I had double pneumonia at two years of age and pneumonia again about nine or ten. I remember well my good mum putting brown paper coated in castor oil over my little boney chest. I really hated that cold sticky oil being pressed into place. As a child I was very sensitive. I was easily frightened and as a result enured many frightening experiences. When I was about three I remember being in the little office in my dad's workshop when a large and very noisy aircraft flew past the side of the workshop so very low. It flew from east to west in the direction of Lisburn/Belfast and my dad said later that it must have been checking up on Belfast because it was a German plane and later there were bombs falling on Belfast. I found the air-raid warnings - the local mill horn - scary even at that age and my dad used to say that I got my squint from that time.
Public Elementary (Primary) school was really challenging for me. Thankfully I didn't know anything about self-confidence so I just accepted things the way they were but I would like to have been able to throw some weight around the way most of the other boys at the school used theirs against me. The fact was that I had very little weight. Being called 'four-eyes', 'specky' and other nick-names didn't help and to this day I deplore the use of nick-names and refuse to use them even when local people would be known by practically nothing else. Very gradually I found my own 'clout' which I worked on with some enthusiasm. The boys who were most abusive to me did not even please the teacher much in class. I was quite good at my work in class and I worked hard to be better. I felt good about realising I was able to do more than they could in class and I really liked how I now felt.
It was a hard lesson that I would be called upon to repeat many times thoughout my lifetime.
I didn't pass my qualifying examination (today's 11+) however, and had to settle for going to the Tech' - Ballynahinch Technical School - a move which I have always since counted as one of the great blessings of my young life. I still had the squint in my left eye at 12 years of age but with one minor exception which was never repeated, I felt respected and accepted from the time I went to this multi-denominationational school until the day I left. I also left with my Junior Examination Certificate which contained five Distinctions, four Credits and a Pass.

The headmaster, Mr. SW Simms BSc was a very tall well-built gentleman who was always promptly listened to when he spoke and took a great interest in all his students - me included. Mr. Jones, Mr. Bleue, Mr. O'Hallaron and Mr. McKee all treated me with the utmost respect. I found this new environment a great comfort and worked hard, especially at the soccer periods which were once a week.
After I joined the 'Tech I had begun reading the boy's books, the Hotspur and the Wizard, and could barely wait until the following issues were published. The athletes in the stories enthralled me. Their speed and endurance captured my imagination but where did they get all those muscles on their bodies. The big question was "Where were MY muscles?" No matter what I did I could find none. Then I read an advertisement in a newspaper offering advice about gaining muscles. The problem was I had no money to pay for the advice offered.
I knew my dad had been a boxer when he was young and even in his fifties he was still very fit. I talked to him and with his help I soon had my own little gym 'out the back' in the open air! I was determined to get muscles.

Almost every morning I was out very early and before I got my breakfast I went for a run and the spent time on my rings, on my horizontal bar and at my punchball which was just an old leather covered football partly pumped up and held in a horizontal position by two bicycle tubes stretched between the tree holding my rings and a post. I then partly filled an old metal bath from our well and had a good wash down and then went in to breakfast and off to school. After much time spent running, playing football and much time spent on rings, punchball, horizontal bar etc I had found my muscles, not big, but visible.
In addition I did about six or seven miles fast walking (power-walking it is now called) twice a week in the dark evenings with boots on.
I actually got picked for the 'Tech football team in my first year along with the big second-year chaps which was really special. I was made captain of the team in my second year. During the inter-school sports I won the 100 yards sprint, the long jump and the high jump. Life was just so good.

Before I left the 'Tech I had been given great encouragement by Mr. Simms in making the most of an opportunity to apply for an interview at the Belfast aircraft factory, Short Bros. & Harland. Mr. Simms had invited the factory's apprentice supervisor to the school to talk to us. Despite my squint, I landed an apprenticeship in the aircraft factory with the help of that wonderful team of teachers in the Technical School in Ballynahinch led by Mr. Simms. I was also fortunate to have had the help and training, from a very early age, of my late father, who was a mechanical genius. At the age of 12 I had the use of the smaller of my father's two steel-turning lathes on which I learned to set up the cutting tools and practice a variety of little jobs. During the Second World War, my father used to manufacture parts for cars which were in short supply for people even in Belfast.
When I had completed my initial three months of training at the aircraft factory's training school at Castlereagh, I was top apprentice of our group and appointed to the Marking-off department in the main factory. During my time at the training school, our training instructer, Mr. Archer, asked me to make, by hand, a part of a tool for the factory's adjoining guided missile department. The tall chap who came second to me in the training school was Hugh McKee and Hugh was appointed to the fitting department above the Marking-off department in the main factory.

