Orna Mulcahy recalls the Ballsbridge of her childhood, where St Vincent's Hospital was yet to be built and the Merrion Centre site was a wasteland colonised by hippies.
It has a rude ring to it, Ballsbridge, so you never mentioned the address if you could help it. That just left Dublin 4 and in time that had connotations too. I'd just say that we lived on the Merrion Road - which went all the way from the actual bridge at Ballsbridge to Merrion Gates and had all sorts of houses along it, from tiny cottages to huge big redbricks.
We lived in a high Victorian house with a view over Wanderers rugby grounds from the back, and my parents live there still. While I love my own house by the sea out past Dún Laoghaire, the Merrion Road still feels like home, especially in spring when the cherry blossom is out and in autumn when you can swish along its wide footpaths, ankle-deep in leaves.
My parents moved to Dublin in 1968 when there must have been a property boom going on. Their budget was £7,000, tops, when they went to the auction for our house, but it cost them almost twice that.
There was work to do, as the house hadn't been touched for decades. Ancient handpainted wallpaper covered the walls right the way up to the top floor, but it all peeled away and crashed down one night after the new central heating was switched on.
The previous owner left behind one of those lever-operated embossing machines that gives you instant, slightly wonky headed notepaper, and a gazebo that was supposed to twirl around on its own axis but which had settled at a tilt in the middle of the lawn.
That's a very busy road, people would say back then, before it got really busy, but that was its attraction for my mother, a countrywoman who likes to see comings and goings.
Hell to her is a cul-de-sac with no one passing your door, so a house fronting onto four lanes of traffic was ideal. It wasn't so ideal for my father who was the superintendent of Stewart's Hospital mental home in Palmerstown. All he had wanted was a house near his work, but for the next 28 years he drove across town every day using every back lane and alley to try and shorten the journey.
He was the first person I ever heard complaining about the traffic.
We had bus stops for going in either direction right outside the house, and town was 10 minutes away on the 5, the 6, the 7, the 7a, the 8 or even the 45, but we didn't bother much with the other direction: Blackrock was almost in the country and Dún Laoghaire elicited shivers from my mother.
Ballsbridge was a startlingly modern place in those days with buildings like Hume House considered high-rise. Merrion was sleepy by comparison. Vincent's Hospital was yet to be built, and the Merrion Shopping Centre site was a patch of wasteland which had been colonised by hippies. We weren't allowed to go near it, in case they stole us. It was the era of sects and men with long hair who were obviously depraved. Everyone knew someone who knew someone whose teenager had been snatched by the Moonies.
Everyone showed up at 10 o'clock Mass in the big barn that is Merrion Church. The local families scrutinised each other for new outfits or hair dos and general behaviour. You would know the seasons by one particularly scatty but well-connected family: if it was summer they would have Wellington boots on, while in winter the light cotton dresses came out.
Ours was a big house but it needed to be. There were two adults, seven children, a rota of nice girls from the country helping my mother, various relations staying over and any number of visitors. The kitchen was never empty.
There was always someone arriving in and being offered tea, or soup, or breakfast or dinner or just drink. So much so that now when there are more than two people in a room, I feel the urge to put on the kettle or make toast.
There was no avoiding the visitors who might be from anywhere - America, down the country, up the road. This went on late into the night when the cast was replaced by boyfriends and girlfriends raiding the fridge, and a barrister uncle who would arrive at 11 p.m. and give a blow by blow account of what had gone on in the High Court that day, with diagrams if necessary.
Later still, my father would be up and around in his dressing gown, unable to sleep with the worry of work and educating seven children. By six my mother would be on the prowl and once she was up we all had to get up. There was no such thing as a lie-in and anyone found in bed after 8 a.m. was considered a lazy good-for-nothing who might as well give up school or college immediately and go and work in a knicker factory.
It wasn't a great neighbourhood for children as many of our neighbours were elderly and there was always the threat of being knocked down if you tried to cross the road. I envied the friends who lived in cul-de-sacs where you would always be in and out of each other's houses. Most of all, I envied their small cosy bedrooms that they could decorate themselves. Our posters just didn't look the same on top of the (new) William Morris wallpaper.
