My father was a national school principal and he got a new job when I was five, so we changed schools. It was all terribly exciting - there aren't any problems at that age. During the Suez oil crisis I remember him putting me on a little seat on the back of his bicycle from Delvin, Co Westmeath, where we lived, and cycling to the school out in Johnstown. I was in the first school and was younger than five at the time. In the second school we moved to the teachers' residence was just a field away. We used to get to go home for lunch and everything, so we were quite privileged.

In those days before free second level education and before school buses, if you were going to second-level school from where we lived you really had to go to boarding school - there really wasn't any way out of it. Even if you were going to St Finian's in Mullingar, which was only 12 or 13 miles away, it wasn't practicable to be travelling every day. I don't remember there being any local second-level schools and I always assumed that going to second level meant going to boarding school.

I went to Rockwell College in Cashel, Co Tipperary - by happy accident you might say. Before free second-level education there were county council scholarships for which I sat when I was 11 years old. No one expected me to get it. It was a kind of warm-up for the sitting of the following year. Contrary to all expectations, I got the thing. This news came in August 1963 and a school had to be found for me within three or four weeks. So there was this frantic dash to find a school. Finian's in Mullingar, which was the obvious place to go, was full, so through the kind offices of Holy Ghost Father Paddy Leonard, who was a neighbour of mine at home, I was enrolled in Rockwell and I started there a couple of weeks later. In terms of upheaval, changing national schools was nothing compared to that.

It was total change and at that age you have no idea of the magnitude beforehand. I remember being filled with huge excitement. The fuss of it all: the packing and buying of clothes and having to dress in a completely different way; having to have so many pairs of trousers and shoes and socks - your life to be organised in that way at the age of 11. It was enormously exciting and it never crossed my mind to be lonely or fearful, or anything like that.

We used to read a great amount and I read a lot of boarding school stories - English boarding schools, with jolly good fun on the rugby pitch and secret societies and all that.

I lasted about a week on the tide of optimism and excitement. Then it hit me that I wasn't at home any more and was barely 12 years old (my 12th birthday was about a month after I started). It came to me that I was actually very young and not as grownup as I thought and home was an awful long way away. From Delvin, Co Westmeath, to Cashel, Co Tipperary, in those days seemed a long way. Your parents didn't come every weekend, because they couldn't, and you didn't get home for Hollowe'en. I used to know how long it was to the day from the beginning of September to the week before Christmas. Hallowe'en break didn't start until a year or two after that. We used to go the whole way through until Christmas and it was traumatic.

It took me years to get over that shock of going away and I was always lonely going back after holidays in a way I couldn't quite understand because I loved it and was hugely happy there. It was a wonderful time, nearly like in the Enid Blyton books, but not quite. Yet every time you left to go back, something inside that you didn't understand was triggered and the tears would come. It would last 24 hours and then you were back with your friends and you would pick up the threads of your other life.

I wonder if that sort of thing gives you a taste for multiple lives - you are somebody at home with your brothers and sisters and parents and you are somebody else away in a boarding school with your young friends. You slip between the lives.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly