She had put my 'coms' on back-to-front. I knew she had. At five-and-a-bit, I was quite capable of dressing myself. But I said nothing. This new world was too new, too upsetting, too much of a mystery. She was a dear little nun and no doubt she meant to be kind and helpful. But 'coms' on back-to-front only emphasized the strangeness, the loneliness, the heartbreak of rejection.

An only child for just over five years, much loved and cosseted, how could I even begin to understand this new life? It was all completely alien to me - especially the 'coms'. I had never worn such things before, but at the convent, they were de rigeur. Combinations, known to us as 'coms', were an all-in-one garment made of wool, with buttons from top to bottom all down the front.

My mother had introduced me to this peculiar garment and shown me how to get into it and fasten it up. I could manage it very well and I could not understand why I was now having to wear it back-to-front!

After the 'coms' came the vest and then the 'liberty bodice'. This was a sort of fleecy garment with a lot more buttons and it finished just below the waistline that a child of five does not have. Then the knickers, navy blue with elastic at the waist and round the legs - and a pocket for one's hankie. Black woollen stockings and garters to keep them up. A petticoat of course. Black shoes with a strap across the instep and a button fastening. Finally, a navy blue uniform dress with a white detachable collar and a pinafore that covered everything completed the indoor uniform. 

Out of doors, there was a navy blue coat and a black velour hat. I have never seen anything so like a pudding basin (had it not been black) with an upturned brim. This creation sat straight on one's head, pulled well down. If one had a rather small head, as I had, and even a normal sized hat, trying to see where one was going could be somewhat daunting. In later years when I reached the senior school, I discovered how the seniors overcame the problem. One simply purloined a large pair of scissors, cut a chunk away from the front of the hat, sewed the pieces together again, replaced the ribbon and presto! one then had a hat which sat saucily on the back of one's head.

The day after my first day at school I was given a bath. Again, it was something totally alien. The lay sisters were in charge of bath-time for the little ones. I was helped to get undressed and as I squirmed out of my last garment, I found myself being enveloped in an outsize vest. This I had to wear in the bath.

Bath-time at home had always been fun-time, but this did not apply in the convent. Here it was a necessary evil. One sat in the bath in one's vest, was washed, lifted out and wrapped in an enormous bath sheet. The vest was removed without exposing the little body and one was rubbed dry, still wearing the bath sheet. This was allowed to drop only in relation to the descent of the first piece of clothing to be put on after the bath. The bewilderment of a child over all these antics is hardly surprising.

My parents lived in the Isle of Man. They had tried the education experiment once before. I went to a nursery school in Douglas. My mother used to take me there on the Manx Electric Railway and pick me up again later. On one occasion, however, she was unable to collect me and arranged for one of the teachers to see me onto the train.

But things did not go according to plan. The teacher simply left me at the terminus and I, of course, had no idea which train to take. In fact, all the trains went the same way so it would not have mattered, but I did not know this. I played with a little boy from the school who lived nearby, but final, y he decided he must go home. Probably he was hungry, for I certainly was.

Eventually I took refuge in an empty horse-car standing idle at the terminus - one of those which ply along Douglas promenade - and there I fell asleep. I did not know that my parents were frantic and that the police were searching for me. I was never again sent back to that school.

My father was an Irishman. My mother was English. My paternal grandmother was living in Dublin and after the nursery school fiasco, the question of a first school for me came up. My grandmother pressed for Dublin. The convent of her choice was not just a first school. A child could start off there and continue right through to the end of her secondary education. Besides, it was her daughter's old school and obviously the nuns would be delighted to have me there. My grandmother and my aunt would visit me regularly. Finally, the clincher: since I was to be brought up as a Catholic, surely this was the ideal solution.

So here I was, aged five-and-a-bit, in a strange, unknown, mysterious world and quite unable to understand why. The convent, though not more than about three miles from the centre of Dublin, was apparently in the country. The nuns had their own farmland surrounding them and wherever one looked there were fields to be seen. There were also high walls. This, apart from holiday times, was where I was to be incarcerated for the next twelve years.

Through my grandmother I had already met one other child who was also just starting at the same school. We had been to visit Evelyn and her family at their home in Dublin. I was quite happy about this. My mother was still there. My grandmother, my aunt, my mother and Evelyn's, sat and talked after tea.

Evelyn and I sat under the table. It was a very large, very solid, round table covered by an outsize, heavy, round cloth which hung almost to the floor. We sat there listening to and giggling over the incomprehensible adult conversation. I cannot remember being so lightheartedly happy again for a very long time.

