My School Days: Pantomime queen June Rodgers suffered stagefright on her first theatrical appearance - and fled.

I went to Rathgar National School on Rathgar Avenue and because we lived in old Tallaght village we used to have to get a lift in with some of our neighbours, either the Jollys or the Bullocks who had kids in the school too. It was a lovely little school. It was separated into two bits, the boys over one side and the girls on the other and we used to always kick the ball over so we'd have to get into the boys section to get it back.

My sister Linda went there a couple of years before me. I remember the day she started school. The headmistress was at the gate getting everyone in and she kept dragging me in the gate as well and my mother kept trying to tell her I wasn't starting yet. I was quite happy to go in, but my mother was adamant that I wasn't.

Our big scare in school was to be put out on the mat if you were bad in the classroom- and you were terrified in case Miss Ervine, the principal, would open the door and find you there. Most of us used to hide in the little corridor where the mat was. It was also where we used to hang our coats so you used to see lots of legs hanging out of coats, where people would be hiding under them.

Miss Ervine always ate cream crackers for lunch and if you had to go and see her after lunch you'd end up coming out with cream crackers on your face at the end of it. I don't think she realised when she spoke the crackers were flying out of her mouth. Although I was probably a fairly regular visitor to the mat, I loved Rathgar. It was a lovely little school with only three classrooms: Miss Sheridan's, Miss O'Hara's and Miss Ervine's.

From there I went to St Patrick's Cathedral choir school, which was great because they'd only started taking girls. Actually my sister was one of the first girls to go there, because it was always a male school. So when I went in it was great because there were about 10 fellas to a girl, but I didn't click with any of them unfortunately.

It was called the "choir school" because a lot of the boys that went there were in the choir in St Patrick's. We had singing lessons as well. My cousin, Eric Sweeney, used to teach us singing in the school. I remember we used to squawk every week trying to sing our lines. My big claim to fame was that Bono was in my class in school for a few years before he went to Mount Temple. While it was my big claim to fame, he's probably going round telling everyone he knows June Rodgers.

I liked the school but not as much as my sister did. I always felt that I wanted to do something else. About a year ago, I met the old head master, Brian Weir, who was also our geography teacher, and asked was I really that bad in school and he said "actually June, you weren't", but I was always a bit of a messer. I was always the one cracking the jokes, showing off I suppose.

In school I enjoyed most subjects. Spanish I was no good at and I wasn't into Irish either - me and Irish never took. I suppose what I was most interested in was looking at fellas. We did do other extra-curricular activities. We put on a show and I had to sing Theme from Love Story called "Where do I Begin..." My mother and father were there and I got such a dose of stagefright that I had to get off the stage. I just got a terrible thing of embarrassment.

I got over that quickly, but I still really didn't know what I wanted to do. I learnt the singing in St Patrick's but everybody would say to me "oh you should be doing comedy", but I never thought of it. It wasn't until I was in my 20s that I started to go into the comedy end of things. It wouldn't have been seen as a proper job at all then.

At one stage I wanted to be a hairdresser but then I heard you got something like three pounds a week, so I forgot about that. I never went to any drama schools or anything like that. In those days we just went to school and came home and did our homework and made our own fun. We didn't have the sort of thing that kids do now of going off to singing and dancing lessons. We were quite simple - I suppose I still am. I did enjoy school but I look back now and say maybe I should have done better, but at least I had Mr Weir teaching me the geography and it's great now with me being up and down the country I know where I'm going, so I learned something anyway.

In conversation with Olivia Kelly