Christine Dwyer Hickey remembers there was little interaction between the locals - until the poet Patrick Kavanagh 'watered' their neighbour's roses . . .

My mother called it Terenure, and although you would have to sit on the bus for 20 minutes or so to reach Terenure village, it was the original postal address: Manor Estate, Terenure, Dublin 12. My father said Templeogue, and as our small estate - a Road, an Avenue, a Close and a Drive - was once on the land of Templeogue Stud and now backed onto the remains of it, I could see his point.

It was too far from Crumlin to go by that name and although Perrystown and Greenhills were close by, their houses were difficult to identify with, as they looked nothing like ours. Years later, I heard my brother say we were from Walkinstown. That'll do me, I thought, and for a while happily went about claiming the same, until I was brutally pulled up one night by a native of Walkinstown Drive. "That's not Walkinstown," he sniped when I told him the name of our road. "That's Poshytown. I can't stand middle-class cows like you who think letting on to be working class is arty."

To be accused of belonging to a class you can buy your way into was bad enough, but to throw the "arty" insult on top of it? Well that put an end to the Walkinstown tag, and I still don't know where I'm from. [It was] a nondescript arrangement of bungalows anyhow, the sort that would later appear, in an ironic sense of course, in films such as Edward Scissorhands and which had, indeed, originally been intended for retired middle-class couples.

Or so the humpy oul' one next door informed my mother one day when she could no longer contain her bitter disappointment at finding herself living among "these people". Had she known families would be living here, some of whom she suspected of coming from God-knows-where - people who were simply not her sort - she would have kept herself to herself, that's what she'd do. But then again, didn't everyone?

There really was little or no interaction between houses. And yet neighbours, although they remained disconnected from each other, seemed to do everything in unison. Lawn mowers softly snarled on Saturday mornings. Those who had cars washed them on Saturday afternoons. Over-dressed children were brought to Mass by the hand every Sunday (except for us). Daddies went to and returned from work at the same time each day (except for ours).

Anyone who had the slightest spark seemed to move on just as you were getting used to them. There was an English family for a while, a troupe of wild youngfellas climbing all over the roof and popping in and out of windows shouting all over the place with their exotic English accents. They left.

And a lovely family across the road with a lively mother my father called Sandie Shaw, because she never wore shoes, who left her boys steeping for hours in a bath filled with Daz washing powder. They left, too.

There was an old lady with a very posh accent who sat at the window, calling out to passers-by and who asked me one day to call the police because Charles Mitchell's eyes wouldn't stop following her around the living-room. She died.

Sometimes I longed for Finglas, where we had relatives living and where in the summer, kids were allowed to play on the street till way after nightfall, where women gossiped out in the open, dropping all sorts of delectable crumbs in the process. Where a van at the top of the street sold sweets and people bought one egg and one cigarette. And where a girl had died of concussion after banging her head swinging on the lamp-post.

Here, nothing happened. Children stayed behind gates tied with scarves or old stockings. We weren't allowed out to play after tea. And the only bit of gossip you might hear was if a nosy visitor asked about the neighbours. Through the Venetian blinds, the people across the road might come under discussion. But only from a safe distance, like in a hospital ward at visiting time. My main memory is the sense of boredom. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by it. Nothing to do, nothing to look at, no one to talk about.

Until Paddy Kavanagh, the poet, pissed on our neighbour Humpy's roses. One summer Sunday in broad daylight, we were coming home from McDaid's, myself and my brother in the back seat of the car being slowly squashed to death between two drunken poets. My mother had been giving out stink about Humpy's husband because he had slapped a cousin of mine, a delicate little thing, as my mother put it (and getting more delicate as the story proceeded). The cousin had hopped over the wall after a ball, her foot barely tipping off one of his roses. Slapped her! Imagine? A child. Just for hopping over the wall. (I omitted to tell my mother that the incident had been part of a game of dares and was by no means the first hop over the wall that day.)

Kavanagh didn't appear to be in the least bit interested, shrugging and shifting for more space in the back seat, while my brother was whingeing because he couldn't breathe. Then the car pulled into the driveway. Kavanagh hauled himself out of the car and stood facing that same low wall with his back to us. It took a few seconds to understand what the hefty rise of steam and the splashing sound could mean, or why the pink and red roses were now mortified and dripping wet. My father thought it hilarious. My mother felt he had gone too far. To us children, Kavanagh became a hero, the man who weed on the roses.

Few women worked in those days, unless they "had to", meaning they had somehow been let down by their husbands. One might hear rumours of a nurse or a teacher on a nearby road, but such jobs were described as "vocations", and implied that the woman in question couldn't quite help herself. So women stayed at home, living side by side for most of their adult lives with other women, whose Christian names they never used.

Talking over the garden wall was considered to be "showing yourself up", and there was little in the way of popping in and out of each other's houses for coffee. They relied on their children for company, their husbands for money. They lived their quiet lives of lonely respectability.

And so the 1960s slipped by. By now I was used to being bored, used to having nothing to do. After-school activity consisted of a few hours in front of the telly. Recreation hadn't been invented, nor had the extra-curricular programme. Even if there was such a thing as gym, drama and martial arts, who would have driven us there? Mothers didn't drive. Fathers were out at work. We walked to school. But did little else. Funnily enough, you rarely saw an overweight child.

During the 1970s, the estate began to mature. Mortgages were finally being paid off, more driveways had cars, more houses had phones. The cherry blossoms seemed thicker on the trees come May, and one by one bungalows became deformed by frowning dormer extensions.

My parents split up. Then the house, which had never been exactly the pride of the neighbourhood, slowly went to rack and ruin. A representative from the Residents' Association called to the door one evening to ask my father to cut the grass. My father said it was a wildlife preserve to encourage his children's love of nature. Then he told the man where to go and what to do when he got there. The concerned resident, a skimpy man with a lemon-coloured sweater and a face textured like porridge, returned when there was no car in the driveway and therefore no man in the house. He handed me a letter: the same request, this time in writing, that the grass be cut, the house be kept more in keeping with its neighbours. Then, on a second thought, he offered to cut the grass himself.

"During the day," he said, "I could come back. Maybe when your father isn't here. Wouldn't you like that, to have a nice garden like everyone else?"

For me it was the ultimate humiliation - this man in a lemon sweater, offering to cut our grass. Where was Kavanagh when you needed him?

Was it still the 1970s? One day I would be old enough to be served in a pub. Until then, I made like-minded friends from the dreaded Walkinstown area. There would be al fresco flagons of cider to be drunk, there would be run-ins with the cops, fights outside the chipper, free gaffs. We would make our own entertainment, in the Irish way, until we were old enough to be legally entertained. We would never be bored again. It was just a question of putting in time.

•These two edited extracts are from County Lines, a Portrait of Life in South Dublin County, edited by Dermot Bolger, published by New Island, €10.95. New Island has just reissued Christine Dwyer Hickey's The Gambler - part two of her Dublin Trilogy. The final instalment - The Gatemaker - is to be reissued in October