singing-properly!' - from behind the grand piano. How could I sing properly, when the girl next to me (I think she was called Maley), straight-faced and angelic, was providing an improved version: 'Fa-la, Fa-a-la, a fella fell aff a lorry, a fella fell aff a lorry..'

A year or two ago I had a surprise visit from a classmate of those years, Helen Duffin, and she recalled something I had quite forgotten - how she got me to draw fairies on the margins of her exercise books, and how she got into trouble about it.

Other people too must have noted the talent which was later to earn me my living. After I had been two or three years at Dowanhill my mother decreed that I must leave and start earning to help support the family. I imagine the scholarship I had won did not pay one's way into the upper school. In any case it was obvious that Susan was going to get a good Higher Leaving Certificate and go on to University, and my parents, as I have said, were in no position to educate more than one of their offspring to that sort of level.

So I joined my younger sister Mary in the Developing and Printing Department of the well-known Glasgow firm of Lizars for a period of time which I find difficult to work out now - probably months rather than years. But I remember some details well and I suppose I could say that it was all part of my education. Mary was already a skilled printer and came home with her fingers stained by the chemicals, whereas my job was a real drudgery, unrolling films under a tiny red safelight - I am sure my eyesight suffered - and ticketing them ready for the developing tanks. There was a lot of banter with the youngsters who delivered parcels of orders to and from centres in Lanarkshire. I told them they should have some ambition and educate themselves, and was addressed as 'great prophet of the Victorian Age' for my pains. But one lad took me seriously and told me that this for him was just a temporary job, that he was going back to Dalziel High School and would some day have his own optician's shop; and years later I found out that that was exactly what he did.

Although this period ( as it turned out a 'between-time' in my life) is a little confused in memory, I know that the soul-destroying work in Lizar's blacked-out cubbyhole was not the limit of my ambitions. Someone had encouraged me to take after-work classes in secretarial skills somewhere in the West end of the city, as a way of broadening my opportunities in the future. I know that it meant a long and tiring tram-run, and a miserable one too, because I soon discovered that Pitman's shorthand and speed typing were the last things I was ever going to be good at.

I was much happier on the evenings I could spend at home, old enough now to be of use to my mother in keeping the very young ones occupied and getting them ready for bed. Eddie, born in the second or third year of the war, was a particular delight. He was greedy for bedtime stories, and thought long and hard when Susan and I told him it was time he was a good boy and told a story himself. He finally came up with something of classic simplicity: 'One day, down a London Road, a wee rabbit!' This got great applause, even when it was repeated the next night and the night after, but we finally felt bound to insist he think again and produce a new story. And so he did: 'One day, down a London Road, two wee rabbits!'

But things were moving elsewhere. I have maybe harped on a little about some limitations I saw in the Notre Dame sisters at Dowanhill, but I have to acknowledge gratefully the effectiveness of the education they gave us, and the debt I personally owe to the superior there, Sister Wilfrid. When she discovered that I was leaving school she took the trouble to make a direct approach to our parish priest, then and for many years later Fr Daniel O'Sullivan, pointing out that I had definite artistic talent and that if money could be found the course at Glasgow School of Art was open to me. Fr O'Sullivan must have done some lobbying on his own account, both with the Archdiocesan authorities and with my strong-willed mother. The upshot was that she applied to the appropriate person, and one of the bursaries the Archdiocese funded for deserving cases came my way, with the agreement that I should pay the money back in due course from my earnings.

Glasgow School of Art I did pay it back, every penny of it; and gladly, because it gave me one of the happiest times of my whole long life. (Years later my husband's priest brother told me that the bursary scheme had been abandoned because not enough people honoured their agreement.) Glasgow School of Art is possibly better known now than it was then, because in the perspective of history it is clear that Charles Rennie Mackintosh's design made it one of the most original buildings produced anywhere in the world in the first decade of this century. But my appreciation of it was of a different sort.

