Family Fortunes: For hitch-hiking middle-class English girls in the 1960s, Ireland was a revelation

It was the mid-1960s, and five of us from Beckenham Grammar School for Girls had decided, following A-levels, to go on a youth-hostelling holiday in Ireland.

Middle-class girls from the south of England, we were taken aback at the poverty we found: shops selling single cigarettes; blocks of butter cut into tiny squares; children following us in the street begging for “a penny”.

We were penniless ourselves, however, and existed on packet soups and the occasional Vesta curry, dehydrated meals that were reconstituted with boiling water. I can still remember the nutty taste of the bits of carrot.

Another surprise as we went hitch-hiking around the country was the absence of cars. We often had to trudge along for miles before being picked up. But it was safe, and people in general were friendly. I remember a man in Kerry who insisted on talking to us in Irish, teasing us with the amazing sounds. And once we got a ride in a brightly painted horse-drawn caravan.

Our saviours on that occasion were not Travellers but two north of England boys, like us on holiday. The horse plodded along at slower than walking pace, but the boys shared their rashers and sausages with us until our ways parted.

On one of our last nights in Dublin we decided to go to see Galileo by Brecht in the old Abbey Theatre on Pearse Street. The performance was long, and we had to leg it up Gardiner Street to get back to the hostel on Mountjoy Square. We were a few minutes late and found the place locked. Hammering on the door roused the warden, a man of strong Republican views who seemed to have taken against us Brits. At first he refused to let us in but relented, especially after, panic-stricken, we insisted we hadn't been cavorting in pubs but visiting Ireland's national theatre. Perhaps he always intended to let us in and just wanted to give us a fright, who knows?

Little did I dream then that I would spend most of my life here after meeting the Irish man I was to marry. But I had already fallen in love with the country that time I first visited with the girls.

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