Donald Clarke returns to the Malone Road area and considers theinflux of middle-class Catholics the only notable change.
As a child I used to gambol in endless glades, always mindful that the following morning Father Feeney would be waiting at the school gate with the leather strap and the nailed cudgel.
Of course, I did no such thing, and no such deranged cleric haunted my past. Moving as they may very well be, those bestselling celebrity memoirs that alternate savage beatings with days spent sitting on logs with milkmaids mean nothing to me.
I passed my early years living just off Belfast's Malone Road, the most middle-class place on Earth. Compared to this southern suburb of the North's first city, Foxrock buzzes like lower Manhattan and Cheltenham seems positively edgy. It is a place where optometrists and barristers wear lemon Pringle jumpers and view a disinterest in golf as evidence of unimaginable eccentricity. Andersonstown is just across the M1 motorway, but may as well be in Sweden. And the Republic? Well, that's where rugby fans go twice a year to have their cars stolen by heroin addicts in the employ of the European Community, or so the area's residents would have you believe.
Then again, is all this still true? I left Belfast in 1975, when my widowed mother remarried and moved to Limerick, thus transforming me into a peculiar mulatto who, to this day, is viewed as Northern (austere, stingy, faintly sinister) by Southerners, and Southern (shiftless, vague, faintly silly) by anyone from what we used to call The Province. Moreover, I was then only 11 years old and, like many children of my generation, was more in tune with the activities of The Banana Splits and The Hair Bear Bunch than anything that went on outside my door. So, what do I know about anything?
On July 15th, under blistering sunshine, I set out to discover what has become of south Belfast in the past quarter of a century. But, unfortunately, south Belfast is shut.
There is an amusing irony here: the Orange Order devotes much of its energies to defending the rights of the Protestant people to stomp up and down the "Queen's Highway" (that's "the road" to you and me) every summer, yet, come the middle of July, most posh Prods use that right to march down to the airport and get the hell out of the place.
The Lisburn Road, which runs parallel to the Malone Road itself, is just about the only place you will find a shop in the area, but those that are not closed for business are deserted. It is customary in articles such as this to discover that the hedgerow under which one deflowered the shepherd's niece has been replaced by an annoying coffee shop packed with people who look like architects (or worse). And here, indeed, is a swish café named, for no good reason, Arizona. It will reopen in a week's time.
Eventually, I come across Swanton's, a pleasant delicatessen all of whose fine sandwiches are served on breads with names ending in "accia". Sitting inside, watching the tumbleweed bounce southwards, are Kitty and Deirdre, the only living people in Belfast 9.
"The thing of getting out of Belfast for the Twelfth fortnight really started a few years ago," Deirdre, a lecturer from Lisburn, says. "After Drumcree, a lot of shops got wrecked and people got a bit wary. But the peace process has changed that a lot. It's much better now."
Kitty, who teaches in an integrated school, agrees: "I would never have stayed in the city at this time a few years ago."
Just in view, 100 metres down the street, a small hernia of Union Jack bunting bursts through from the nearby loyalist enclave of Sandy Row. But, elsewhere, there is little evidence of the march which made its way through the suburb a few days ago, unwatched by the optometrists and barristers who were turning brown in Tuscany.
There is a perception in these parts that the new social spots on the Lisburn Road provide evidence of a hip, thrusting Belfast which has left bunting of all hues behind it. Well, maybe. There certainly are a great many more noisy eating places and curiously- windowed bars in the area than there were 10 years ago. But this remains a place where you can find a restaurant named Springsteen's next to one named Ruby Tuesday's, both employing pop-cultural references that were current when I left the city in 1975. No, the real change in this part of Belfast is something less immediately visible. "There are a lot more Catholics here than there used to be," Deirdre says, echoing a view I hear repeated everywhere.
The advances in the availability of education that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s have swelled the ranks of the Catholic middle-classes and transformed the golfing suburbs into the most integrated areas of Northern Ireland.
Stephen King, the liberal and witty adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party, acknowledges the demographic shift which has driven some unreconstructed Protestants, who see only encroachment, to refer to the Malone Road as Vatican City.
"Some of my coarser friends describe it as a ghetto now," he laughs. He goes on to explain that the SDLP vote has gone up significantly in south Belfast in recent years. Yet, if you look at the Saabs and Volvos parked outside St Brigid's church in Derryvolgie Avenue every Sunday, you can't help but marvel that so many of their owners are voting for a party with the word "Labour" in its title.
"We do get some Catholic members in the area," King says. "Indeed, north Down and south Belfast would probably be the only two places that we would see Catholics joining."
Leaving the Lisburn Road, I head towards one of the suburb's leafiest avenues, where I join an old friend in the back garden of the house he has lived in for nearly 70 years. Wearing a floppy, white hat and dangerously snug shorts, he points and swivels like a weather vane in a typhoon. "Catholic family. Catholic family. Catholic family." But how do you know? "Oh, the schools they send their children to mostly." There is no antagonism or resistance in his tone.
The predominant political philosophy of the Malone Road's Protestant population is that espoused by members of the AFU (Acceptable Face of Unionism) tendency such as Stephen King. After a bucket or two of gin, latent Afrikaner instincts do still emerge. But the cocktail parties of Harberton Avenue or Deramore Drive are not places you would expect to meet the Rev Martin Smyth, the local MP and a former Grand Master of the Orange Order.
The truth is that here, as in similarly exclusive locales throughout the North, adhering to the conventions of middle-class, suburban life will excuse you of any troublesome beliefs you may hold concerning transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.
Once we Prods realised that the Catholic QC next door wasn't going to put his car up on blocks and scatter soiled nappies about the lawn, our worries eased. And when we heard he played off a single-figure handicap and had a sit-down lawn mower we began glowing at the very mention of his name.
Middle-class people (or "professional people" as they generally style themselves) look and behave pretty much the same everywhere in the developed world. And their values have not changed much since 1975. The cars may be a bit more four-wheel-drive, the food may smell more of fenugreek, but this is an environment that would be easily recognised by my 11-year-old self.
Most remarkable of all is the unchanged outward appearance of the Malone Road itself. Though, inevitably, people from this part of the city lost their lives during the Troubles, the bricks and mortar remained largely unscathed. Just as Betjeman's friendly bombs never came to Slough, this grand thoroughfare, with its mighty, ivy-clad edifices, never attracted the interests of the arsonists. No peace lines went up in Bristow Park. There are no murals on the gables of Cranmore Gardens.
In fact, as my friend in the dangerous shorts tells me, if you drove the two miles from McCracken Memorial Presbyterian Church to Queen's University you could count the buildings put up in the past 30 years on the fingers of one hand.
This makes for an unsatisfactory class of nostalgia. As Proust might agree, the poignancy derived from experiencing a reminder of one's past is heightened by stumbling across that reminder among contemporary bustle. But meandering around the Malone Road is like staring at very familiar photograph. Nothing here has changed as much as I have.Time is something that happens elsewhere, its passage observed in the pages of the Daily Telegraph and, increasingly, The Irish Times.