A wordy friend once described my schooldays as peripatetic. I'd been in enough schools for long enough at the time to know what she meant.

My education, formal and informal, was a moveable feast. My father was on the go a lot and, as was the custom of the time, my mother and us children went with him. So it happened that, when I was five and of an age to go to school, I was sent from the village of Ballymascanlon - seven cottages at the side of the road and where we lived at the time - to the primary school attached to the convent in Dundalk.

This, for reasons I don't remember, didn't last long. I remember wooden desks and a nun or nuns. I remember sitting without moving.

Then I was finished with Dundalk and the nuns and told I would be going to a new school in a year's time when my sister was old enough for us to walk there together. My schooling, for years to come, would be inextricably tied to hers.

I remember Ravensdale NS as much for the daily journey there as for schoolroom activities. It was a long, adventuresome walk. We left the village early, crossing the bridge and heading up the Deerpark Road; river on one side, trees on the other; to the final lap along the forever-muddy Duck's Walk. There were just the two of us except in the springtime when we had the company of two brothers from a travelling family. They wore brown corduroy jackets and brown, knee-length corduroy trousers.

The school building was of gray, cut stone and had vaulted windows. I loved going to school there and it was where I learned most of what I know. The teacher, whose name I forget, was thoughtful and kind, and rewarded us for little things. When we made our Holy Communion I dawdled on the Duck's Walk, found half-a-crown and missed kissing the Bishop's ring. I thought myself thrice-blessed and so did that teacher.

Then, one day, we were climbing into a lorry and leaving Ballymascanlon and heading for a new life in Skerries, Co Dublin.

Skerries was like a metropolis in the grip of a perpetual winter. Doors and windows were barricaded with sand every morning, winds filled with rain blew every night. We went to the national school in the town for about nine months where, at break time, we were given currant buns and watery chocolate to drink. We were three, maybe four, classes in one room and the teacher, a young woman with red lipstick, set us work to do while she smoked by the window dreaming her dreams.

When we arrived at last in the capital, to live in Ballymun, my mother announced she would go no further with us children - and didn't. When she sent my sister and myself to the Holy Faith Convent NS in Glasnevin I found myself back with the nuns.

A Holy Faith schooling taught me many things. It was there I first came across snobbery, the notion that an accent and home-made uniform could set you apart. It was there too I discovered I could write - and that nuns, like the rest of the world, were both good and bad. I will always remember the gently encouraging Sister Cabrini. I heard a few years ago that she was sent to New Zealand where she was involved in a car crash.

With the Primary Cert behind us, my mother one day announced that Sandymount High School was the best place now for my sister and myself. Not only did it offer a fine and broad education but it was non-fee-paying and didn't demand the expense of a uniform. But Sandymount High School, alas, didn't have places for us so it was onward and forward with the nuns in the secondary part of the Holy Faith, Glasnevin.

My days there were not a howling success. I didn't share the nuns' sense of class and division: had no idea what was expected of me and was too often in trouble to be happy. When I was 15, with my Inter Cert in my fist, I left. Nothing to do with school, just another family situation. My sister stayed on to do her Leaving Cert.

But habits are hard to break and a few years later I was trotting between night classes in a couple of VECs, as well as learning Latin from a friend, in the hope of getting a Leaving Cert. Don't ask me why I couldn't have arranged a one-stop location; too set in my ways, I suppose. I got the Leaving Cert and at 29 years of age went to TCD. I left there four great years later with a BA Mod in English literature and language.

It's not over yet, not by a long shot. My grandfather used tell us grandchildren that a "little knowledge" was "no burden". I always though he had a point and so, this winter, I'm in yet another Dublin VEC classroom learning Spanish.

Peripatetic? Definitely. But the best education you could have.

Rose Doyle's new novel, Friends Indeed, is published this month by Hodder and Stoughton at £10.99.