I was very young, around sixteen, when I began the general course. Being naturally diffident I felt very overawed to begin with, and even when I had picked up friends among my fellow students I can remember being reluctant to cross Renfrew Street to get something to eat without asking somebody to come with me. Yet the total impression is of a wonderfully free and tolerant place which gave every stimulus and encouragement to people wanting to create something personal and original. I can remember leaving some class-task when things were not working for me and going up to what we called the 'Bird's-nest' with its view across the city to the hills; it was the natural thing to do, and nobody seemed to mind. I suppose there must have been some drudgery in the first years, with perspective exercises and anatomy and endless life-studies. It is odd to think of myself, who was innocent even by the reticent standards of those days, spending a good deal of time drawing nudes from every angle. This was no doubt what one Notre Dame sister, less enlightened than her superior, had meant when she firmly dissuaded my classmate Peggy Maley - who had I think more natural talent than I - from considering an Art School course: 'It is no place for a good Catholic girl'.

Glasgow School of Art from its beginnings thirty years before had offered a wide range of applied arts - its embroidery courses, for instance, were known internationally. I tried as many fields as I could. I recall the teacher of Illumination making us cut and use quill pens so that we could live the experience of writers of script through the centuries. She was very encouraging, and liked the way I developed my own version of Celtic decoration and script. As it happened this was one of the talents I was called on to use even in later years when my children were round my feet and I had many other things to think about besides art. Many a time when the table was cleared and the children ready for bed I would be recording painstakingly on parchment the gratitude of this parish or that for the work of some priest 'on the occasion of his Silver Jubilee' or for some other reason. (The parochial committee would sometimes give me something for my trouble and sometimes not, but my real reward was the simple pleasure my husband Jim took in presenting my finished work: 'The parish priest kept feeling for the edges of your wee pictures in the margin - he thought they were stuck on!')

Ceramic was to be my specialisation for the Diploma, but the faded notebooks and darkened drawing-sheets in my old portfolio show that I was giving at least as much of my time to figure-drawing and landscape as to the decorative motifs which were the raw material of much ceramic work. I remember James Gray, the chief Instructor, criticising my scatterbrained approach - 'You get an idea, and then another one comes on top of it, and you pursue that'. It was something of a theme-song with Mr Gray, and he was ready to give me object-lessons - 'Look at that design, now - a fellow who was gifted, but hadn't the backbone to finish'. He was a good, good, man, Mr Gray, and I have never forgotten the kind guidance he gave to a little girl from the East End who was very unsure of herself and her ability. I pray for him every day. It was he whom I went to when I was terribly upset at finding a near copy of an ambitious frieze design of mine presented among someone else's work; I told him my mother thought I'd a right to sue, but he said that would harm everybody and the School as well. Meeting him years afterwards I said I wished I had taken his advice and been more industrious. 'The cry of the indolent always!' he said, with a sort of gentle regret.

The first time our group was in his room he asked us to write down and illustrate with a sketch something we would like to make. My idea was for a fireplace frieze for a children's nursery in low relief, and I had a verse from somewhere to go with it:

Poetry of one sort or another seems to have inspired a lot of things I attempted at this time, and there were plenty of 'Pied Pipers of Hamelin' and 'Fairies at the Bottom of my Garden' among the sketches and watercolours which I allowed my mother to give away right, left, and centre to relations and friends -'That's very nice - I'm sure Mrs McKeown would love it'. I have a feeling not all such gifts were appreciated, though the sort of work I was producing was very conventional. It was certainly worlds away from the surrealism and futurism of the contemporary avant-garde, which I hardly knew about, much less understood.

No doubt there was a sense in which lowly students like myself were following an orthodoxy provided by the Glasgow colourists and the decorative approach of people like Jessie King and the other 'Glasgow Girls'. But as I remember it the School of Art was mainly concerned with providing the technical competence on which people could build a personal style, and there were even irreverent references to the figures of a generation before - 'William McTaggart, now - he gave a rub with his thumb and called it "atmosphere"'.

