Seaside Haunts: Ballybunion: 'First Blood', first love, wigwams wiggin', free seaweed baths in the Atlantic - John Connolly recalls the tacky Ballybunion summers of his childhood

It is, to be scrupulously honest, a bit chilly for July. At a rough count there are six people on Ballybunion strand, and I am one of only two not wearing a wetsuit while paddling a canoe. A more sensible person might take this as some kind of sign, but I have not set foot in this water since I was a child and at the sight of it I have been overcome with a desire to swim in it once again.

The other unprotected bather is now walking towards me, away from the sea. His face has the set, stunned expression of the recently bereaved. He has managed to get a little colour while in the water, but unfortunately that colour is blue. I am reminded of one of my closest friends who went swimming off the Co Mayo coast some years ago and experienced such profound shock at the temperature that one of his testicles retreated into his body and, like a startled snail, refused to come back out for half an hour.

"Cold?" I ask.

He looks at me like I'm an idiot and keeps walking.

I reach the edge of the water. A wave laps at my toes, and my foot instantly goes numb. I am tempted to run away, but I am afraid someone will laugh at me. I advance slowly into the sea and, as the tide reaches my waist, I am tempted to weep. It might be nostalgia, but I suspect that it's something more profound.

I think it's pain.

* * * * * *

Ballybunion, in north Co Kerry, was where I spent most of my seaside holidays as a child. Technically, we stayed with my grandmother in Ballylongford, a few miles further east at the mouth of the Shannon estuary, but Ballylongford didn't have much sea and sand. To be honest, Ballylongford - and I bow to nobody in my affection for the place - was a little on the quiet side generally. There were no bright lights in Ballylongford. In fact, once you passed the Garda station there were no lights at all: if somebody struck a match on the road from the village to Ballyline it was as though a disco had suddenly opened.

Ballybunion was like Las Vegas by comparison. It had gambling and arcades and restaurants. International acts graced its cabarets. Boney M once played Ballybunion, although the group was kind of on its uppers by that point, and I think some inner turmoil had split its members so that we got one or two of them while Bogota or Sierra Leone got the rest.

Occasionally, my father would force us to take a break from Ballybunion and instead try to convince my brother and me of the relative merits of Ballyheigue (very pretty but not as many amusements, so thumbs down for Ballyheigue) or, infinitely worse, the desolate wasteland that was Beal. Beal had a reputation for treacherous currents, and the prospect of sudden drowning has the tendency to rather spoil a nice day out. In addition, I had once returned from Beal to find small dark insects merrily burrowing their way into my skin, their rear legs kicking while their heads were lost in my pale flesh, and was subsequently traumatised to such a degree that even the mention of the place induced mild hysteria. For years after, I half expected little bugs to come flying out of my mouth every time I coughed, released at last from the prison of my insides.

So Ballybunion it was. We would sit on the beach, or take the cliff walk and see, in the distance, the ruins of the old fortresses that once dotted the coastline. Up on Sandhill Road was the Marconi Stone, marking the spot where the first ever telephonic message was sent from east to west across the Atlantic in 1919. There was also Collins's hot seaweed bathhouse, which is still in business to this day, but I was an adult before I enjoyed a bath there. (My father took the view that if I wanted a seaweed bath then the Atlantic was out there waiting for me, and it was free.) The seaweed turned the water viscous, so the whole experience was a little like sharing bath-water with someone who had a very bad cold, but it felt wonderful afterwards.

* * * * * *

Now, almost recovered from my swim - my extremities are starting to tingle, and not in a nice way - I am walking along Main Street in Ballybunion once again, trying to figure out what has changed and what remains the same. It's drizzling slightly, and Ballybunion remains the kind of place that cries out for a leisure centre, somewhere to take the kids on rainy days that doesn't involve gambling, booze or annoying me while I'm trying to have a cup of warming coffee and a piece of apple crumble.

The little cinema that used to stand behind the bingo hall is now gone, which is unfortunate as it had a very liberal age policy for its time. In 1982, my brother and I saw First Blood, Sylvester Stallone's violent, X-rated Vietnam revenge saga in that cinema. I was 14. Brian was eight, and he wasn't even the youngest person there. There was another little kid who had to stand up just to see the screen.

