As a boy in Bray, Co Wicklow, I vaguely remember wondering why it was that the local laird was the Earl of Meath?
A Portrait of Bray - out in time to be included in the Christmas books list for nostalgic Brayites, past and present - doesn't seem to clear up this question. But several authoritative contributions to this historical compendium do explain that the Brabazons were very important indeed in their day, though suburbia now creeps almost within the gates of Killruddery.
The family was once powerful enough to dictate the cliff route of the railway to Greystones, and Rosslare beyond, giving the engineer Brunel scope to show his genius. (My main memory of it is the time a train thundered by within inches of me when I got caught in Brunel's long tunnel.)
Neil Jordan, in a blurb on the charmingly illustrated cover (by Gay O'Toole) says this book is "a delightful patchwork quilt" of contributions. He is being kind to its uneven quality. But anyone with a long-standing relationship with this odd, intimate seaside community will be charmed by many of the better essays.
One of them comes from Garret FitzGerald. He paints a picture of a youthful idyll in "Fairy Hill", one of a string of Big Houses that used to mark off the upper town Killarney Road area as "posh Bray". "Mother and Daddy were great party givers - tennis at weekends during the summer, and talk and charades in winter."
Garret tells us how "Fairy Hill" had to be sold, when he was 11, because of his father's reduced circumstances after losing his ministerial position in the Cumann an nGaedheal government in 1932.
Brass door-knocker
A cryptic note at the end of his piece suggests a dogged Proustian recherche du temps perdu: "The door-knocker of Fairy Hill was dumped with other brass [after the house was demolished]. It was eventually restored and found its place on the front door of one of the editors of this book." Presumably the young Garret couldn't reach it then, but still wants to get his hands on that knocker. The editors are, by the way, Eva O Cathaoir and Jason Forde.
Nowadays Killarney Road's once sylvan setting is semi-detached. But the Killarney Road and King Edward (VII) Road piles were once an imposing reminder of Bray's 19th-century identity as a resort from Dublin for the wealthy.
They were drawn by the bracing air to the "Brighton of Ireland" for "a cure". In 1854 an inaugural train puffed in full of top hats. This helps to explains why Bray used to have two Church of Ireland churches, one of them of almost cathedral size, built in 1878. At one time Bray had almost 1,500 C of I members.
In the 1950s to 1970s this strange place became to me a microcosm of a two-nations society, with its working-class "Little Bray" below the Dargle Bridge, whose artisans' dwellings were liable to regular flooding. The "Cripples' Home", opposite the "People's Park", was a magnet for "good works".
Left-wing vein
In those days my parents worried a little about the appeal I found in a left-wing vein in the rock of Bray's establishment. I'm reminded of this by a chapter from Ross Connolly (grandson of James). Ross, a then active Bray and District Trades Council member, tells of a tongue-lashing he and other anti-apartheid protesters got from the pulpit of the Church of the Holy Redeemer during a visit by the Springboks rugby team - and of a spirited response to the priest in question, "who left Bray shortly afterwards".
The controversy - arising out of a trades council motion by Desmond Hedley Wright (ATGWU), a local activist, photographer, Gaeilgeoir and character - "marked the first time, at least in Bray, that a priest's sermon in church on a political issue had been challenged in public", Connolly writes proudly.
The businessman Feargal Quinn recalls his father's entrepreneurial folly of a cable chairlift to the Eagle's Nest Ballroom on Bray Head. We thought it the greatest thing since fried bread, putting us on some sort of summit of Swiss Alpine sophistication. (I seem to recall, however, that passengers were seldom suspended much more than a comfortable jump from the ground.) Sadly, the contraption's rusting remains today bespeak a foresight too far.
This was before Ireland's sexual revolution and new linguistics. An advertisement explaining fun ahead at Bray Head urged visitors to "go gay all the way" on Ireland's only aerial cableway.
When it rained, holiday-makers from industrial Lancashire and Scotland, banished till teatime from their budget B and Bs, would have to trudge sadly about between Dawson's Amusements and the Fun Palace as the wind creamed the sea and misted the windows of the Bella Vista on the Prom. The visitors' bowed backs under see-through plastic macs lent them the look of a migratory species of birds whose sense of direction had somehow let them down.
Rusty railings
A sure sign that the bustling summer holiday season was drawing to a close was the eruption of rust specks on the Victorian railings of the mile-long esplanade. The circus, the divebomber and the Jack Daniels Road Show would already have pulled out and the "pedalo" boats were stacked away.
The long grass could recover in Barry's Field, nowadays a tidy bowling green. The Royal and the Roxy - where the films changed twice a week and I witnessed the doubtful innovation of 3-D, as well as the Bray Literary and Debating Society - beckoned.
One of the few people with regular seasonal work seemed to be the painter who would appear in spring to recoat the rust in time for the merry bustle of the three summer months.
In those years of static development - and of tension between the interests of the "tinsel town" and the quieter one the residents had to themselves for the winter - there was a tendency to see Bray's shortcomings as just too funny for words. But really Bray was a paradise of youth. Roll up, roll up. This chance to recapture lost times costs £14.99.