Was he the loneliest boy in the world? "Indeed I wasn't. I was as happy as Larry," says Gearoid O Cathain. He was the last child on the Great Blasket Island and lived there among the older people from 1947 until the island was evacuated in 1953.
In April 1951 the Irish Press published a feature on the lonely child on a lonely island, windswept and lashed by the southwesterlies. I don't know who wrote this fine piece as it was written before by-lines were published.
With the death two weeks ago of Sean Mhaidhc Lean O Guithin, one of only three remaining islanders in the Dun Chaoin area, the small band of people who lived on the island off the Kerry coast diminished even further.
The islanders who took root on the mainland in the early 1950s after the evacuation, when there seemed to be no choices left, could look across the Blasket Sound and see the looming oval of the island that was their own place with its roots in the mists of time.
For young Gearoid it was simpler: there was only the freedom of the island, the company of adults and the dawning awareness of being part of something that had changed for ever.
Loneliness was not part of his equation. There was too much to do; annoying the adults, watching the men at their tasks, being mothered by the women, and being feted, almost, as the last youngster. In summer there would be tourists, keen to see a dying island, keen to learn Irish, to touch something that was passing. Other children would arrive. There were days on Tra Ban, the beautiful beach where seals still languish in the surf.
Gearoid O Cathain was born on the island in 1947 and remembers the evacuation in 1953 clearly. Does he ever go back? "Yes, ag spaisteoireacht." Rambling and thinking and noting any changes. I told him that, with photographer Paddy Whelan, I visited the Great Blasket some years ago and found the silence there profound as dusk approached. You could almost imagine hearing the voices of long-departed islanders.
"And if you stayed overnight, as I've done on my own many times, it's not just hearing them; you could see them," he says.
The Blasket Islanders had to leave because circumstances were against them. It was literally a battle against wind and rain, the search for food and fuel. But they had made a noble stand and the likelihood is that in a different political climate - Charles Haughey, who owns one of the Blasket Islands, might have had something to say about it - they could have stayed on. In some cultures, their unique way of life would have been fostered and cherished. In ours, it wasn't.
Gearoid has no recriminations. He had a happy childhood and he was loved. He was indulged and cared for as the last of the islanders prepared to leave. Without knowing it, he had become the symbol of their need to go. He was the only young person left. He wouldn't be staying.
In his mind's eye he still sees a vibrant island and all the activities that went on there. The sheep and cattle being trussed in order to put them into the naomhogs that would take them across the sound to Dun Chaoin. He remembers going with his mother, Brid, to the hospital in Dingle where Peig Sayers was dying.
And when she did die, he was an altar boy un Chaoin during at the burial service in 1958. "I just remember Peig talking. It was all in Irish, of course. At the time, I hardly thought it was important," he says.
Gearoid O Cathain, as one would expect, speaks Irish with a facility that comes only to someone who was nurtured in the cradle of the language. But when he looks back, he can recall a time when his problem was learning English.
"I was sent to primary school in Dun Chaoin and afterwards as a boarder to St Joseph's College in Kilkenny. If I hadn't gone to these schools I would never have had good English," he adds. Gearoid agrees that in those last days on the island he was treated as a special person but never thought of himself as a unique one.
Gearoid's story was picked up by newspapers all over the world. He received numerous letters of encouragement, even offers of adoption.
Life on the island was measured but there were troubles, too. In the 1940s Sean O Cearna, one of the islanders, died of meningitis. That frightened the fragile community, compounding the growing belief that without doctors, priests or back-up their way of life was crumbling.
He lives in Cork now with his wife, Marie, his son, Graham (25), and daughter, Sandra (20). He works in the social services, helping unemployed people and sometimes giving grinds in Irish. There are no regrets and his family continues to retain ownership of the old family plot. He believes the future for the Irish language has never looked brighter.
Gearoid's mother, Brid, married into the island and lived there for seven years. She loved every minute of it. She married Sean Chaist O Cathain, a fiddleplayer like his father, Padraig Caist. Now living in Ventry, Co Kerry, she is slightly hard of hearing but thinks that the great days of the Blasket Islands are not over yet.
"Of course, I would love to return, but I'm 83 now and I don't think so. Maybe people will live there again; I hope they do," she says. She remembers that bedside meeting with Peig and is proud of the fact that the Blaskets spawned gems of literature like Peig, An Oileanach and Fiche Bliain ag Fas.
The death of Sean Mhaidhc Lean O Guithin has closed another chapter on a remarkable story, and now only three islanders remain in the Dun Chaoin vicinity. Many Blasket Islanders made their lives in Springfield, Massachusetts, after leaving the island.
Feargal Mac Amhlaoibh of Dun Chaoin has been in touch to say that in the recent Irish Times report on Mr O Guithin's death it was suggested that Mr O Guithin and his brother, Muiris, had collected several hundred island placenames. The names, he says, were actually collected and edited by Mr Padraig Tyers.