Lord of the flies and the stones

Seaside Haunts: Killiney: When he was a child Chris Binchy thought Killiney beach, in Co Dublin, was good only for walking dogs. Now he knows his instinct was right

On a good day in the summer when the DART comes out of the tunnel after Dalkey station there is a change in atmosphere. The burst of light and blue and mountains and sea that comes after 15 minutes of no view at all excites the understimulated. Children and tourists start shouting and pointing and there is a mass shift to the left of the carriage that I worry might destabilise the train and send us crashing on to the rocks below. Sit down, I say to myself. You'll kill us all, and the last words I will hear will be: "It's just like the Bay of Naples."

Even as a child I thought there was something sad about the endless comparison of Killiney Bay to Sorrento. Those loaded Victorians in big beautiful houses looking out across the bay, trying to convince themselves that Bray Head was in a way like Vesuvius. Calling the roads Vico and Nerano and, just in case anyone was missing the point, Sorrento. Did it make them feel a part of a bigger world? Did it take them away from their compromised existence in this godforsaken backwater? It seemed needy.

There is an undeniable similarity from the top of Killiney Hill or when you're on the train. On the ground it's different. It was always very much a part of Ireland. The beach was a 10-minute walk from my grandmother's house. In the real summers of the mid-1970s my sister and I would spend days there with our aunts and uncles. It is the first beach I remember, and it didn't match the billing that beaches got in the books I'd read. Waving at trains was as good as it got. It was stony and it hurt your feet. There were flies everywhere. There were too many people, and all of them seemed on the edge of becoming seriously pissed off. There were babies crying and dogs barking, and the toilets, if you could be bothered, smelt strange. The water was always too cold and it shelved too sharply. You couldn't build sandcastles with pebbles. There was a shop with the word "Teas" written in huge letters that suggested the possibility of food, but it had stopped trading. They should paint over that, I said. It's not fair.

When you left the beach to go home, suddenly from nowhere sand started to appear. In your hair and between your toes and in your crisps. On the carpet, on the stairs in my grandmother's house and in bed and in the bottom of the bath, exfoliating your backside. Sand everywhere.

I always wanted to go. I looked forward to it. It seemed to be a place that held the possibility of a good time. Everybody got very excited when we went, including me, but I don't know why. It's possible that I was holding out for the day that it would become sandy and flatter and bigger with fewer people. That it would turn overnight into what I'd thought a beach was supposed to look like.

My grandmother had two dogs. One was young and exciting and glamorous, some kind of half-breed spaniel who had been found and whom we all suspected of having a dark past. He would run in circles for hours in the front garden when my sister and I chased him while the rest of the family presumably looked on in delight, thinking that two tasks were simultaneously taking care of themselves. The other dog was moody and rickety, and his breath stank. He was like a greyhound who had grown old and fat and bitter with the way the racing game had treated him. His name was Pup, which had become ironic and cruel and was now always said in quotation marks. Hello, "Pup". My grandmother loved us, I'm sure, but the dogs had a special place in her heart.

There were a number of mornings, in 1977 maybe, that my grandmother and I went with the dogs to the beach at six o'clock in the morning. I don't know whose idea it was, possibly one of the dogs'. There was hardly anyone there, just a couple of guys fishing from the shore. The sun was coming up over the sea, and when the dogs went into the water I went with them. My grandmother walked the length of the beach while the dogs and I swam parallel. There was a similarity in technique between the three of us, all striving to keep our heads up and splashing more than was necessary.

In the morning light the beach was orange and different. The water didn't seem too cold and the stony beach didn't matter. The other people and the flies weren't up yet. When we came out they shook themselves off and my grandmother gave me a towel. We went home and had breakfast.

There were at least two of these occasions and probably no more than three. I'm not sure what I found so happy and exciting about them. Perhaps it was that at last I had understood that our beach could be beautiful and enjoyable. Or that I had understood that an alternative life as a dog was within my grasp. The extra regard of my grandmother would be just one of seemingly countless benefits.

Groups of us used to go when we were 14 and had nothing to do. It was a different time of the year, in October and November and March, when the wind was blowing and everything was grey, the sky and the sand and the sea. We went just to be somewhere away from the tyranny of our homes. It should have had something. That was what frustrated us. There should have been something we could do with a beach.

We were imaginative. There was a quarry in the hills above, into which we used to throw petrol bombs. You can't burn a beach. Apart from throwing stones and pushing each other into the water there wasn't much. There was a river that we tried to cross and then tried to cross back, and when you got wet somebody always said that that river was full of sewage and everybody would laugh.

Then we found that if you sat on the grass at the top of the slope, near the train line, and pushed yourself off you would slide on the wind-flattened grass back down to the beach. Or you would hurtle with no control at incredible speed towards a rocky bottom. The minor risk of death meant we could all enjoy an activity that was at least three years beneath us. We did it for about a week before we all decided that it was boring. It was many things, but it was never boring. I suspected that I was not alone in recognising the laundry implications of a day spent sliding on your arse on grass.

I never really got it. It was for walking dogs. It was for smoking. It was for looking at waves when the weather was terrible. It was for filling in gaps in a day with someone who'd never been there. It was for bringing girls to, because girls like beaches. It was always for something else and never for itself. I know it too well. I don't appreciate it. I don't go back. There are no dogs in my life. I will swim in water that temperature if I fall off a boat but not by choice. They closed the hotel, so there isn't even a drink in the area to stiffen your resolve before a walk or reward yourself after. My instincts at the age of six were right. It's not for me.