Going back after a long absence to places we have loved is risky. They will have changed in ways we can't anticipate and we will have changed in ways we ourselves can't fathom. Recently I revisited Portstewart with a university friend from decades back who had lived much of her childhood in the town but who had been there only fleetingly since we last met each other.
It was here one evening, before my time or hers, that the Ulster song writer Jimmy Kennedy had watched a small yacht sailing westward into the Co Derry sky and found inspiration for his worldwide hit Red Sails in the Sunset. On holiday with my family, as a child bordering on adolescence, I remember standing on Portstewart's magnificent strand, gazing at the infinite Atlantic and dreaming of journeys I was later to achieve as a television reporter.
Tennyson's Ulysses was an early role model:
"for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset,
and the baths
Of all the western stars,
until I die."
Other, earthier dreams came to mind in the course of my recent visit. Although the cinema facing the harbour is no more, the archway above its entrance is still there, and my friend smiled at the memory of amorous canoodlings in the back row's dark sanctuary. Good for her, I thought. Fantasy was as far as I had ever got, lusting after the sultan's daughter in the Arabian Nights epic The Thief of Baghdad.
Along the street from where that enchanted cave once beckoned, Morelli's survives, although more chic and glittering than of yore. It was the place to go for ice cream, coffee, cakes and eye contact that could be - but, alas, never was in my own experience - the start of something big.
The outward sprawl of Portstewart bears witness to its current status as one of Northern Ireland's most desirable locations. Second-home ownership in particular has led to rapid inflation and grumbling by local residents who are being priced out of the market. According to a price index report in March, property is more expensive in the North Coast region, to which the town belongs, than in prosperous south Belfast.
And yet to stand, as we did, by the harbour and its bobbing fishing boats, and to follow the sweep of the seafront, is to take in the same vista that had delighted me more than 50 summers ago. On a cliff at the far end, unchanged in its commanding presence, the Dominican College surveys the promenade, the rocky coastline and, off to the west, the hills of Donegal. Founded by Dominican nuns who bought the property from the Montagu family in 1917, it was administered by the order until the 1990s, when it came under lay control.
My sister Joan was a boarder there soon after the end of the second World War. During the war, so the story goes, the commander of some American troops based nearby had sought permission from the Mother Superior for his men to do PT on the hockey pitch. Permission was refused. Perhaps the spectacle of able-bodied soldiers at their push-ups would have been too distracting for teenage girls. Nevertheless, it says much for the spirit of the place that Joan was happy to spend several family holidays in the same town. She still talks fondly of the side door which led down the cliff to Port-na-happle, a seawater swimming pool in the rocks below. And she was intrigued by a fortune teller called Foley who used to set up his tent along the coastal path, known as the Cliff Walk, and weave prophetic spells for eager customers. Indeed, there were those who feared him for the often disturbing accuracy of his forecasts.
Port-na-happle was far too cold to think of swimming on the day my friend and I walked by. We made our way along the Cliff Walk to the strand, the setting for so much childhood rapture in our separate lives. It is now owned and managed by the National Trust but still stretches two golden miles to the estuary of the river Bann. The well above its eastern edge is said to have been the water supply for Stone Age inhabitants of the long array of high dunes, territory which I myself - more recently, would roam and revel in as Tarzan of the apes.
A place is what it says to you as much as what meets the eye. Portstewart says to me that I was part of a loving family and that it was in the security of such love that I began to explore the world and dream of further exploration. And it reminds me, in words Tennyson gives to Ulysses in the poem I treasure, that there need be no end of exploration:
". . .the deep
Moans round with many
voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a
newer world."
That day my friend and I climbed the dunes, buffeted by ocean breezes, and were young again.