By my old sense of fun and mischief started to return for the summer holidays were here again.

New Brothers replaced the old Brothers for the summer recess. The number of boys started to dwindle as each in their turn went to "adopted families" all over the country. Most were placed, but a few, sadly, were not. They were allowed to wander the prison grounds like orphaned ghosts and left pretty much to their own devices. The "summer Brothers," not familiar with this prison, and certain in their own knowledge that their stay here was a short one, gave them a wide rein. I got lucky; I was back with the Blane family.

Long summer evenings with this wonderful family stretched ahead and everyday a bit of me got more and more spoiled. After about two weeks with them, another one of my nine lives ended and a river almost became my final resting place. Their son, John, decided to go for a swim in the River Suck and had me tag along. I had bragged that I was a great swimmer. He was easy to convince but not the water, and I would literally get in over my head. Pride was often one of my more destructive traits and flagrant disregard of danger a close second.

The river snaked and coiled its way for miles, and went from being very wide to being very narrow and back again. John settled on a narrow stretch. We both changed into swimming gear and he warned me not to stray too far from the embankment. It was then that I thought he must have figured it out after all and saw through my puffed-out chest and overconfident posture. John waded in confidently like a pro and swam with the flow of the river.

I waited for him to round a bend just yards away. That was when I figured I'd show him how good a swimmer I really was and swam towards the opposite banks. As I neared its center, curiosity made me check how deep the river was. I stood upright in the water only to plunge immediately to the bottom. Panic seized me. I came up for air and dropped straight down again like a stone. Beneath the water, I spotted a great big boulder and climbed onto it, and used it to jump off and air lift my body out of the water. After about twenty jumps, my legs got weaker and weaker. Every time I broke the surface of the water, I prayed in the direction of where I saw John last, and every time he wasn't there, my heart sank with my body. One final push of energy propelled me one last time to the surface where John grabbed my chest and dragged me onto dry land, our hearts beating to the same song, relief. We both lay there a long time numbed by what could have been and in the end decided it was best to be our little secret.

Not too long after that, John's father's health took a turn for the worse and a long recovery lay ahead. This cut my time here short and I had to leave this wonderful family for good, even though there was still a fair stretch of summer yet. I didn't mind too much that I would be back at the school for I was sure that there were a few adventures I could get myself into. Luck was still holding and only days back when along came another family knocking and I was placed with them, the Noonans from Athlone.

The Noonans ran a pub in Athlone town and lived above it. They were elderly with six grown up children who were in their thirties. One son lived in England, another, John, in Dublin, and then there was Steve who lived with his wife, Katherine and their seasonally kept child, Quinn, on a small farm just outside the town. Quinns circumstance was the same as mine and like me was adopted for the summer. Two other daughters came and went and I remember one of them in particular, Terry, as a very kind person whose kindness touched many people.

Once, she came across an elderly man that was homeless and went to great lengths to feed and find clothes for him while also harassing the local council to find him a home. They did. As only I could, I fell right into place with this family.

The pub opened only in the evenings and I was allowed to help behind the bar. The customers were mostly soldiers from the local barracks who were good company. Sometimes, I would feel a certain loneliness when they drank alone and felt quite sad about it without fully knowing why. The gap of generations kept us apart I suppose, an invisible line that stopped me growing up too quick and asking too many questions. I also became pretty pally with Katherine and her husband Steve. I would often babysit Quinn as well. The babysitting was easy, the living easier, and the pocket money was good. Steve was as easygoing a man as I ever knew up till then in my life. He was always looking to keep the peace. I had to prick my ears just to hear him speak, look twice just to know he was there, and if he were any more chilled-out, he would be comatose. When he would come to visit, he would hog the record player to play his favorite record that he always carried in his pocket, and I never heard him play anything else. The song was called Five Little Fingers and I think the singer was Frankie Mc Bride. It was a slow ballad about a man whose wife had just died and he was trying to explain to his child where she had gone. It would have brought tears to a stone. It choked the two of us up every time he played it. There was simply no accounting for taste.

His wife Katherine looked like she wore the pants around the place. She was the decision maker at the end of the day and carried with her a firm minded personality that covered a warm and fair woman, and it showed. I liked them both and loved helping them around the farm, and it was appreciated as Steve also worked in a factory to help pay the bills. Life around here was going great, but the happy mundane never stayed with me for long as the dramatic was sure to follow, and it was not long before it came knocking on my door and on a day that saw things go horribly wrong. Young Quinn went missing.

