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I think I have already mentioned that our boys attended St Aloysius' College, the Jesuit school in Glasgow, and that I returned to teaching. The two things were connected, as you may well imagine. Jim felt that his own father had worked and sacrificed to give his sons the best education he could, and he wanted to do the same. The All Saints headteacher Rosina Cairns encouraged him in this, as did his brother Fr John, and so he brought ten-year-old Tom to sit the entrance test at Garnethill and had a talk with the formidable headmaster Fr Calnan, SJ. When our son passed comfortably and I stitched the pocket-patch with the Gonzaga eagle on his first green blazer - I remember we failed to find one in the correct shade - the die was cast in more ways than one. We would have to do the same for the others if they were up to it - and they were; and the quite reasonable fees, plus capitation payment because we lived outside the city, would in time become a strain on Jim's income.

It was a time when the implementation of the postwar legislation which set up Junior and Senior Secondaries in Scotland gave more opportunities for married women to return to the classroom; and this is what I did. First on a temporary basis in a Motherwell school and in St Andrew's Junior Secondary, Coatbridge, then on a permanent (and therefore superannuated) contract, I went back to the teaching of art. Jim did not want this at all; it was one of the very few disagreements we had in forty years of married life. But even when he became headteacher of All Saints school himself I could see that it was simply unrealistic to pay school fees for all four children - which is what we did - and still make ends meet without a second income.

It meant a long wait for the day's main meal, and housework never caught up on - but I am as sure now as I was then that I did the right thing. As it was life had few luxuries: it was tacitly accepted that things like school trips abroad and new bicycles were not on the agenda for our children, that Jim had no savings account and never even thought of getting a little car. We didn't talk much about material things to our children, and they did not seem to develop any envy for the good things possessed by their better- off friends. After all, we had our long Irish holiday to look forward to each year; and in June Jim would 'plank' a few pounds from our double pay in a secure place in the house to make sure we could manage through the lean weeks between our return from our holiday and the first monthly salaries.

It is more difficult for me to talk about another decision of those years, which was to send our only daughter to board at the St Margaret's Convent School in Paisley. This was in line with our desire to do our best for our bright offspring, but that purpose would have been served if she had gone to the Franciscan Sisters' school at Bothwell or to my own old school at Dowanhill. Maybe Fr John, who was chaplain to the Paisley school and like Jim had been a boarder himself at St Eunan's College in Letterkenny, convinced us that she would benefit from the experience of being with numbers of other girls from all parts of Scotland.

So Rosaleen went off to live convent-school life. There was a weekend at home every month, and we were regaled with stories about eccentric Sisters and wayward companions which brought back memories of the 'Bins' of my Notre Dame days. She made some good friends, and we could not fault the kindliness of the Faithful Companions of Jesus or the education they provided. But in long hindsight I wonder if we should not have guessed beforehand, or picked up the signs, that our wee girl had not got the fend-for-yourself temperament needed to be happy in that kind of environment. Maybe we judged too readily that things were all right since she made such good academic progress, showing a flair for Mathematics which her elder brothers never had, and gaining University entrance qualifications in her fifth year. She opted in the end to follow the family tradition and do the teacher training course at Craiglockhart College of Education in Edinburgh, run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Primary teaching was clearly where her natural vocation lay, and she has found great fulfilment in it, both in Scotland - at St Andrew's, Airdrie - and in the English Martyrs School in Reading to which she has given many hardworking years.

My story has brought me to the fifties and sixties now, when family members were leaving school and going their different ways, and retirement was on the horizon for Jim and myself. It will hardly do to dwell too much on the recent and less eventful decades of my long life, but for completeness sake let me tell you a little of what happened to the family Jim and I brought up at 38 Cairnhill Road, Airdrie. I have already mentioned that Rosaleen followed her parents' footsteps into teaching. She found her husband where I had found mine, Frank Carr being a Fanad man like Jim, though he had been working for long periods in England and it was in Reading that they brought up their family of three boys (Eunan, Brendan, and Martin) and two girls - one at each end - Angela and Una. Rosaleen did some teaching in the parish Primary school before the family began to arrive, finding like others before her that the skills of Scottish-trained teachers were very welcome south of the Border; and she was able to return to work at English Martyrs once Una reached school age.

There was some debate about our eldest son Tom's destination after school because he had a fine instinctive drawing talent and could well have followed my path into the Art School. But the decision, in which as usual Fr John played a part, was that he should go for a classics degree at University first and develop other talents afterwards. The latter part never really happened- there was more success with a return to playing the violin in middle age - but he did produce some superlative posters for the Catholic Society and the Distributist club at Glasgow University. He was a Classics teacher at St Mirin's Academy in Paisley when he married a fellow-graduate, Mairi McCorquodale from Oban, in the fine Coia- designed church of St Charles', Kelvinside. Mairi and her sister Catherine had lost both parents when they were still children, and they had been brought up by their aunts. Catherine had married a Glasgow doctor called Jim McGeachie some years earlier. The choice of St Charles' came about because the sisters had stayed in that parish while studying in Glasgow, at the Daughters of Charity student residence in Wilton Street.

This wedding was a very happy affair, for all that it marked a milestone in our family history, and that one member - John - could not be there because permission to come home for such events was not normally granted in the Scots College of those days. After a period living in one of Glasgow's classical Victorian tenements in West Princes Street Tom and Mairi moved south, and he taught for a while at a Benedictine-run prep- school at Llanarth in Wales before coming to the Oratory School - the one originally founded by Cardinal Newman - where he became in time Principal of Classics and a housemaster. Mairi and he had the sadness of a stillborn child while they were still living in Scotland, but afterwards had two girls and two boys, Kate and Judith, Dominick and William. Kate (strictly speaking a Scot, since she arrived before they moved south) is now married and has three lovely children; I have a photograph of myself on the last journey I was able to make to England, trying to do a sketch of little Edward, just 90 years younger than I.

John struck out in a different direction from the others by deciding in his 6th year at St Aloysius' College that he should try his vocation to the secular priesthood. This marked the first real break in the family, since he could come home only twice -after three and five years, during his 7-year course at the the Scots College, Rome. Ordination in 1961 did not however spare him the family fate of a teaching career: he was directed after a year's parish work at St Monica's, Coatbridge, into a Latin and English Lit. degree at Glasgow which led on - via Jordanhill - to 18 years in the junior seminaries at St Vincent's, Langbank, and St Mary's, Blairs (near Aberdeen) where boys interested in the priesthood did their Secondary education. He was Rector in the last year, 1985-6, of Blairs' existence, and has been in parish work since, apart from a six-year term as Rector of his old College in Rome.

The youngest of the family is often the one most worried about, and Jim's deafness gave us cause for concern all through his schooldays. It was misplaced worry: he proved to have good powers of concentration and like his sister a bent for mathematics, and with the help of some excellent teachers at Garnethill did well enough to join a local firm and pass the examinations to become a chartered surveyor. He has spent most of his working life in Glasgow with the firm of Currie and Brown, married a girl from Larkhall called Moira Moran, and has a family of two, Philip and Marie-Pat.

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