At school we slept in dormitories. In the junior school there were two of them. Very big rooms they were, light and airy with tall windows and high ceilings. In the farthest corner slept one of the senior girls. She had curtains round her bed for privacy. That was a privilege that one acquired only in the senior school.

Modesty, however, was another matter. This was an art it was essential to learn. It was considered thoroughly immodest to dress or undress simply by putting on or taking off one's clothes in full view of anyone else. We had to drape a dressing gown round ourselves and, without allowing this to slide off, squirm our way to the desired state.

Washing oneself was a most disagreeable necessity. All down one side of each dormitory was a row of cabinets. These housed our toilet items and each cabinet had a free-standing basin on top. In the junior school these would be filled for us with cold water and we were obliged to wash ourselves thoroughly, night and morning.

Morning washing was even more unpleasant than night-time washing. After all, many of us were still not much more than babies. The routine meant being wakened from sleep in a nice warm bed by the ringing of a handbell. This was just the beginning. In would come the bellringer, a nun reciting prayers, to which we were expected to give the responses. Anyone who did not show signs of immediate emergence from the bedclothes, or did not respond to the prayers, could expect the handbell to be rung right beside her ears.

Once out of bed, a dressing gown had to be partially put on. This would be tied round the middle but the top and the sleeves would be left dangling. Then came the cold water and up and down the line of little girls, unwillingly washing themselves, would come the nun, quietly, almost in a whisper, or even more likely, just by gestures, exhorting and harrying the troupe.

"Eileen, wash your ears!" "Mary, that is not washing your neck!" "Phyllis, you cannot possibly have finished yet!"

Admittedly the little ones did get help. We were not expected to do everything perfectly, or without help, right from the start, but this did not make the whole business any less bewildering and unpleasant.

My mother had brought me to the convent, reminded me that I was a big girl now and I must also be a good girl and do what the nuns told me. She assured me she would write me a long letter every week. Grannie or Auntie Flo would visit me regularly and the nuns would be very kind to me.

The nuns were very kind to me. I was the youngest child in the school and everyone therefore, made a fuss of me. But I was homesick. I would wake up and find myself in a wet bed - clearly the result of a small child's trauma on being, it must have seemed to me, abandoned. The nuns were never cross with me about it and never anything but helpful. Perhaps they understood the problem.

I, of course, did not understand it at all. I just found the whole thing absolutely mortifying and there was nothing I could do about it. I cannot remember how long this situation lasted but for certain it was not rectified overnight.

As promised, Grannie and Auntie Flo visited me without fail every week and this certainly was a pleasure. "You're wanted in the parlour" would come the message. Great excitement! There were several 'parlours' which were used for different purposes and occasions, but unless the matter was a private one it was always the same parlour in which one was 'wanted'.

I did not know my grandmother or my aunt before I went to school in Dublin. In those days travel between the Isle of Man and Dublin was not a matter of a short flight by air. There were no planes. Instead, it was a question, first, of a four hour passage by boat from Douglas to Liverpool. It could, of course, be longer if the weather was bad. This was a daytime journey.

Then came the overnight passage by boat to Dublin. There were no stabilisers on the boats at that time and sometimes the crossings could be very rough. Indeed at a later date, when I used to make the crossing unaccompanied, the passage on one occasion was so rough that the ship was blown off course. I always had a cabin overnight and was fast asleep in my berth. On arrival at my grandmother's next day, however, the results of the bad crossing were plain. I was so badly bruised from having been tossed about in my bunk that I was unable to return to school for a week. Yet I had slept solidly through it all.

This was the way my mother first brought me to Dublin to school. We broke our journey in Liverpool and instead of taking the boat to Dublin that same night, we spent a couple of days with my mother's sister, Edie, and her family in that city. Later on when I travelled on my own, I always looked forward to that same break in Liverpool.

We followed the same pattern in Dublin. There we stayed at my grandmother's house for a few days before I was taken to the convent. In this way I got to know my grandmother and my aunt a little.

Those few days at my grandmother's may well have set the scene for part of my childish bewilderment. My father's family were staunch Irish Catholics. My mother was an English Protestant. She had in fact converted to Catholicism before marrying my father but had never really embraced it.

My grandmother had strongly disapproved of the marriage. Knowing this, my mother must have felt herself to be in a defensive position and must have resented it. After all, I was in effect, being given over to the care of a Catholic convent, overseen by my Catholic grandmother, well out of my mother's reach. Children are very quick to pick up the undercurrents.

