Over the last couple of weeks, I've become conscious of an uneasy feeling in myself, a deep sense of foreboding without obvious derivation. It took me some time to understand that it was connected to my five-year-old daughter entering her second year at big school. I began to remember that I'd gone through similar feelings this time last year, when I took her across the threshold of a real school for the first time.

Of course, the feelings are not to do with her, but with my projection of feelings about my own school days. Somehow, even though I know school is utterly different now, at some part of my being I expect her to share my foreboding. I am constantly amazed to watch children around schools, observing their so few outward signs of terror. Something in me doesn't quite believe it.

My school days were continuous waves of terror, interrupted only by illness and holidays. The first week of September evoked in me the kind of feelings I imagine I might have about being terminally ill. Throughout my school days, I devoted much of my energy to becoming terminally ill, or at least persuading my mother to this effect. I became ingenious at being ill. I could teach it in school.

I was fortunate in having, to begin with, a very bad chest. This was good for about two weeks out of every month. At the end of a fortnight between the blankets, I would awake at dawn on a Monday and concentrate like Buddha until I had magicked up a pain in my stomach. Once, after I was sent out to school after five weeks in which I had exhibited symptoms of more than half of the entries in my mother's medical dictionary, I waited until my father was driving down the post office hill towards me before diving to the ground and tearing both knees to ribbons. I had stolen another week with Desperate Dan and Billy Bunter. At the end of third class, the brother congratulated me for breaking all previous records: 20 days attendance in one term.

School war stories are boring, I know, but I like to think that mine are rather special. Schooldays were for us a seamless succession of brutalities.

I began with the Sisters of No Mercy, moved on to the Marist Brothers (these were the lads who failed the psychiatric assessment for admission to the Christian Brothers) and ended up in a institution known as Meβnscoil Iosef Naofa.

I learned nothing at school except how to avoid it and how to be afraid.

There was hardly a day that I didn't get at least 20 strokes of some implement or other. One brother had a discipline league table, awarding penalty points for failures or misdemeanours, dishing out the punishments over the following week. You might have 100 slaps to get over the course of a week, but the interesting aspect was that you could take a few whenever you felt like it and he would knock them off your score.

But an even worse thing about school was the boredom, which taught me at an early age that brutality doesn't work. I would return to school after a fortnight of reading Little Dorrit and spend a day listening to my classmates going "The cat sat on the wi . . . wi . . ." Whack!

"Ow!"

"Window-sill! You moron!"

I don't condemn these teachers. Maybe I should. It was the way of the time and everyone knew it was going on. I suppose I got enough out of it to escape with something of my soul intact.

The brother with the league table was also responsible for my starting to write. One day, he had a competition for the pupil with the best sentence in his essay. He gave us five minutes to perfect our most promising sentence. Mine was about a swallow. I forget most of it, but it finished with the words "to the naked eye". He praised it so much that it began to occur to me that I could do, or be, something. A couple of years later, I achieved a dead heat with Enid Blyton in an essay competition - it was later discovered that the other winner had cogged his entire essay from a Famous Five story. He didn't even change the name of the parrot, Kiki. My essay was about road traffic accidents.

In a sense, that brother saved my life. He killed me and then brought me back to life. It could have been worse.

As we used to say in the west: aren't we great to be as good as we are?