The first holiday trip I can remember in clear Technicolor was when I went with my mother, her sister, Auntie Gwen, and their long-standing friend Lillian (whom I would call “Auntie Lillian” throughout her life) to Courtown, Co. Wexford.

Courtown was a small, popular holiday resort on Ireland’s sheltered South-East coast, served then by the steam trains linking Dublin to the port of Rosslare, further south.

Rail travel was a real joy and adventure for small boys. There were signal boxes and water towers with dripping hoses at any sizeable station and turntables at major stopping points like Bray, Co. Wicklow. The passenger carriages were split into narrow compartments with a door at each side opening directly onto platform or track. Passengers could only open the doors from the inside by lowering the window so that they could lean out and turn the heavy outside handle. The windows were manipulated with heavy leather straps, like those used to make harness or to strop cut-throat razors. Punched holes in these straps allowed travellers to open the window for ventilation. Parents with children always had to wrestle with the dilemma of hoisting up their infants so that they could feel the rush of air and smell the steam as the train moved off or of refusing any such adventure on the grounds that you would get smuts in your eyes, or your clothes covered in soot, as the big locomotives strained to gather pace.

Gorey was the station for Courtown and my first holiday memory is of being frightened by black shapes wriggling on a patch of grass between the platform and signal box. My fear subsided when, brought down the platform, I could see and understand that the black shapes were the glistening heads of calves protruding from the mouths of the sacks into which they had been tied so that they could travel more easily in the train’s guard’s van.

(In describing the calves now, I appreciate how troublesome the images must have been. Many worries and fears last until one can find a focus and context which explains what one is seeing. Great artists replicate the mysteries of “seeing” and “understanding”. I think of how frightened I was of the dream sequence in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, the first “art” film I went to in the little Astor Cinema on Dublin’s Eden Quay.)

Getting from Gorey to Courtown meant a trip in a pony and trap. My stock image of such transport is an amalgam of cheerful driver or jarvey flicking a tall whip, with a plaid rug tucking in passengers and luggage, to give them what seemed a false sense of security. Traps and side-cars always seemed precarious as they jerked along road surfaces that were often little more than skiddy gravel. An exception, on future holidays, would be the stylish landau-type carriages lined up outside Bray station to transport visitors to the hotels on the promenade.

Courtown accommodation was boarding house rather than hotel and there was no sense of promenade. My other memories of that holiday are very specific and are of colour and style.

Getting dressed involved putting on a little Viyella suit, the colourful check of the short trousers buttoned directly on to the matching check shirt with patterned metal buttons. I am uncertain about the comfort but remember being admired.

I seem to remember beans, but to be honest am not clear whether it was my first experience of being offered baked beans or “Smarties”, the little chocolate sweets covered in a hard icing which spilled out from a cardboard tube in a multitude of colours. Orangey-pink is the colour I see. Was that the colour of the Viyella, of the baked beans, or of my favourite Smartie?

On the Courtown beach, as I sifted the sand with my fingers, I discovered lots of little snail shells – yellow, brown, grey, and some also orangey-pink. I definitely remember Auntie Lilian hanging such shells on the branches of twigs which could be stuck in the sand to stand up like miniature trees. “Prune trees”, she said.

Sometimes on the beach there was talk of hearing the crump of bombing and even seeing the flash of anti-aircraft fire. I can vaguely remember thunder-like rumbling. It could easily have been thunder. The interest to the adults was that the noise might be bombs falling on Liverpool, not far across the Irish Sea. I was a baby in a world at war.

Read on: 1942 – A Father’s Image