Around the same time in the early 1980s I had a profound crush on a girl who lived near me in Dublin, and during the summer holidays I would take my dog on repeated walks past her house. In fact, I was passing her house so often that her parents must have been tempted to call the police, and eventually the dog got so bored that he refused to come out with me any more. Nevertheless, I felt that it was only a matter of time before my persistence wore her down, or a social worker intervened, and so I was reluctant to make the annual two-week trip to north Kerry that year. I was afraid that her memory of my sensitive and somewhat underdeveloped charm would fade in my absence, and I would return to find that she had shacked up with a welder.

In a souvenir shop on Main Street, I bought her a wooden sign with the words "I like you - you're different" written above a small piece of bark upon which two round eyes had been glued. The eyes rolled around in an amusing manner. At least, I thought it was amusing. Unfortunately, when I presented it to my beloved upon my return to Dublin she didn't find it amusing at all. She interpreted "different" to mean that she had skin like a tree trunk and eyes that could peer in two directions at once, and immediately abandoned me to my hormones. I stopped walking by her house after that. It was probably a good thing.

After all, it's a very thin line between walking and stalking.

The little souvenir shop is still in business, although it now offers less scope for dashing the hopes of young lovers. I am tempted to buy something for old times' sake, but I've already splashed out on a model Panther tank kit that I spotted earlier in the day in Jackie McGillicuddy's in Listowel, plastic tanks and airplanes being one of the ways that I passed rainy days on holidays as a child. I won't put the model together, though, as that would be kind of sad. I'll just keep it as a memento.

* * * * * *

It's eight o'clock, and I've almost finished putting the tank together. It didn't have quite as many guns as I'd hoped - you can never have too many guns - and the tracks were a bit tricky, but it's done. I have glue on my fingers, though, and it won't come off.

While the glue is drying, I decide to visit the Pavilion amusement arcade, the biggest in town. It still has bumper cars and there are still burly blokes hanging on to the backs of them, trying to help the more clueless kids to steer properly. It was always a badge of shame to have one of the helpers on the back of your car, a sign that you had not yet managed to pass one of the initiation rites of adolescence. An inability to drive a bumper car made you less of a man. You would never get a job, or a girlfriend, and you would spend the rest of your life making Airfix models in the bedroom of your mum's house and never have a sexual experience that involved more than one person.

I feel a bit sad as I wander around the Pavilion. The ghost of my father drifts through these places:complaining about "catchpenny" machines, paying for chips, steering bumpers, and buying soft drinks that only seemed to exist outside the Pale. I mean, where did Bubble-Up come from? The only place I ever saw it was in Co Kerry. Its origins were a complete mystery to me.

I head down to what was once Kiely's pub, but is now called The Cashen Bar. A man called Johnny Barrett used to have a residency at Kiely's. He would play the organ, and my mum and dad would dance. Johnny Barrett had one song about "the wigwams wiggin', way in the Indian land", which he would accompany with the kind of hand-against-mouth Indian calls beloved of small boys the world over, except perhaps for small Native American boys who can probably do them properly. I loved that song. Sadly, Johnny Barrett doesn't seem to be here tonight. I hope he's still alive. I always thought it would be a bit of a blow for him if he died and it turned out that there really was a Happy Hunting Ground in the next world. I reckoned the Indians would be well cheesed off with him.

At last I find myself back at the high cliffs that overlook Ballybunion's twin beaches. A small outcrop separates the strands, topped by the remains of Ballybunion Castle. It dates back to the 14th century and used to be a popular spot for clay pigeon shooting, and for falling off. Now the OPW has erected a fence, so people have to fall off someplace else.

I sit on the edge of the cliffs and let my toes dangle. I was going to spend another night here but I think I'll go home instead, or maybe just spend an evening back in Ballylongford. That's really where my fondest memories lie. Ballybunion is just, well, too much. It's not like it's Marbella, or Blackpool, and Boney M must have been a bit puzzled by it when they came. Maybe they went on the bumpers to pass the time, and one of the big blokes had to help them steer because they were from Germany and the wheel was on the wrong side. As for me, Ballybunion is a place that my family visited in order to get just a little excitement before returning to the peace of Ballylongford, and that's the way it will stay.

So I stroll back up to the B&B, and the ghost of my dad strolls along with me, puffing on a cigarette. I pop into the Pavilion for one last go on the bumpers, and he puts out his cigarette and joins me.

Secretly, he always did like those bumpers.

John Connolly's new book, Nocturnes, will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in October