Catherine Foley, a boarder for part of her formative years, looks back on the good - and the bad - old days in the dorm

Enid Blyton's books about Malory Towers were responsible for creating certain naive impressions about boarding schools in this writer's mind.

As I set off to board at the tender age of 11, my head was crammed with images of midnight feasts, hockey matches, tasty tuck boxes and even secret trysts behind the school tennis courts. My two younger sisters were envious. They thought they would never be old enough to join me.

A two-year sojourn at a boarding school in Cork city was one of the most memorable and bittersweet periods in my life. Then at the end of my second year there, the school had to close due to economic reasons. My sisters never got to savour life in a boarding school.

Each Sunday I waited on the landing of the convent-run school for my mother to ring at 3 p.m. Like a key unlocking my emotions, the tears would flow as soon as I heard her voice.

Even as a young adult, I continued to cry on the phone if I heard my mother's voice. It was like a Pavlovian response.

A well-meaning aunt was paying my fees, so being sent away to a boarding school was a privilege not to be refused by my parents.

To an impressionable young girl, the powerful memories of dormitory smells, meal-time noises, the darkened chapel on cold winter's evenings, the wake of an elderly nun in the convent, the noisy gatherings in the girls' toilets before "lights out" and the clinging to radiators in the recreation hall listening to records are still with me. Not forgetting the snow, the poetry classes with Miss Walton, the singing and music classes, the learning, and the waiting as I scanned the seemingly endless line of traffic passing along on the other side of the River Lee, as I waited to spot the family car which was coming to take me home at the endof term.