Skerries in the 1960s. The world might have been blowing up in Paris or Prague or Vietnam but here in this part of old Fingal time stood still, petrified in summery gaiety like a print from a Doris Day movie. Young men in drainpipes and winklepickers jived to Elvis and Buddy Holly in the amusement arcades. Young women bleached their heads and blackened their eyes until they all looked like Dusty Springfield. A real chocolate-box romance was showing at the Pavilion and a snow-covered Omar Shariff gazed wistfully out at pink and giggling Irish flesh.
There was romance a-plenty all along this costa exotica as teenagers fumbled and mooched from one love affair to another; an embarrassment of testosterone under a gaudy carnival moon.
The whiff of fish and chips rarely penetrated as far as Red Island which catered for a much more sedate crowd altogether. This was a kind of Taj Mahal to cheap holidays, perched atop a cliff at the back of the harbour. Elderly English visitors drifted around its battlements like ghosts, their teeth chattering in the wind. There was a great ballroom here and from it came a constant blare of Joe Loss big band music. Even on the brightest afternoons you could see those haunted rictus smiles inside as the merriment grinded on relentlessly.
We went to Skerries for a month every summer - along with, apparently, every other family from Dublin's northside. We stayed in a house by the beach at the Hoare Rock. Nobody ever knew why it was called the Hoare Rock. The only passion we ever saw displayed was provided by prim, guesthouse geraniums. Our landlady was like an ancient, black-shawled widow from Fellini's deepest south. She retreated into a tiny back room, one section of which was a shop which sold only bread, sweets and paraffin for lamps. I remember an enormous brass bed behind the counter.
The enduring legacy of those summers is a fascination for the sea. Its immense silence lulled us to sleep at night, and in the mornings we awoke to its roar. I remember sultry August nights with the moon hanging over the bay and everyone singing on the beach after the pubs closed with an intensity that seemed like defiance. Or early mornings when the world never seemed more alive.
Skerries in the 1960s was probably like any other Irish seaside resort. But in the sepia glow of memory, the ordinariness of pebble-dash and honky tonk of plastic palaces and tacky variety shows is transformed into something special.
We played pongo in the evenings, had Sunday picnics in the old mill field listening to Michael O'Hehir drone on endlessly. We strolled out country lanes to buy fresh eggs and new potatoes. Charlie Chaplin, we heard, lived in Loughshinney. We watched the trawlers coming in as if they were Spanish galleons laden with silver and gold. And everything glowed: faces, hearts, the mundane, because it seemed that we were as free as the wind.
And then there were those sounds which defined and gave shape to childhood: the Belfast train whistling late at night in the fields behind us, the overwhelming hum of the sea, Elvis, the Beatles, the music of growing up, of a perpetually bright and optimistic world.
Other sounds too intruded. I once overheard my parents whispering in their bedroom about my eldest brother who was determined to go to England to study for the priesthood. I could catch the fear in my mother's breath and sensed, for the first time, departures to come, the possible end of some idyll.
Then, out of another sunny morning came the news of a granny's death. That pulled the curtains on the sky and the beach and another summer.
Skerries may now be a suburb of the city but then it was a place apart, a remote and sun-blessed peninsula of the imagination. The old Baby Ford, jumping with children and weighted down with mattresses, kettles, bedclothes, buckets and spades, took hours to get there. The adventure always started as we chugged towards Raheny and the first intoxicating scent of sea air. And then there was that moment when we climbed a hill beyond Rush and caught our first glimpse of the sea.
It still seems like a dream - that distant blue horizon, a flurry of gulls and Rockabill lighthouse glinting in the sun. We roared our lungs out at the sight of such magic.
Whenever I go back to Skerries I can still hear that ghost roar of triumph, still get that sense of childhood trapped in a particular place.
Aodhan Madden's new play, Getting On, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November.
