Primary school was St Anne's Convent, a small, all-girls school run by three Mercy nuns in Kilrea, Co Derry. It was the kind of school that, when we were needed to pick spuds in September, it would close for a few days.
I have great memories of the little bottles of milk that would come - before "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher" got her hands on them.
My first two teachers were superb. The first was Sister Marie-Therese, and I used to think of her as being an angel. She was a beautiful nun with a big dog called Bruno - he was our class pet. Sister Claire had a wee budgie in her room and it was my job to clean out its cage. I loved that budgie.
Those nuns were part of the village and they knew everything about every child. They used to teach us PE and I always thought it was really funny to see a nun with long black robes flying up and down the playground. For the 11-plus you had to come in for classes on Saturday mornings and you paid sixpence for the heating. I missed the first 11-plus exam because I'd broken my finger and I had to take the exam by myself in a Protestant school in the town. It seemed such a strange environment. I looked up and there was a picture of the Queen staring down at me! I've no doubt a Protestant child walking into a Catholic school and seeing the Virgin Mary looking down would have felt equally strange.
The morning the results came out we had to run down to the school and there was a fat envelope or a thin envelope. Mine was a fat envelope. I remember dancing with the other children who passed, but never forgetting the faces of friends who hadn't. That's why today I'm totally in favour of its abolition.
Secondary school was another convent, Loreto in Coleraine. I loved it. I was big into hockey and athletics and I represented Northern Ireland at the 100- and 200-metre sprints.
There was great camaraderie around school plays and concerts. I used to feel terribly sorry for the boarders because it was such a harsh regime and they weren't allowed out at weekends. When we got involved in drama, we had to sleep over because we lived so far away, so I got a little bit of boarding without the pain.
We had an English teacher called Miss Murray and I nearly frightened the life out of her once. She was reading Naming of Parts by Henry Reed and she said, "If only I had a gun I could explain this poem properly." So I went home and got my father's gun for dogs that got at the sheep. I put it on her desk in the morning and she nearly fainted. It was the height of the Troubles! Anyway, I broke down the gun and showed the class all the different parts, bullets and all, while she read the poem. Apparently she told that story for years afterwards.
If a girl wanted to study science, she had to walk down the hill to the boys' school - we were called "the virgins on the hill" by these boys. There was a girl who wanted to study medicine but she made up her mind she wasn't going, though five girls did go. We were terribly intimidated by boys in those days because we didn't mix with them.
Girls have to start learning at a very early age to compete and challenge and confront. If you closet them off, although they may do better academically, in a very short period of time they will lose that.
My school days were a period of incredible change in Northern Ireland. I remember going out on huge civil rights marches at night and being back in my school uniform in the morning. All the schools I went to were all-girls and all-Catholic, and that was something that struck me when I went to Queens University. That was the first time I'd been in an integrated environment. It made me think about how the education system creates a society in which your attitudes are decided in your formative years because you haven't had your opinions confronted - either by boys or by Protestants!
In conversation with Mary Minihan
