It's an old, ornamental chest, a bit decrepit, into which documents and bric-a-brac have been dumped for decades. Opened recently, one small pile held together by string contained several schoolboy diaries of the late 1920s and into the 1930s. Also, scores of picture postcards of several generations ago; some used, others just bought as souvenirs of the place. Whitehead, a small seaside resort (small then, anyway) at the northern end of Belfast Lough, mostly sepia in colour. There was the promenade with bandstand. Did they have pierrot shows there too? And open-air vaudeville, then known as concert parties? There were shots of the promenade with the yacht club. There was a photograph, not a postcard, of two giant boulders, each the size of a modest cottage on the shore at a tiny bay called Port Davey. They were known in the Northern Way as The Wren's Eggs.
From the diaries, the boy stayed with his grandfather and two unmarried aunts in a house on the sea-front, which they rented for two months each summer. The aunt with a job commuted to Belfast. Swam before breakfast. The boy spent much of his time messing around among the rock pools in search of crabs - small and green, which he looked at and then put back. In later years he would hire a punt and with friends fish offshore for blocken and lythe (coalfish and pollack).
A thrill when he was small was to be given a few pennies to buy ice cream in the local Italian shop - Bonuglis. In those days Italian immigrants seemed the chief ice cream merchants and sellers of soft drinks and sweets at seaside resorts. He got to know a couple of boys of his own age and they explored as far as Blackhead at the end of the Lough, and walked around the cliffs, safely on iron bridges put there by the local council.
A great occupation in the evening was to watch four passenger steamers from Belfast make for Liverpool, Heysham, Glasgow and Ardrossan. After dark the beam from Blackhead lighthouse swept rhythmically over the front, of his window, and he could see the Copeland Islands winking at him across the Lough.
From the train at Kilroot, just outside Whitehead he was shown "Dean Swift's Cottage". A fine big white house. It is no longer there to argue about.
What a boring summer holiday? Not to judge by his diary. Bullfinches, rabbits, sea birds, crash of the waves. Sound of the sea on the pebbled shores. Thrills to him. Simple times, today's boys would say.