FOND MEMORY It was a school where all the children wore darned worsted, where they cried -- or almost all -- when the Reverend Mother announced at lunchtime that the King had died peacefully in his sleep. I dressed in wool as well, ate rationed food, played English games and learned how wise the Magna Carta was, how hard the Hanoverians had tried, the measure and complexity of verse, the hum and score of the whole orchestra. At three o'clock I caught two buses home where sometimes in the late afternoon at a piano pushed into a corner of the playroom my father would sit down and play the slow lilts of Tom Moore while I stood there trying not to weep at the cigarette smoke stinging up from between his fingers and -- as much as I could think -- I thought this is my country, was, will be again, this upward-straining song made to be our safe inventory of pain. And I was wrong. -- Ms. Eavan BOLAND