In a way it is a pity that in the later years of my time at Glasgow School of Art I had to concentrate on ceramic work. I don't think the choice was a bad one, and the challenge of matching shape and design and pursuing the goal of colours as delicate as those on Chinese ware was a delight to me. So also was the craft side of pottery work - it was a matter of pride that I was entrusted in time with the work of packing items in the kiln and firing them correctly. But of the items I produced in my favoured medium all but one have disappeared - either by way of my mother's kind donations, or in one of the accidents which are inevitable when there are active children in the house. And then of course I never did have the chance in later life to continue in this line; even the more progressive of the schools I worked in did not have a kiln for pottery. One of the might-have-beens of my life came in the form of an invitation - I think through Mr Gray - to speak to a representative of a pottery in Staffordshire which was looking for ceramic designers. I think it was at the time of the customary exhibition of diploma work at the end of my final year. I suppose my next step in life - to enter teaching as my sister Susan had already done - was already decided upon in the family circle, and maybe I was just too young and unsure of myself even to consider making my way in a place far from home. In any case, I did not go to see the gentleman, and in all the glory of my new Diploma status went off after that summer to do the specialist teachers' course at Jordanhill Training College.

Girls going into teaching from school or after finishing a degree (like my sister) were required if they were Catholic to attend the residential Teacher-training College run by the Notre Dame Sisters close to their school at Dowanhill. Men attended Jordanhill Training College (later 'College of Education'), where special provision was made for them to take a course qualifying them to teach Religious classes in Catholic schools. People like myself fell between two stools, since Notre Dame did not have the facilities for training students of special subjects like art and in any case such teachers were not expected to take R.E. classes later on. So I missed the experience of 'living-in' in the convent atmosphere of Dowanhill which was part of the formation of most Catholic girls entering the teaching profession.

Whether there was much personal loss in this I do not know: some of the freer spirits at Dowanhill envied us our situation, chafing as they did at the restrictions of a life- style which was too much like that of a boarding-school. Jordanhill on the other hand was a very male-dominated environment, and I remember a note being delivered from students in the large English department asking us girls in the Special subjects group 'to have pity on the poor jaded non-specialist students over here'. I rather enjoyed the new experience of the training College, and there were courses which were comething of a delight - speech-training, for example, presided over by Anne McAllister. It was not at all a training in acquiring a special 'teachery' way of talking, but of using our natural resources well. She taught us something of the mechanics of voice-production, and presented us with many passages and excerpts which fed my taste for reciting aloud. Anne was a formidable expert in her field, who would ask the class of newcomers to read a few sentences each and then unerringly 'place' them in their local district of the West of Scotland. My Art School friend Rosie Graham, who had 'done elocution', was quite mortified to know that Annie could tell straight away that she was from Dennistoun.

Going into classrooms for the first time was a bit of a terror for naturally shy people like myself, but the subject itself gave Rosie and myself some advantage - most pupils are willing to be interested in art if you give them a chance. The discipline of preparing lesson-plans and carrrying them out under the eye of an experienced teacher or on the occasion of the dreaded 'Crit-lessons' undoubtedly concentrated the mind and provided strategies for one's future work. I remember talking to a class about how pictures were often based on a triangle, and illustrating that from Old Master prints, and the kindly lecturer who had been sitting at the back giving my self-confidence a boost by saying - 'You know, I've never thought of that approach myself'. But I think that like most student teachers who came already qualified to what was later called a College of Education I found much of the lecturing pretty wearisome, and could understand why others on the benches sometimes amused themselves by making life difficult for the less popular lecturers. The persecution could be active - laughing at the wrong places, and asking disingenuous questions - or simply a matter of studiously ignoring the lecturer's attempts to interest them. Stories were passed around about what one or other of the wags had said to enliven a dull period. The one I remember was about a youth whose private conversation was interrupted by a Geography lecturer demanding that he name the main types of wells, and who came up with H.G.Wells and the Bonny Wells o' Wearie before being ignominiously dismissed. (He was a colleague of mine in a Lanarkshire school thirty years later, and was still producing quotable cracks. 'I'm not good enough at Science to get promoted,' he would say, and when somebody rose to the bait and asked what Science had to do with it, would answer, 'I can't get the Promotion Experiment right. You know - Fill a Local Councillor up to the neck with alcohol and shake vigorously by the hand'.)

I don't know what their future pupils would have thought if they had seen their mentors' own classroom behaviour at the training stage, but I suppose for all of us it was a rather uninspiring interval to be endured before we got on with the business of life.. To read now about my Father click hereTo return to the top click here.