The first thing I remember is waking in an armchair under a blue blanket. The barred kitchen window threw sunlight across the table. My father sat with the sleeves cut from his shirt talking to the Deegan brothers who had come to cut the corn. My brothers were eating with their backs to me. The smell of sweat, and gravy. My mother cut a rhubarb tart into squares and put the soother in my gob to keep me quiet. That was the beginning of my conscious memory.

Dusty men talking in the afternoon sunlight and my mother spooning the cream off the top of a milk jug.

It was August, 1971. I was not yet three. Summer was a time for watching the clouds. When the hay was down but not yet saved or the barley's head grew heavy on the stalk, there was a "whisht!" for the forecast. Then the man from the Met Office predicted tomorrow and the day after. They were seldom the same. The priest in Clonegal, Cluain na nGall, Meadow of the Foreigner, prayed for dry days.

When the time was right, the yellow combine came up the lane, cut the corn and spat out straw. Trailers full of grain were driven late into the night to Tullow Co-op. All during August, we met headlights of tractors on the roads or got stuck behind a combine on the narrow roads to Shillelagh or Carnew.

We kept barley for the sheep and cattle, and oats for the horses. A mountain of grain was shovelled into the granary loft, crawling with ladybirds. God's cows, my mother called them. I used to put a handful of grass into a jamjar, collect them and set them free in the garden. Hens pecked the stubble and grew fat. The bantams laid out so the dogs grew shiny and their farts were beyond comparison.

I was a strange child, even as children go. I followed ducks who were laying out, wearing the hood of my anorak so they wouldn't recognise me, but they never led me to their nests. I cleaned the tom-cat's nails with the blunt end of a darning needle, sat on Nowlans' ditch with salt and pepper and seasoned their lettuces, their scallions, worse than Peter Rabbit. I ate green gooseberries, blackcurrants, rhubarb stalks, blackberries, sloes. I got belly-aches. I walked naked through the streams of Newry wood with hens' feathers stuck in my plaits. Someone must have seen me. I went missing. My mother, after calling my name for hours, found me that evening, and told it on Sunday after Mass, how she found me sitting in the stream without a stitch. I turned red.

The day I turned three, an envelope came addressed to me. It was a birthday card depicting a rabbit with a green balloon in its mouth. My mother was making the bed, whipping the sheets up so they would sail down flat on the mattress. She said I was getting big, that I would soon be going to school. I protested, saying I would never go to school.

"Never" is the first word I remember saying.

"You have to learn to read and write," she said.

I got down on the floor and bawled until I realised she was no longer in the room. I hated this, the fact that she would part with me.

I loved school. Towards the end of summer they put me in a classroom with things to play, then let me out three times a day, to play. I skipped lower infants, for I was not sent to school until I was six years old. (My mother could not bear to part with me after all.) Even though I could not write the letters, I already knew how to spell Mississippi, and I had heard my father say that two and two wasn't five. That much I knew.

My teacher, Margaret Grant, made boxes with a hole through which we could put our hands but we were forbidden to look inside. She told us to use our imaginations. She taught us A for Apple. That was the first lesson. She played the organ, wore the loveliest coat I had ever seen, made of knitted patches sewn together. She had style. When I scalded my feet with a pot of soup and could not wear shoes, she said my polka-dot slippers were lovely. She taught us to sing, to hopscotch, to add. She said we did not need brushes to paint. She put me in a corner for laughing too much and sent my painting of a witch to the Children's Academy all the way across the sea to London.

Then the school year ended and it was summer again. We put a spoonful of jam in a jar and filled it up with water. The wasps drowned themselves on our window ledge. We hung flypaper in the kitchen. I was getting big. My soother was a thing no-one but my mother was supposed to see. My brother called me a big babby. I hid it in the pocket of my pinafore, in the drawer where we kept the tablecloth. I sat on it when somebody other than my mother came into the room. It was hard work.

The sheep had to be dipped, sheared, dosed, castrated and fenced. We spread dung, picked stones, made jam. I buttered sliced pans for haymakers, shearers. I turned the handle on the churn, clipped the edge of the flower-beds with my mother's good scissors. I found a pound of turnip seed under the stairs and imagined I was the priest sprinkling holy water on Palm Sunday. I shook the tiny seeds all over my mother's flowerbeds. They sprouted green shoots and finally my mother gave up pulling them and we had turnips, turnips, turnips.

Every Sunday after Mass in Clonegal, I sat on the gas cylinders outside of P J Dunne's shop licking ice-cream and looking up at the empty school. I pulled my mother's skirt and asked: "How many more days? How many?" She was pestered, but summer passed.

The night before I went back to school, my mother lit the fire. It was strange, her having the cooker on, for the evening was warm and the dinner over. The back door was open to let a breeze blow through the house. It was only herself and me in the house so I sat there sucking the soother and thinking about what Miss Grant would be wearing. My mother opened the cooker door and we looked into the fire. Anthracite glowed red in the grate.

"You're getting big," she said. I looked into the flames. The sun threw the evening shadows through the barred window onto the linoleum. My mother was waiting but she let me do it in my own time. I sucked like a calf, a last suck.

When I threw it on the fire she shut the door, as though she was afraid I would reach back into the flames to retrieve it. That was the end of childhood and summer, the last day of August, 1974.

Claire Keegan's award-winning book of short stories, Antartica, has just been published in paperback by Faber & Faber. £6.99 in UK