My mother and grandmother, in fact, never did see eye to eye. On the surface, all was sweetness and light, but there must have been tension. That had existed from the very beginning. Apparently, when my father first brought his bride to visit his mother, they were told they would be sleeping in separate rooms. My mother protested that she was a married woman and expected to sleep with her husband. My grandmother's reply was to the effect that since they had said they did not intend to have children for the time being, they certainly could not share a room.

Things like this, of course, I learnt about only later on in life. At that time I am sure they would all have been concerned to present a united front to a small child. I doubt however, whether my mother could possibly have been completely successful. After all, in this game she was the loser.

At school, my initiation into Catholicism began immediately. I was very puzzled about religion. At home it had had no apparent place. My father, brought up very strictly on religious lines, was still a believer, though no longer a practising Catholic. Nor was my mother a churchgoer. So far they had made no effort to bring religion into my young life.

.....

I can remember my mother telling me, in later years, how she and my father played truant from Mass when on a visit to my grandmother. They took themselves off to the zoo instead and had to concoct lies when quizzed about the sermon.

The subject of religious education was called Religious Knowledge. When the nuns started to teach me this I was lost. "What is God?" I asked. They were enchanted. The child was profound. "What is God?" she wanted to know - not "Who?" 

It was simple knowledge I was seeking of course, on a subject about which I knew nothing at all. There was certainly nothing profound in my questions.

To begin with, religious teaching meant the catechism. There was nothing very difficult about this. Children often have a great facility of word retention and I had an almost photographic memory. We had to learn the catechism off by heart and I found no difficulty at all in doing so.

Teaching us the catechism was reinforced by stories from the Bible, simply told by the teacher. I have no doubt that many of these, particularly from the Old Testament, would have been very carefully selected, expurgated versions.

Apart from what we learnt in class, religion was impressed upon us all the time. We began the day by being wakened by prayers (and the bell of course!) Once we were up and dressed, we had morning prayers. Then, as we left the baby stage and progressed through the junior school, there was Mass in the convent chapel. Mass was followed by breakfast during which one of the seniors would read aloud to us from the 'Imitation of Christ' and the lives of the saints.

All meals began with the saying of grace: "Bless us O Lord and these Thy gifts, which of Thy bounty we are about to receive, through Christ our Lord. Amen." Similarly, when the meal was ended, we all stood to express our thanks in grace.

Every day our first class was Religious Knowledge and all classes began with a prayer. Thus all work was dedicated to God and we learnt that we needed God's help in all things. If we were talented we must not be proud of it: our talents were purely a gift from God.

Everything stopped at twelve o'clock, midday, when we would kneel for the Angelus. The same thing happened again at six o'clock in the evening. The end of the day would see us all collected together for evening prayers, after which we would file off to our dormitories. Then, off with our clothes (modestly of course!), shiver through the ritual of cold water washing, and see how quickly we could get into bed.

Finally, the lights would be turned off. The nun in charge that night would recite the final night prayers, to which all must give the responses. On the wall towards which all the beds faced, there was a picture of the Sacred Heart and in front of this there burned a little night light in a red glass container.

It was very comforting; infinitely preferable in fact to my bedroom at my grandmother's house. There was no sop there to childish fears and of these I had plenty. One of the bogeys that had surfaced for me at school was THE DEVIL! We learnt that we each had a guardian angel but that the devil was always around and putting temptation in our way. Our guardian angel would help us as much as possible but a great deal depended on ourselves. We must always be watchful and wary.

Whenever I stayed at Grannie's house I was expected to go upstairs in the dark, go into the unlit room and turn the light on for myself. I was petrified. Every time I had to go upstairs in the dark I was convinced that the devil was waiting for me just inside the bathroom door and I always expected him to pounce on me!

The bathroom and my bedroom (the return room, it was called) were at the top of the first flight of stairs and there was then a small flight to the rest of the bedrooms. It is hardly astonishing that in the circumstances I should feel isolated and terrified.

It was the convent's religious teaching that had conjured up for me the spectre of the devil. Once in bed in the big dormitory, however, that particular bogey did not trouble me. My only fear then was a wet bed. The red night light was reassuring and comforting; and Sister Mary Francis, the nun in overall charge of the juniors, would come and say goodnight to me, her youngest and smallest, make the sign of the cross on my forehead and arrange my arms over my flat little chest in the form of a cross.