The green train had compartments, dusty scratchy seats, polished wood panels overhead. You could run along the corridors in your squeaky new sandals, sway in delicious terror on the metal plates between carriages. The window in your compartment had a leather strap like that mysterious one at the barber's, with holes on it like a belt - you could peg the window at different heights by slipping the hole in the strap on to a shiny little brass nipple.
Everything shuddered and roared and puffed in a pandemonium of childish excitement, adult admonishment and singing, metal, wood, leather, glass, all hurtling out of the city. The train to Youghal. The Sunday excursion.
We woke with sandy eyes from excited shallow sleep. Down Water Lane to Blackpool church, the fastest nine o'clock Mass of the year, Father Lynch caught up in the excitement, rushing the Mass to get everyone out in time for the exodus. Everywhere families streaming through the lanes and streets, the flow swelled at Bridge Street by crowds hurrying down from the North Chapel, along the quay from St Mary's, a flood by the time you got to the end of MacCurtain Street, the sea itself in the milling, swirling yard of the station. Buckets, shovels, grannies and baffled fathers, school friends spotted bobbing in the crowd. The great dinosaur steam train up on blocks, the roar of engines, the railwaymen like sheep dogs chivvying the throng. And then the almost unbearable excitement of the train itself, the whirl of what passes by the windows, and the weighty, triumphant, eventual, slow arrival at Youghal.
The wind off the sea whacked you in the face, salt, sea-wrack, seaweed, sun lotion; and, swaying over and above it all, the long baying ululation of thousands of overcome children, all rushing the sea wall at the same time to stop, awe-struck, at the wide bay's extravagant range of possibilities.
I remember a journey which maybe never took place - in the sense that it is probably a composite of many such Sundays. I remember the long trudge out to Claycastle, the great bank of dunes at the eastern end of the town. Setting up camp at the base of the dunes, the sea looking colder by the minute as it became clear we were expected actually to go into it. My father the hurler togging off, dancing from one foot to the other in a long towel, showing worrying signs of hearty briskness. Me dressed in a scratchy pair of his old woollen togs, Ellen in something ruched with elastic so that it looked as if she was covered in pink and white blisters.
Granda established behind a half-wall of bags and biscuit tins full of grub, shaking out the Examiner, settling for the day. Then we were being dragged squealing towards the sea, then we were being dragged into it, me stumbling, falling, sand and salt and cold sea-water, crushed down out of the light, hauled up again in a spray of bright droplets, Ellen and Gerard screaming, my all-powerful father laughing, suddenly strong and carefree and straight as a soldier.
Out of the water and we ran and ran, the sand under tender bare feet, the eye-catching shells and other treasures whirling by, remembering where things were, to come back for them later. Then the rough towelling, the shorts and T-shirts, the half-heard lecture on the dangers of sunburn, a mouthful of Tanora and then the blowing-up of not one but two beach balls - always, without fail, neither trusting the other to remember, my Da and his Da would each have bought one.
A day of running and never walking, football, elaborate impromptu games, carving extravagant roads for Dinkies up to, around and away from elaborate sand-castles, my father as happy and concentrated and lost in the high sun and space of it all as we were. The sea reflecting the salty high sun in great flat sheets. The sand getting in everywhere, especially into the tomato-sodden sandwiches, making a necklace around the neck of the lemonade bottle, cutting between your toes, never more sharply than at the end of the impossibly long day when you put your socks back on, shoved on the suddenly too-small sandals and started the long climb up the dunes to the picnic on the wiry grass over the wide panorama of dying day (a box full of crockery and a full teapot 1/6d from one of the shacks on the road behind Claycastle). And then the long, drugged trudge back to the station, buying sticks of rock for all the brothers and sisters, the train a swaying cocoon home along squeaking rails, the high gloom and drama of the Victorian station, the crowd murmurous, thinning out, the steps up to the house, my mother's warm smile as the door opened to admit us to home, hot milk, sun-warmed, wind-scoured sleep.
They closed down the line to Youghal and I have never forgiven them.
Theo Dorgan's most recent collection of poetry is entitled Rosa Mundi, published by Salmon.
