During that time he both acted in and wrote plays for community theatre groups. He worked as a civil servant, for 14 years. Leonard was educated at the Harold Boys' National School, Dalkey, and Presentation College, Glasthule, winning a scholarship to the latter. For the rest of his life, despite the pen name of 'Hugh Leonard' which he later adopted and became well known by, he invited close friends to call him 'Jack'. Raised in Dalkey, a suburb of Dublin, by Nicholas and Margaret Keyes, he changed his name to John Keyes Byrne. Referring to himself in the third person was a distancing device to allow varied perspectives and to tell some of the more emotionally difficult episodes of his childhood, such as embarrassing public displays by his drunken mother, the brutality of teaching priests and brothers, the troubled lives of relatives and neighbours, and the testy, sometimes unforgiving but also well-intentioned character of Mr Drumm, Leonard’s boss and mentor at his job at the Land Commission.Leonard was born in Dublin John Joseph Byrne, but was put up for adoption. The narration alternates between the first and third person.

Home was a two-room cottage, “one part for the living, the other as an ideal, a regret and an aspiration all in one”. His gardener father (known as “Da” and the subject of a Tony Award-winning play of that name in 1978) was uneducated, deferential, gentle and loving his mother, Ma, was “small and stout, like two Christmas puddings, one sitting on top of the other, with a weenchy one on top” that could turn nasty and vindictive when she had drink in her. “My grandmother made dying her life’s work” is the opening sentence and sets the tone and style of the book. Adopted by the Byrne family of Dalkey, he here creates clear and memorable portraits of his parents, grandmother, neighbours, friends and employers. Leonard’s real name was Jack Keyes Byrne, and Home Before Night covers his early life and adulthood up to the time he decided to give up his Civil Service job and become a full-time writer. His two volumes of autobiography, of which this is the first and probably the better, provide powerful, evocative and moving insights into Irish urban working-class family life in the 1930s and 1940s.

Hugh Leonard (1926-2009) was among Ireland’s foremost dramatists, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

Home before night by hugh leonard