MEMORY LANE: John McGAHERN, perhaps Ireland's best known author, was born in Dublin in 1934. He became a primary teacher and taught successfully in Drogheda and Dublin. His teaching career came to an abrupt end when he was dismissed, on the instruction of the Archbishop of Dublin, following the banning of his controversial novel, "The Dark." He subsequently taught in England, at first and third levels, before returning to Co. Leitrim, Ireland, to live and write. He has written many successful novels and short stories including the much-acclaimed "Amongst Women," published late 1990s, "The Leave-taking" (1974), "That They May Face The Rising Sun" (2001), considered one of the best novels from that year, and "By The Lake," (2002), which takes place in rural Co. Leitrim near Drumshanbo. McGAHERN recalls, "I remember very vividly a certain day in school when letters on the page that until then had been a mystery, just signs, suddenly started forming into words and making sense. I experienced a feeling of triumph, or the coming into knowledge. I suppose I was four or five at the time. My mother was a teacher and I went to school whenever she taught, which was in a lot of schools. She had a permanent job, but it was in a small school and the number fell. She always had to go where there was a vacancy at the time, because of a thing called the Panel. In one school, I remember, there was a very wicked teacher called Mrs. McCANN and I thought I'd pacify her, maybe, because my own mother was a teacher. I decided to bring her flowers, but the only flowers that were growing around our house were thistles. I thought these purple flowers were quite beautiful and I brought her a big armful. She took it as an incredible insult and I got an extra biffing for that. I thin! k that nearly all the children of that generation went to school in fear. The war was going on in England and there was always the "hope" that one of the bombs would be dropped on our school. My mother was a very gentle sort of person. She came from a very clever family, but they were poor and they came from the mountains. She was the first person from that mountain ever to take up the King's Scholarship, but I think that it was a hard thing for her, in that she was uprooted from her own class and sent to boarding school in Carrick-on-Shannon. She had seven children in nine years and then she died. We had a farm as well, because in those days it was easier to buy a farm in the countryside than it was to buy a house...she had a very busy life. My father was a Garda sergeant and again it was a very strange house in the sense that we used to go to the barracks in the school holidays and he would come to the farm on his days off. He was stationed about 22 miles from home and of course there were no cars then. He often used to come home on wet nights and I remember still the blue glow of the carbide lamp on his bicycle and its strange hissing noise. I had a distant relationship with my father. He was an only child himself and didn't relate very easily with people. To a certain extent I suppose he was, with the great influence of the Church at the time, very much a kind of symbol of God the Father. My father was very conventional in the sense that he would do whatever what be approved of. He was exercising the law and he was going to see that he set an example, first and foremost. There was a lot of superstitious talk then. For instance, we were told that the sun danced in the heavens for joy of the resurrection at Easter. I was always getting up early to see if the sun actually danced. I heard so much about heaven that I went in search of it. We had a rushy hill at the back of the house and I remember climbing it and being terribly tired and thinking I would never get to the top. Eventually, I reached the top and there was as valley and an enormous disappointment to find another hill at the end of the valley. I remember falling asleep and alarming everybody because they couldn't find me. My mother died when I was ten. When the news of her death came, I was shattered. Our farm was sold and we went to live with my father in the barracks. There was a succession of maids, as they were called then, or servant girls who looked after us. The barracks was a very interesting place. We lived in the living quarters and all the activities of the police station actually happened in the house. It became part of our domestic lives. We would see the few prisoners that were there and we would witness the routine of the barracks. Nobody had anything much to do. They used to cycle around the road and they used to write reports, which I think were one of my first glimpses of fiction. They used to call them the patrols of the imagination! On wet days they would hole up in some house, but then they would have to pretend that they cycled and had to dream up what they had seen along the way. These reports were quite long, often a page and a half of the foolscap ledger. Often in the evenings the policemen would be bored, because one of them always had to be in the barracks. They would come up to play cards in the living room. We would hear them thumping up the stairs with their bed in the morning and taking it down again at n! ight, where they slept beside a phone that never rang. There would be enormous excitement on a court day, when they would be all polishing themselves up. They had to go into town to the court and they would put a few bets on the horses. There would also be great excitement when the superintendent came on inspection. He used to line them up and comment on their dress and that sort of thing. They also had to measure the rainfall. There was a copper rain gauge out among the cabbages in the garden and that was one of the daily rituals. There were a whole lot of pointless ceremonies. They had to put out the thistle, ragwort and dock posters and notices about dog licences too..."