Have you got an enchanted place in your memory bank to revisit in times of stress, when you want to escape present circumstances or are trying to get to sleep – a haven which you didn’t even know was that special, until there it was, lodged in the mind like a visual poem comforting and consolatory? Like Wordsworth I have owed to these places
As children, we used to go to come down from the Black North to the Sinful South to Bray for our August seaside holidays. It seems unlikely, looking at the distorted town now, so ruined by cruel settlement and nasty decisions, but Bray in the 1950s was a genteel charming resort, with a pebbly sandy beach, fantastic concrete swimming baths, an– wonderful word – a frontage of hotels and boarding houses – and a great big cross on Bray Head.
The sea, too, was a miracle. The extent of it, the tides, the wrack. I was no stranger to water. At home in subfusc Tyrone we lived beside Lough Neagh, the biggest stretch of water in the British Isles. But it was fresh water so there were no tides or shells. Shells were exotic and I discovered they were used in fabulous ways as decorations on ornaments. In Woolworths and little beach kiosks I bought a little condiment set and a shrine covered with tiny shells for half a crown.