WALTER Hemphill was one of the first pupils through the door of St MacNissi's College when it opened on September 3 1951.
He was part of the cohort of first years who were among 120-130 boys who arrived to find that, while the setting at Garron Point, 200 feet above a winding coast road, was stunning, the educational environment left something to be desired.
"You've got to think back to 1951 when the place was just opening, it was a building site, literally a building site.
"Our dormitory - there were 20 or 30 boarders that initial year - was the stables that had been converted into a dormitory.
"The day pupils were brought in by bus from around the area and when school finished they went out again and the boarders went with picks and shovels and wheelbarrows helping clear the grounds."
The pioneering spirit of those early years was punctuated by tragedy, when one lost his life in an accident in 1956.
"Terry Fannin was the lad," the 82-year-old recalls with an abruptness that suggests the name is never far from his mind, even years later.
"There was a water mill that pumped water up into a reservoir that was used for everything at the school. He went up there. He was wearing a Burberry car coat and the belt caught on the wheel of the mill."
Until enrolling, Walter Hemphill had lived with his three sisters and two brothers in Portstewart where his father and uncle were greenkeepers at the golf course.
He hasn't been back to his home town in half a century, by which time he was so used to the nickname bestowed on him during his interim serving in the RAF and living in England that he no longer recognised the name bestowed at his christening.
"I've been 'Paddy' for so many years it's unbelievable. The last time I was home 50 years ago people were talking to me and I was ignoring them because they were calling me Walter - it just didn't sink in."
Mr Hemphill's exile from Northern Ireland has been a mixture of running businesses and raising his family in Nottinghamshire with his wife Susan, the fact "service men were not welcome in the sixties and seventies and I didn't want to bring trouble on my family", and also a distaste for the sectarianism tearing it apart.
"Religious bigotry has been a blight on the people of Northern Ireland and one of the reasons I got out of it.
"My father was a Protestant and my mother was a Catholic and religion meant nothing in our house.
"Every Sunday my father was up getting everyone up for Mass. My grandmother collapsed and died waiting for a bus to go to Coleraine and the first person on the scene was the local priest.
"From that day on my father made sure there were always flowers at St Mary Star of the Sea.
"All my uncles belonged to the Orange lodge and every one of them contributed to the `Half-Crown Mile'."
The `Half-Crown Mile' was was the initiative of Fr Charlie Agnew who "decided we wanted a chapel and started a big drive".
"He said all the bricks in the chapel would cost half a crown each and if he could get a mile of half-crowns he would have enough to build a chapel - that's 55-56,000 half-crowns."
It was one of Mr Hemphill's uncles who was the unwitting accomplice in a crime that had gone undetected for more than 60 years.
There are a few (probably apocryphal) tales around Garron Tower's famous cannons, which are lined up along the sea-facing battlements of the imposing grey stone building, built as a Victorian summer residence by Lady Londonderry in the style of the 13th Century castle of Burg Rheinstein on the Rhine.
Beside each were a stack of cannonballs which in July 1957 halted a young Walter Hemphill as he was driven away for the final time by his uncle.
"I said `Hold on let me get out' and picked the top cannonball off the stack and off we went. I sometimes joke it `fell in'."
That December he joined the RAF, embarking on a career that would take him around the world but was ill-suited for "taking an 8lb cannonball with you" and it was stowed with various family members until his eldest daughter returned it to him.
Now, on the seventieth anniversary of the school (now St Killian's College), Mr Hempill is bringing it home.
"When I decided I was going to come across to the anniversary I decided it was time to bring it back."
He plans to present it to the current school leadership team on Friday - the first time a cannonball will have breached the tower's defences since the mighty guns were placed there more than 170 years ago.