I was apprenticed to a truly remarkable Belfast gentleman called Sammy Cromie. Sammy was gentle, quiet and minded his own business. We got on great. Sam McClure was the department's Charge-hand and like a number of the marking-off staff was a born again Christian. Christy Curran from Andersonstown was the clerk and Christy and I were the only catholics in the department. I really enjoyed the impromptu religious discussions that would arise from time to time and have fond memories of Willie Anderson who would have had me converted if only I had said the word! Bill McBride was another real gentleman. In fact, those men were a delight to work with because the treated me with the greatest respect. I was still a very sensitive person and found it very difficult to cope with the, at times, excruciating noise in the factory although I really enjoyed my work and the opportunities to be around, and sometimes in, the aeroplanes. I was quite a lot inside a Sunderland flying boat we were working on. I had got very interested in model aircraft from a young age having been invited by a next-door neighbour, Edwin Bain, to watch him construct model aircraft during the winter evenings after he came home from work. I then became quite competent at constructing the models myself. I also got my interest in cricket from Edwin who was a very pleasant and talented young man and came from a most respectable protestant family.

In 1957, at the age of 17 I spent ten days in the former Opthalmic Hospital on Great Victoria Street near Shaftesbury Square in Belfast where I had the bad squint in my left eye straightened. This was a big event for me and I was able to put a lot of childhood trauma to rest.
My confidence soared. Almost immediately afterwards I decided that I wanted to become a priest and gave up my apprenticeship in what was then Short Brothers & Harland. Not long after, I learned that Hugh McKee also decided to leave the aircraft factory and became a minister in his Church.

So after I got my eye straightened I told my fellow workers I had decided to become a priest and just before I left on the afternoon of the last day at the aircraft factory these wonderful men presented me with the best fountain pen that money could buy at that time - a Conway Stewart. I still pray for those lovely souls.

I spent two wonderful years of preparatory study at the Jesuit-run college in Osterely called Campion House, passing my exams with no trouble. In my Latin grammar examination at the end of my first year I received 100% and was promptly 'promoted' into the highest class, Set3, for my second and final year. At the end of my second year I tied for third place with another Irish chap from Portlaoise called Gerry Cummings. I then came home on holiday in the summer of 1957 to prepare for further priestly studies in England. A short time into my holiday I received a letter from the late Father Tigar SJ, the Superior at Campion House, advising me to become a good Catholic layman as he felt the life of a priest would be too much for my less than robust health. I was devastated! I just stood holding and reading this letter which was totally unexpected and 'out of the blue'. I could not go back to my apprenticeship in the aircraft factory and I felt really, really lost. I began helping my dad in his workshop. Some weeks later I was walking home when I suffered the most awful, frightening experience. It was so bad that I thought I was actually dying. I ran home in a terrible state. In the following days I found that I was afraid to go outside in case the terrible scary feelings returned.

My terrible scare happened one evening on a beautiful starry night about 9 pm sometime about October 1957 when I was 19 but it was to be another 33 years and four months before I found out the truly simple cause of my terrifying ordeal. Towards the end of February 1991, at the age of 53, I watched a programme on BBC 2 television which documented the suffering of three people, a television cameraman, a young married mother and a single girl. I had seen the programme listed in the TV viewing page of the Belfast Telegraph one evening which I thought I must watch as it seemed to have a bearing on the suffering I had endured for so many years.

These three people were suffering from panic attacks. I had never heard of this disorder but I knew exactly what they were going through. This was exactly what I had suffered at the age of 19 and during the years since.
I wrote to the programme makers to thank them and to seek the sheet that was available on the subject. I received a letter back apologising for the delay which was inevitable because 12,000 people had written in to the programme.
After finding out what nobody in the medical profession had been able to tell me for most of my life I was now able to talk openly about my health problem for the first time. Later that year I joined a wonderful organisation called Grow. This organisation was founded in Australia in 1957 and has spread to four continents. During the next six years I gained a great insight into my problem and by 1997 I had turned around a lifetime suffering in ignorance of my condition. I had gained knowledge and confidence.
I was now driving long distances on my own. I even completed a lecture course in Queen's University and was really looking forward to further study if my essay on the course was worthy of a sufficiently high mark. Before I received the letter from the university telling me that I had received full marks for my essay, I was knocked down by a car while I was attending the scene of another accident where the police were also in attendance!

In the meantime, in October 1957, our GP called at home and it was decided that a psychiatrist from the Downshire hospital in Downpatrick would call with me as soon as a visit could be arranged. The psychiatrist was a tall quiet, middle-aged man who suggested that I should become a voluntary patient in the Downshire psychiatric hospital.
I was confined to bed for my first three days during which the event I remember most happened late one night when another patient, a man who must have been around forty, was wheeled into the large ward in an awful state which I found frightening. Almost immediately an elderly, frail gentleman who was remarkably light on his feet hurried to the side of my bed and began at once to talk to me in the most kindly manner and explained to me that the man who had just been wheeled into the ward had just gone through electroshock treatment which was causing him to make such weird noises. I never forgot that old man's thoughtfulness and kindness. I found out later that the old gentleman was a retired bank manager who lived in Bangor, Co. Down. Although I was later told that doctors had considered putting me on a course of insulin injections similar to another chap there who had been a student at the 'Tech with me, I never received as much as an apirin the whole five weeks I was a patient there. My mum and dad brought my piano accordian in to me and I entertained the patients and nurses over the Christmas period. I was also appointed as assistant to the hospital librarian, Mrs. Page, a job I really loved. I signed myself out of the hospital just after Christmas and my mum and dad brought me home in their car. (To be continued)