There was always a nice whiff of dung in the air during the Spring show, the Horse Show and Goff's horse sales, which were held on what is now the AIB headquarters. Our house was a quick trot away from the RDS and we felt entitled to use all its facilities. Our grandmother was a life member of the society, and this, we felt, gave us all entrée into the grounds - via the slackly attended doors on Simmonscourt Road.
The aim at each show was to get as many free stickers and samples as possible, though I can't remember what we ever did with the bags of stuff we brought home from Zetor and Ciba Geigy and Kerrygold. Probably kept them with the flags and the maps that we begged from the embassies on Ailesbury Road for fictitious school projects. The French were tight as anything but the Japanese would give you plenty.
The RDS library was where we pretended to study. A beautiful 1960s space, it was an exceptionally genteel place full of beautifully-dressed old men - sadly with drips at the end of their noses - and bent-over old ladies looking for the latest Judith Krantz.
Where those were kept we never knew because the shelves were packed with books on animal husbandry or Ancient Rome or life with the Masai in Kenya.
A lot of what we got up to centred on sweets and buns and getting them cheap if not free.
The Johnston Mooney and O'Brien bakery in Ballsbridge, where the Herbert Park Hotel is now, was a great place to go for cheap jam tarts - the red ones, not the dreaded yellow apricot-flavoured ones - and Vienna rolls straight off the conveyor belt that they would give you free if you asked for something to feed the ducks in Herbert Park.
After school, in St Mary's, Haddington Road, we walked down through Pembroke Gardens, whose chocolate box cottages have not changed one jot, and into Baggot Lane where there was another bakery. I think it's a chic little mews house now, but then you'd slip in through the high wooden doors and be served by a woman who was pretty much covered in chocolate.
We would get Viennese fingers dipped in chocolate and cream buns for half price. For sweets we went to Mrs Mack's shop on what is now the platform of Sydney Parade DART station where you could buy apple tarts and bullseyes and these huge pink gobstoppers that had a coin in the centre, wrapped in greaseproof paper.
For comics there was Browne's newsagents, where Tony Browne would let you read Sindy and Bunty and Mandy even if you only bought Tammy. Later we graduated to Jackie and Fab 208 which advised you what to say to boyfriends who wanted to go "all the way" and how to turn a pair of jeans into a peasant skirt by splitting it open at the seams and adding bits of broderie anglaise.
There were places that we would be left for a couple of hours to amuse ourselves at weekends: Herbert Park where you could do yourself a serious injury on the barrels, and the Ritz cinema on Serpentine Avenue which was always running swashbucklers starring ErrolFlynn.
Our neighbours were mostly women: the Irwins next door who kept amazingly late hours and were witness to many road accidents and incidents in the early hours; nearby Mrs King-French and Miss Blake Campbell; Kay Marshall who gave her famous ante-natal classes upstairs; and Mrs Kinlen, whom we loved.
When you called in the evening, she would be sitting by the drawingroom fire, winter and summer, fiddling with her magnificent pearl necklaces and toying with a supper that had been wheeled in by her housekeeper, Molly, on an elegant little trolley.
Later on we discovered discos. There were four rugby club discos within walking distance - Wesley, Bective, Old Belvedere and Wanderers.
I wasn't allowed to set foot in any of them but by keeping a set of clothes in the front hedge, and a nightdress in the letter box, I managed to attend them all on a clandestine basis from about the age of 14.
Flitting home down Ailesbury Road at one in the morning was as safe as could be, the street lamps casting a warm orange glow over the road.
Writing for the Property supplement, I'm always back in Ballsbridge, visiting houses that are for sale. As each old family moves on, the big houses are pulled apart and put together again in a far grander style. Marble bathrooms, gym rooms, vast conservatories, landscape gardens, bay trees by the front door and electronic gates.
I preferred it when everyone's gate was wide open and you never knew who would come to call.