The recent sighting of a property ad in one of our national newspapers offering a bijou two-bed residence off the North Strand in Dublin 3 for a mere €400,000 or so brought back memories of my early life on that cold-sounding boulevard.
The prologue to my time there was the German bombing of the North Strand in May 1941, just three months before I was born. The 500-pound landmine that caused most of the 39 deaths detonated on the tramlines 200 yards from our home in Annesley Place. I grew up listening to our neighbours talk about it as if it had happened the previous week.
The closing act came when the River Tolka burst its banks and rolled into our little rented house in 1954. The same freezing cold, filthy waters metaphorically floated us out of there to the elysian fields of St Anne's Estate in Raheny, and into a Corporation house with, of all things, mirabile dictu, an indoor toilet.
In between, hope and history rhymed for myself and my fellow inner city scholars, as we made our daily way across the bomb site on the other side of Newcomen Bridge towards the shining educational trinity of North William Street Sisters of Charity junior infants, St Canice's primary school, and O'Connell Schools in North Richmond Street.
Even in the inner city in those times, the country wasn't too far away. Most weekdays, lowing herds of cattle were prodded down the North Circular Road towards the North Wall boats and their date with foreign slaughterhouses. Our morning milkman filled up the tilly cans we left out overnight at the door.
Tommy Finnegan, our coalman, delivered bags of the black stuff to that same door from the back of his horse-drawn wagon. Danny the slopman, giving a Hibernian imitation of Ben Hur with his horse and two-wheel cart, would gallop by every few days to collect nourishment for his pigs from garbage bins. What the various horses deposited on the street in their passage was quickly shovelled up by neighbours who valiantly cultivated roses around their outside latrine. And the aforementioned porkers lived at the end of Annesley Place, beside the blacksmith's forge. Rus in urbe had nothing on it.
National politics came to us as well. I looked out my bedroom window one summer's evening and watched as Éamon de Valera, standing on the back of an open lorry, harangued a crowd of male apparatchicks, many of whom had left the comfort of Birminghams' public house to hear the man from Clare talk about the evils of partition and inter-party governments, as rainbow coalitions were known in those days.
And then there was the equally legendary Alfie Byrne, the seemingly perpetual Lord Mayor of Dublin, who swept into the North Strand on the ebb of the December 1954 flood, the worst experienced before or since by our capital city. He shook my hand in Annesley Place, gave my mother a can of emergency food and promised us all kinds of goodies and reliefs - some of which we actually got. He looked to my young eye as if he had just stepped off the stage of the Theatre Royal, with his black-tails jacket, flyaway celluloid collar, and top hat, but still he was the first politician to land on the North Strand after the flood.
On that early December morning, the metallic grey light showed the Tolka where Annesley Place used to be, an alien torrent reaching four feet in depth. Truly, a river ran through it. The next week was kids' heaven - no school, boats rowing up and down the street, an Army emergency kitchen where the soldiers let us help in making and serving monstrous portions of stew to the residents.
But if the North Strand flood united the community in hardship, it was also to be the great divider, as Dublin Corporation in its mercy began moving families out of devastated housing to the new shiny cement suburbs. We were one of the lucky ones - St Anne's Estate, then and now, was an inspired choice by the planners. Located as it is in the old Guinness family domain, its 300 acres ran from the barony of Raheny to the bird sanctuary of Dollymount and the Blue Lagoon.
This was social revolution de luxe, but it severed social links as well. The six miles between North Strand and Raheny wasn't just road any more.
We never went back, we just passed by, and as the time moved on, so it seemed that the North Strand was physically shrinking, viewed from bus or car. But the little house we rented for 10 shillings a week didn't stop growing in its own way, as that €400,000 price tag so eloquently testifies.