Katherine came running into the hay shed where Steve and I were pretending we were doing work of some importance. Her face was white and her lips trembling; she had a helpless, pleading look in her eyes. It was just after noon and within an hour, fifteen or so neighbors joined us in the search.

Every bush, briar, bramble, gully, tank, and drum was searched, every badger, rabbit, and foxhole was looked into. Every hedgerow, pool of water, any water, loft and ditch probed, and still no sign of Quinn. Everybody fanned out further and a wide area was covered. As the long evening started to close, the fading light held a more ominous and fearful warning for us. Surroundings that had always looked pleasing in the daytime suddenly looked like a threat as we combed yet again through several fields where cocks of hay lay in formation. Their detached and egg-like curves now looked threatening like alien invaders set against a darkening sky. And just about then as I wandered off alone, to my left I noticed a small movement in one of the haystacks. As I got nearer and with some hesitation in case of an attack by some lost bull, I realized it was blond, blue eyed, Quinn.

His head lay sleeping and he looked exhausted with soiled pants clinging to his legs.

Its smell had attracted flies that were crawling over his body. A nightmare was playing havoc over his dreams and he was pleading to someone to leave him alone, probably the flies. I shouted excitedly to the rest of them that I found him, creating a stampede with everyone running at once towards us as I lay holding Quinn's hand. Katherine picked him up and cried with relief as she hugged and kissed him like never before, while Steve fell to his knees not sure whether to laugh or to cry. I was hero of the day and bathed in its glow long afterwards.

As that great summer of fun, freedom, and sometimes happy boredom started to close, Steve seemed to be missing me a lot and I had not even left yet. It could have been a case of him being forever grateful to me for having found Quinn, or maybe it was the fact that I was the only other person who liked the song, Five Little Fingers, and doubly so because I could sing it too.

And I knew that in her own little way My baby was saying Daddy I love you so It took five little seconds For her five little fingers To tell me All that I wanted to know Either way, he promised to see me off the following Friday at the railway station when it was time to go back to the prison.

That last morning, the Noonans dropped me off at the station to be met at the other side in Galway by Hop-Along. After they said their good byes, and I waited alone, I had just about given up on seeing Steve for the train was only minutes away. Suddenly, a figure came running towards me, and there he was. He didn't get a chance to shave and he looked disheveled and lost. He pressed three pounds into my hand, quite a large sum of money at that time, and an even bigger sum for a just-gone ten-year old.

With barely held tears, he said, "Barry, if you are ever in any trouble and have nowhere to go, you come see me." I knew he meant it.

Steve knew more than people understood back then of the workings of these children's reformatories, and he was the first person that started me on my journey of believing than I was not the bad guy. He gave me a hug which overwhelmed and embarrassed me and waited until I got on the train. As I looked back at his retreating figure, his sadness overcame me and I started to cry. I never saw Steve or his family again.

My life had gained a certain pattern by now and all that was good never seemed to last long.

Doors opened with great shafts of light and every time I stepped nearer to pass through, they slammed shut again. There was no control over events and I owned nothing except the thoughts in my head that all too were often crossed by fears and anxieties. It was as if I was marooned on a ship lost in an ocean, only in my case I could be seen but no one seemed to know I was there.

Back with the lads, we still had the weekend to go before school would begin.

Everybody was exchanging stories about the places they had been, the families that they were with, and the joys or sadness of it all. Some stories made me a bit envious, while others made me realize just how lucky I was.

One boy was in pain, a lot of pain, and fled from my company crying. He had been trying to tell us something about what a man had done to him and that he was bleeding. It went over our heads. There were no checks or balances in the system of this holiday policy. I heard similar stories over the coming weeks that I did not understand about bachelor farmers living in remote areas with one thing on their minds. Their loneliness turned them into sexual deviants driven by a primitive need that was remembered by instinct and reminded only by the couplings of the animals around them. Their brain cells had long corrupted before then speaking only to the spirits around them and company in a bottle of cheap beer laden with whiskey. Much later and over time would it become clear to me what really happened to that boy and the many others.

Yet, other children were given to farmers for the summer, and instead of holidays, the children were forced to work hard while the farmers more or less took their own holidays.

Boys doing the work of men, given the respect shown a dumb animal, paid with empty pay packets, and cold inedible dinners. I had been lucky and that luck was about to run out.

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