Hugh Linehan returns to Blackrock and finds that, despite its enduring air of wealth and privilege, he never wants to live in this Dublin suburb again.
I never liked Blackrock very much. In fact, I still don't. With increasing unease, I've been reading my Irish Times colleagues' reflections on the idyllic places from whence they all seem to have sprung. What exactly, I wondered, do I have to say about Blackrock? Where are the golden memories? Why do I have absolutely no affection for this place? What's wrong with me? I know, I should count myself privileged. Blackrock has everything: the sea, the DART, the leafy avenues, good schools, the roight accent . . . Not as flash as Foxrock, not as posh as Ailesbury Road, it still has the confidence and security of Solid Money. But, to me, it never seemed to have much of a personality or a heart (even before the bypass). As a snotty teenager, I sulked against its middle-class smugness, its presumption of entitlement. Now, in retrospect, it just seems bland and rather boring.
Blackrock for me was a blank slate when I was growing up there. I haven't thought about it much since I left, and barely notice it when I'm occasionally passing through, or visiting my parents (who, it should be said, still seem delighted with it after 40 years of living there). The one thing I really know about the place is that I don't want to live there again. Luckily, I can't afford to.
Maybe it's something to do with being from suburbia. Even as a child, it seemed that life, whatever that was, happened somewhere else. I can see now that, at the time, Blackrock was a sort of work-in-progress. It had been part of Dublin's commuter belt for more than a century, ever since the train line was built. But it was changing. There were Big Plans. The DART would be coming soon, and bulldozers were carving out the bypass which would relieve the traffic-clogged main street.
It was the 1970s, Ireland's version of the 1960s. At secondary school in Newpark Comprehensive, they didn't have History or English or Geography; they had a hippyish mish-mash called Integrated Something-or-other, taught by well-meaning types with progressive hair. Newpark was (and for all I know, still is) a school with a Protestant ethos and a large clientele of lapsed, lapsing and just plain confused Catholics breaking down the gates to get in. It was also co-educational, which was just too frightening for me. We were lab-rats for a new, right-on Ireland, and there were many, many things we didn't know. Especially the fact that we were all about to have a very big practical joke played on us, called the 1980s.
Actually, Blackrock had deep enough pockets to weather the 1980s better than most places. The Frascati shopping centre is one of Ireland's finest examples of Kajagoogoo-era architecture. Pay no attention to those Ye Olde Village pictures of the Main Street in the rare old times: physically, the place is now defined by its two 1980s shopping malls and by its four-lane bypass, whose most notable engineering feat is a pedestrian subway which has never been used by anyone of sound mind as anything other than a public toilet.
So here I am in the summer of 2003, wandering aimlessly around the Frascati Centre, wondering what it's all about. "Hanging around in a one-horse town," sing Blackrock boys The Thrills, who seem to be getting a lot of play in the shopping centre's record store. But they're not singing about Blackrock - they're singing, for some reason, about Southern California. People don't really sing about Blackrock. The only time I've seen the place represented in dramatic form was in the mockumentary Paths to Freedom. The house where the terminally smug doctor and his insufferable wife lived, I realised with a jolt of recognition on seeing it for the first time, was on our road. My people - immortalised at last. Oh, dear.
Blackrock has had more than its fair share of resident writers - novelists, journalists, poets - but they've never shown any great inclination to write about the place where they actually live. I find this comforting. It's not just me - clearly, there's something about Blackrock which causes people to start thinking about somewhere else.
I walk out of the shopping centre and onto the Main Street. In some ways, the place has changed out of all recognition; in others, it hasn't changed at all. There's clearly no shortage of money. All the major banks are represented. If you want a mortgage, a fluffy coffee or a wash and blow-dry, you will be well served. You can spend hundreds of euro on spicy designer underwear (co-educational, like Newpark), and you won't find a better place in Ireland to buy a pashmina. There are several of those shops which look as if they're run by women who don't really need to run shops. Despite all this evidence of comfort and prosperity, I'm surprised by how tatty-looking the street is, the shopfronts an uneasy mish-mash of the gaudy and the chintzy: Xtravision, coffee shop, bank, pub, Supermac's, Eddie Rocket's, coffee shop, bank, pub. There is, of course, a Centra. And a Spar. The post office, which was always the most imposing building on the street, has a big "For Sale" sign on it. Soon, it too will be a pub. Or maybe a noodle bar. I'm depressed already.
None of the old civic buildings has fared very well; although the dilapidated library is finally getting a face-lift, the public baths have been allowed to fall into graffiti-covered decrepitude. It all looks a bit . . . scruffy. There are definitely more pubs than there used to be, some of which have acquired a notoriety for their all-you-can-drink promotions. The young folk of Blackrock are going to hell in a handbasket, apparently. No change there, then. I seem to remember similar moral panics back in the 1970s.
I feel I'm here under false pretences. The premise of this series is that, not only are we shaped by whatever geographical location we happen to have been raised in (which has to be at least partly true), but that we carry around a little parcel of memories of those places like jewels in a bag. I appear to have lost those jewels, or the bag, or both. It's not that I don't remember being a child in Blackrock, it's just that those memories don't really resonate in any way with me. Maybe it's not Blackrock's fault at all. Maybe it's me.
Here's a memory that resonates. I remember the first time I was brought to the cinema, in Dún Laoghaire I think, to see The Wizard of Oz. I would have been five or six years old, and I was enthralled but bewildered. Why did Dorothy keep going on about getting back to Kansas? Kansas was in black-and-white. Oz was in Technicolor, and full of magic and songs and adventures. What was all this "there's no place like home" business? Flying monkeys I could happily accept, but this was too absurd.
A couple of things strike me about this memory now. One is that a six-year-old who uses the word "absurd" clearly doesn't get out much (and don't blame my parents - they tried, honestly), which probably explains the absence of apple-stealing/football-playing stuff in the old memory bank. The other is that, from an early stage, the rot had set in. I was never going to be one of those people whose eyes welled up at the mention of the word "home".
Oh well, onwards and upwards . . . I decide to walk my old school route, up Carysfort Avenue, taking the short-cut across to Newtownpark Avenue. Past the huge, triumphantly ugly Catholic church (I always liked that) and up the road into the school. Something strange happens - the strap on my shoulder bag breaks. It's a cheap, khaki thing, not unlike the satchels on which I used to painstakingly etch in biro the names of my favourite bands. The strap on my schoolbag was always broken. Is this a sign? Clutching the bag awkwardly to my chest, I walk around the school grounds. To my surprise, everything seems to be pretty much exactly the same as the day I left. I stop and wait. Nothing happens. No memories come flooding back. A caretaker sweeping leaves glances over at me. Standing there, clutching my broken bag, I feel stupid, sweaty, maybe even slightly sinister. Why am I here? What should I do now? Why do I feel so unutterably gloomy? I'm just having a Bad Day in Blackrock. Again.
Tomorrow: Donald Clarke returns to Belfast