Nothing is ever the same the second time around. The first thing I saw, on returning to "Ballykilburn" after an interval of 35 years, was a sign saying, "Welcome to the London borough of Brent, twinned with South Dublin". Hang on, now. In the 1950s and 1960s, when 17 out of every 18 people in Kilburn were Irish, Dublin accents were almost as scarce as Cockney ones. The air was thick with Kerry, Mayo, and Donegal voices, flatter Midlands tones, Donegal and Ring Gaeltacht Irish, writes Kieran Fagan.
In 1965 the welcome was easier to refuse. The Irish Mail from Holyhead arrived on a bleak grey platform at Euston station shortly after
6.30 a.m. A female scarecrow ambushed weary travellers, blinking as they stepped down from the train into the cold dawn. "Good, clane Catholic lodgings," she shrieked, pressing cards on us, cards with Kilburn addresses. The latest draft of "McAlpine's Fusiliers", come to carry hods and lay bricks, could find billets at St Assumpta's lodging house off Kilburn High Road (with the bed warmed by its previous shift-working occupant).
"My mouth feels like a dog slept in it," observed my companion. We decided to decline the comforts of St Assumpta's. Two 20-year-old Dubs in search of adventure did not think we would find it there.
Besides, there was good reason to fear Kilburn. Good money on the buildings, but no insurance stamp, and no sick pay if you got hurt, or dole if you were out of work. Getting paid in pubs and having to buy the foreman drinks. Getting a "sub" (advance) on Wednesday to get through to Friday, assuming you were working. Later, no chance of the jackpot - tunnelling work on the Victoria Line - unless you were from Mayo, or perhaps Donegal.
I went south, settling in Clapham, close to an established community of Dubliners who had arrived to do factory work during the war and stayed. The jackeen-culchie divide crossed the Irish Sea - and Kilburn was rural Ireland in a way that other Irish settlements such as Birmingham and Liverpool were not.
In my book, survival in 1960s London ruled out Kilburn. My visits to it and adjoining Cricklewood were infrequent, usually with an English friend who lived there. "It's not so bad," he said. "But you're not Irish," was my answer. "I could get sucked in."
And I looked at the tired-looking men in the pubs at opening time - no work, no money to go home, afraid to show up in their shabby clothes and admit failure. The great job in London, much boasted of at home, exposed as a sham.
Recently I read Catherine Dunne's book The Irish in London: An Unconsidered People, and I began to wonder if my image was too black-and-white, or maybe too murky-green. And the place I visited earlier this year was no longer the Irish colony I had known.
True, on Kilburn High Road, Allied Irish and Bank of Ireland stand their ground. But near Messina Avenue, there's a nice juxtaposition of new and old immigrant communities: Hillman's butchers, which must have been kosher originally, bookends a row of shops, selling "fresh hand of pork" and Barry's teabags. Next comes Al Sabil halal meats, then Afro cosmetics, the Al Amira greengrocer offering the shiniest aubergines in the world, then the El Andalouse Spanish-Moroccan tapas bar. The far bookend is a green-fronted pub, The Kingdom. Indubitably ours.
There are other traces of our occupation. There's Tara Travel, and Jumbo's news agency where the Westmeath Examiner sits comfortably on the rack alongside garish pink newspapers with swooping Arabic script.
But the big shock was up the road - the Crown in Cricklewood. A big seething barn of drink and noise and smoke when I last visited, it was not for the faint-hearted. Brendan Bowyer, Bridie Gallagher and Larry Cunningham on a permanent loop on the jukebox, a ceili band in a corner. The aftermath of a fist fight, the danger of being "glassed" by someone who didn't like the way you were looking at him - or the county you came from.
"The crack was good in Cricklewood, and we wouldn't leave the Crown. There were glasses flyin' and Biddies cryin' and the Paddies were going to town."
Today the original building is preserved, with an elegant atrium linking it to a modern block. Now the Crown Moran Hotel, the original bar is a sedate compromise between an old-fashioned coaching inn in its prime and a 1990s wine bar. The transformation, I later discover, was wrought by a Dublin-based consultancy, John Duffy Design, and the hotel belongs to an Irish chain.
My waitress appears to be Swiss. She brings me a teapot which does not leak, a cup, saucer and bowl, all matching, and little lumps of sugar, like you used to get when visiting a convent; only the Tetley teabag jars.
And on the end wall of the bar there's a large painting depicting the Crown of old. Men with flat caps and sombre square faces look out: watchful faces, country people, in a part of a strange city which, for a few generations, they made their own. Jim Kemmy's poem Exiled Memory '57 recalls the fight for survival, "straining for a homely voice. . .choked with homesickness. . .holding on".
They fought a fight I ducked. Many won through. I have come to pay tribute. In silence I do just that.