It was the summer when life was going to begin. The August when I was going for the first time to the dance in Ballybunion. I had thought of little else all year.

After all, if you didn't play golf, if you hated swimming when it was raining and were too old for the bumper cars in the Amusements, what else was there to yearn for?

There was a wrought-iron gate from which you could peep in at the dance, and those of us who were 14 and 15 peeped with ever-increasing envy. The whole place smelled so grown-up, for one thing: Evening In Paris perfume, which they got in a spray from a dispenser in the ladies' cloakroom, toothpaste, beer, sweat, hair lacquer. We couldn't wait to be part of it.

And now at 16, the summer had arrived. All year I had been experimenting with Sta-Blonde shampoo. A friend at school said that, strictly speaking, Sta Blonde only worked if you were blonde already; if you weren't, you might need to add a dash of peroxide to the rinsing water. I thought about it very often, but I was afraid I would become brassy and outrageous, so I used lemon juice instead.

There wasn't any problem about what to wear to the dance in the mid-1950s in Ballybunion. You wore a nice summer frock and you checked in your cardigan to the ladies' cloakroom. It was considered tarty to wear taffeta or satin, as if you were trying too hard. What you needed was a nice colour that might make you look good and bright enough to attract fellows' attention, without actually making yourself look like a lighthouse.

Through the wrought-iron gates we had peered for two summers. And it looked as if girls in red got danced with more. This was bad news for those of use with red faces, so we looked for a second colour. Turquoise and white seemed to do well too. So, based on this research, I had got a cotton dress in these colours in Clerys.

It looked grand in the shop, not so good being tried on a dozen times in the small bedroom. It looked worse when I dropped a chocice down the front of it and the stain didn't quite come out. Still, it would be fairly dark in there, and the numerous dance partners mightn't see.

The dance at which we were going to launch ourselves was in the middle of August. For over two weeks I could hardly sleep thinking of it all. I would go in smiling left and right, the marvellous glittering ball of light in the ceiling would put different colours on us all.

I would go to the Ladies, give in my white cardigan, have a six-penny spray of Evening In Paris, comb my freshly washed hair, have a giggle with my girlfriends. Then I would hear Maurice Mulcahy and his band begin the Brass Band Samba, so I would slip out onto the dance floor and a group of tanned men would come out of the shadows and ask me to dance.

I would smile at one of them, and the others would retreat, good-naturedly waiting their chance. When the music ended, my partner would stand beside me chatting animatedly, so that by the time it started up again, the only natural thing would be to collapse into each other's arms again for Unchained Melody.

But then to be fair to the sad, disappointed men standing smoking glumly around the edges waiting for me to be free, I would move gracefully away, allowing myself to be seen to be up for grabs again.

There was great excitement at home about the dance. My father said he would come up and walk us all home, in case it would be noisy and dark. But we wanted it to be noisy and dark and we all persuaded our fathers not to come within an ass's roar of the place. We swore we would just go to the van for chips and then all come straight back home. The last thing we needed when refusing to go down the sand hills for a walk with all those tanned men, besotted with us, was the thought of our fathers looking on.

My sisters wanted to know whether I would get engaged after the dance and I thought possibly not; they said it was great that we had all the dancing lessons at school and we did the Cha Cha Cha and the Charleston around the kitchen for a bit, to get into the mood.

There was only one thing wrong with my lustrous appearance before I set out: I wasn't suntanned enough. It had been a wet August, and it was the era before sunbeds and fake tans. But it would be lovely to have had a gorgeous colour. I made my own: Brown Nugget boot polish and Nivea cream.

One of my friends, then and now much more elegant than the rest of us, said she wouldn't put Nugget on her shoes, let alone her face. But I thought it did great things for me.

As I rehearsed and practised, and in my mind told great handsome hunks that they would have to forgive me if I wasn't on for a grope, I would say that if they really fancied me they would wait. It was the headiest excitement you could imagine for two-and-a-half weeks that summer.

I pitied everyone else I knew who wasn't going to the dance: my father going for a walk along the cliffs, my mother sitting in the garden reading or going up and down the main street for a series of chats and encounters, my sisters and brother playing games on the beach, or going to the Amusements.

What drear, dead, monochrome lives they lived compared to mine. And the local photographer came by that afternoon taking snaps of people in their garden and I thought, as I simpered at the camera: next time I get my snap taken it will be at the dance, with fellows fighting over me.

There was a lovely sunset as we all headed up for the Central Ballroom, and over 40 years later I can still remember the tight, excited feeling in my chest. It was all going to start and I was going to join in.

YOU don't want to know all about the dance. Honestly you don't. About the fact that there were many, many more women than you'd think when you were peering in through the wrought-iron gate. And you couldn't get anywhere near the perfume spray in the Ladies' cloakroom.

There were too many of the wrong kind of women there: older, experienced ones who were just dying to go down the sand hills with fellows. You could see it in their hard, narrow eyes.

The mother of two daughters who were known beauties and never off the dance floor, said how wise it was of me not to dance and tire myself out - and I wanted to break my bottle of Club Orange and scar her for life.

Then I saw my sisters and their friends peeping in through the wrought-iron gate to see if I was smooching with someone and maybe getting engaged. It was during a rendition of See You Later Alligator, so I danced joyfully on my own past the gate once or twice, the way they'd have something vague to report.

The Nugget and Nivea unguent, due to the great heat in the place, was beginning to leak onto the dress and had to be removed with rather hard, rough, lavatory paper. Some of my friends got danced with a bit. A lot more, it must said, than I did but not nearly as much as we had expected. And we went for chips afterwards, ignoring the mainly drunken men who stood outside and asked: "Can I have the going home?"

We never admitted to each other or ourselves that it was a disaster. We said it was too crowded, and they let too many in and they needed better air-conditioning. We spoke as if we were all experts on entertainment architecture and design just in from Vegas.

We got on to personalities, said so and so looked cheap and someone else was depressingly old, probably about 26. We swore that if we were as old as that we wouldn't demean ourselves by going to a dance. We went home as promised, told lying stories about the great times we had had, even though the magic had not quite materialised.

But we all felt that even though it was hotter, noisier, less conquest-filled than we had hoped, that summer something had happened. Whatever it was had begun. We had joined. We were out there now.

Thursday: novelist Miriam Dunne recalls the 1960s summer she first went to Sherkin Island, Co Cork.