THERE have been many changes in the 64 years since a teenage Walter `Paddy' Hemphill left Garron Tower on a journey that would take him thousands of miles around the world.
On his return yesterday to his former school the 82-year-old was struck by one in particular.
"What happened to all the cannonballs?" he asked as he walked along the castle's famous battlements where the black cannons have been lined up, more in hope than expectation, for 171 years.
"I think you started a trend," chair of St Killian's board of governors Sean Doherty replied dryly, a twinkle in his eye.
For when Mr Hemphill had driven through the gates with 8lb of perfectly spherical iron it had been an exact reversal of the journey taken in June 1957, as on a sudden whim he made his uncle stop the car and plucked it from one of a pile lying beside a cannon.
When the priests who were running the school at the time realised it had disappeared a furore ensued that led to stringent efforts to winkle the truth out of bewildered - and wholly innocent - pupils.
Mr Hemphill was oblivious to the drama that he had left in his wake as he embarked on adult life and a career in the RAF that took him to lands that no longer exist on modern maps, such as Siam, Ceylon and Malay, as well as Borneo, Sumatra, Singapore and Aden.
Whether other pupils realised that the best way to escape punishment was to emulate his audacious exit strategy, or they decided that they may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, one by one the cannonballs `dispersed' over the years, making the one surrendered by Mr Hemphill the only original now on the site.
Possibly mindful of the previous tradition of souvenir-taking, Principal Jonny Brady will not be drawn on what plans he has for this particular piece of his school's history, which has been restored to him complete with a plinth made by its recent `custodian'.
As he walks around the grounds with his wife Susan, under the gentle guidance of Mr Doherty, Mr Hemphill sees both the modern school and the ghosts of the one he entered among the first pupils through the doors on the same day 70 years ago.
"It bothered me a bit when I found out it wasn't still St MacNissi's," he says wistfully.
But even his own memories are of two schools.
There is the "building site" he and around 120-30 boys first entered ("There wasn't a roof on any of this building," he says of the iconic castle. "Along here was all rubble that the boarders would have to move with wheelbarrows as soon as classes finished for the day").
And there is the finished school which he left as an 18-year-old.
"There were two great big monkey-puzzle trees on the lawn and then one year it was dug up and potatoes were planted.
"My father and uncle laid out a nine-hole golf course over there in 1952/53," he points across to a grassy area beyond a well-manicured lawn at the front of the Victorian mock-German-medieval building.
"It was an official GUI (Golf Union of Ireland) golf course in the end," Mr Brady tells him.
The handball courts are still there, Mr Doherty [also a former teacher and bursar at the school] assures him, as is the chapel built after a mammoth `Half-Crown Mile' fundraising effort by the first bursar, Fr Agnew.
Mr Hemphill chuckles as he remembers the ruthless dedication to the cause of the priests determined to make a success of their educational venture built out of the ruins of a remote summer residence of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
"We used to say if you walked past with gold fillings they would have had them out of your head."
He spends some time at the chapel. Mr Hemphill was particularly anxious to see a stained-glass window there dedicated to the memory of a pupil Terry Fannin, who died in an accident at the school's watermill in March 1956.
The 13-year-old was the uncle of Irish News editor Noel Doran, who called Mr Hemphill after reading his account of the tragedy.
Mr Doran said yesterday: "Walter was a mould breaker when he joined the first group of students at Garron Tower in 1951 and only someone with his pioneering spirit would have returned the famous cannonball 70 years later to the day.
"It was great to have a conversation with him, and hear his poignant memories of my late uncle Terry."
The St MacNissi's old boy said the window was a "beautiful" tribute to the young pupil whose death affected the entire school fraternity and is remembered by all who were there at the time.
As he leaves, Mr Hemphill declines an offer to have his photograph taken outside the stable block that was his dormitory all those years ago.
"I want to keep it in my head as I remember it then, not as it is now. I've always had those memories with me."
And he drove away, the eight-hour car and ferry journey to his Nottinghamshire home 8lbs lighter than the one that brought him back to his past.
