MOST ABIDING school memory: a rain sheeted, dark, winter evening on the playing fields of Notre Dame. Mud-caked legs, red, hot cheeks, pounding, thumping hearts and then tears that just couldn't be stopped. We had come so far in the inter-schools hockey championships, and here it was all lost in the wind and the wet on a Churchtown hockey pitch.

To have happy schooldays is a blessing - one I had, largely thanks to "Miss Meredith's", Pembroke School, close by the canal in Dublin 4.

Slow - snail-like actually - in learning to read, I arrived at Miss Meredith's at the age of eight with a number of schools, and special reading classes, behind me. Miss Meredith herself was still very much a presence in the 1960s. Her unmistakable elderly frame, clothed in raincoat and scarf, would arrive with some ceremony each day, mid-morning, to call the roll. Later we would all get jobs looking out the window to see if the taxi that came to whisk her home had arrived.

She was an important person to us - how important I only realised later: a single woman with no big businesses behind her who had the strength of purpose and cared enough to start a school for the lay, Catholic education of girls in the early part of this century - a school that is set to sail past the year 2000 still going strong.

Among an array of individualistic woman teachers was my new Irish Times colleague, world-distinguished author and, above all, friend, Maeve Binchy - always, a tiny bit, still "Miss Binchy" in the hearts of former pupils like me.

Rapt, we listened to tales of her time on a kibbutz in Israel, and marched around her Latin classroom posing as Visigoths, Romans and Vandals, while Cicero and Co came to life in the upstairs rooms of that fine Georgian house on Pembroke Road. Not to mention the hijinks when she took us on a day boat trip to Caernarvon.

Singing in choir in Westland Row, crocodile files to and from confessions and Mass in Haddington Road church and shy co-mingling therein with the boys from nearby St Conleth's were all part of it. Co-education is a wonderful - maybe even a necessary - thing in today's world, but one looks back with nostalgia at the powerful sense of possibility "boys" seemed to have then, when they didn't sit beside you in class and were sighted only on these rare occasions.

At a class reunion dinner a few years ago all present seemed to be thriving. "You wouldn't come to your school reunion if you weren't," someone said, but most of the old school friends I still bump into seem content with the myriad challenges life has inevitably thrown at them.

Miss Meredith's was an intimate place. That to me was its great gift.