In the early days it was always Greystones. Once, we lost the run of ourselves and defected to Skerries and a tall, crooked house called

Midsummer Madness. An old, bed-ridden woman lived in a downstairs room at the side, cats crawling all over her bed. We used to spy in the window at her. Later that year we heard the woman died when the house burnt down and I couldn't sleep for ages, with thoughts of the cats wailing to get out.

The next year we went back to Greystones. We stayed in the

Woodlands Hotel once: it was beautifully run down. There was a fat

American boy staying there too: he was a big hit with us. He could give the most heart-stopping back-answers to the grown-ups and eat sandwiches made of fried egg and strawberry jam. And he could fart to music. In the evenings, the adults drank in the bar and we ran wild through the overgrown pathways down to the beach.

There were other holidays too; the summer of the continental tent;

grotty campsites and endless rain. Then there was the Holiday from

Hell, the year my mother took us to Billy Butlin's. On the very first day I got bashed for losing the bag of sixpences that was supposed to be our pocket money and then a child on The Cyclone vomited all over me. And, as if things weren't bad enough, my mother had to go and win the talent contest dressed in a black and gold maxi singing Then

Along Came Bill. I found the fame difficult to cope with. We were interviewed everywhere we went and when, under a spotlight in Dan

Lowrey's bar, I was asked what my father did for a living and replied that he painted hay-barns, I was bashed again. I was supposed to say he was a maintenance engineer and hadn't even mentioned that he was the boss.

But Greystones I remember with fondness, and the cottage by the railway bridge. We stayed there for most of the summer, my mother and my brothers and I, with my father appearing at weekends and other odd intervals, returning from whatever it was fathers did in that other world outside.

The cottage was full of holy statues; it had cream-coloured sofas with cabbage roses and big frills. By the time we left, most of the statues were broken and the sofas had every possible spillage from every sort of bottle.

There were lilies growing on the bank opposite the house, beautiful white lilies that would break your heart the way they would die in your hand the minute you picked them. There was a simple-minded chap who lived down the way, who would waggle his willy at you - if you asked him nicely.

You could do things in Greystones - things there you could only dream about at home. You could eat candyfloss, or go pony trekking, you could go to The Copper Kettle for afternoon tea. The shops were different too: hardware stores with hanks of wellington boots hanging around the door; grocery shops with the fruit set outside on barrows.

There was even an old-fashioned railway station.

The local children didn't just go out to play, they were organised. They belonged to clubs - the tennis club and a beach club that held something called a BBQ at night time on the beach.

It was exotically Protestant and, as I was just hitting my Enid

Blyton stage, I thought I was a character in one of her books. You could pretend to yourself that you really lived there which, I

suppose, is the real point of holidays.

When he had a good day at the races my father would come down to take my mother out. She would put on her high heels and lipstick.

Then she wasn't a mother at all. Then she was a young woman that you might see in the pictures. They would walk across the road together to the La Touche Hotel and she would come back radiant with reports of linen and silver and the delights of a five-course meal.

During the week sensible aunties might arrive. But mothers and sensible aunties were never much fun. They were always moaning at you; making you clean up or eat your dinner.

They'd murder you if you lost your stupid bubbly swimsuit or if you told all your business to the nosey woman in the shop. They sat on the beach a little way behind you and watched your every move.

But at the weekend, when visitors would arrive, everything moved uptempo and sensible aunties would fade into the wallpaper or simply decide to go home. John Ryan and his wife Dee would come in and the real 1960s glamour would start: bottles of wine, Blue Nun and Mateus

Rose, and a dead-eyed salmon baked in foil with streaky rashers draped over his back. Lipstick and high heels again and trips to the pub or, if the evening was fine, to sip Pimms No 1 on wrought-iron furniture on the back lawn of the La Touche.

You would wake up in the middle of the night and then gradually fall back to sleep to the sounds of a disorganised sing-song and laughter that seemed just a little too keen.

Patrick Kavanagh was a regular visitor too. We children loved to see him arrive, as it took every adult in the house to look after him. He diverted attention from us, and we could go completely wild.

He was the boldest person I had ever come across - even bolder than the fat American boy - stretching out to sleep on the floor, swearing all the time, and doing his wee out on the wall of the back yard.

The women fretted about him all the time, whispering to each other in the kitchen: "Where is he now? What is he doing?" "Oh God, don't say he's gone into the house next door?"

My father would take him out then, to give the women a break. I

stuck to the pair of them like a limpet. Sometimes we went out to

Delgany to a pub with a big black bird that knew how to talk. I

preferred to listen to Kavanagh and my father, gossiping ruthlessly about their friends, arguing about horses and cursing their heads off. (My love for bad language probably stems from this time.)

We went fishing once, the three of us in a small rowing boat, the two big men like the terrible twins, dressed in matching Aran sweaters and black berets. Kavanagh sat the back of the boat, moaning and groaning to himself. He nearly toppled the boat several times. I was afraid of my life but my father didn't seem to notice.

The summers moved on. My parents' marriage started to go sour;

another few summers and they were separated. There were no more trips to Greystones, no more five-course meals. And the only family outings we had after that were trips to the family law court.