Free Trespassers by Julia O'Faolain Page B

and foreign exchanges were arranged for me, that the Italian or French girl whose lively hospitality I had enjoyed in the Savoy mountains or the seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi would die of boredom in Killiney.
    Yet it was a pretty place, just a brisk, fifteen-minute walk from hilltop to beach, lush, woodsy, part of the old Pale, close enough to Dublin for people to have gone there in the days before motorcars to build roomy houses amidst what by now were mature, semi-exotic gardens, redolent of empire and Mediterranean trips. Several had dreamy names like Capri, Khyber Pass and Sorrento, though native Irish owners tended to choose ones like Carraig Donn, Grianán, Cois Ḟairrge and, in our own case, the semi-Anglicised Knockaderry, which, in the original Gaelic meant ‘the hill of the oakwood’, in memory of an earlier house where Seán had holidayed as a boy. Our field for now had only very young trees, but across the road from it rose a wooded park, and downhill to the right, between the Vico Road and the sea, a eucalyptus wood anchored the soil above a near-vertical slope which descended to White Rock Beach, where the cliffs gleamed with mica, and the sand was finer than caster sugar. In Killiney Park,during the Thirties and Forties, children could be seen gathering sticks for firewood, then carrying them home in great bundles on their backs, which were often bent at right angles, like those of figures in a Bruegel painting. In winter, their fingers, like my own, were covered with chilblains. Fuel shortages were returning us to medieval conditions.
    However, just under the crest of Killiney Hill Road was a row of workmen’s cottages, one or two of which, thanks to the Mexican Gulf Stream, had palm trees in their small gardens. These, allegedly, had been built to house English servants brought over to work in the vanished great house belonging to ‘the Talbot Estate’. What had happened to that house? And where had it been located? Nobody seemed to know, but the names of the families now living in the cottages were indeed English – Hall, Mason, Tyndal and the like – and the big house belonging to Captain Disney, who had sold us our field, was said to have been the dower-house of the same estate. Down the hill to the left, just off the road leading towards what Protestants still called Kingstown and we called Dún Laoghaire, there was a tall, see-through, lacy, stone remnant of a house said to have belonged to the Parnell family which later disappeared. Had it been burned in the Troubles, as happened to so many such houses in fact and perhaps more in fiction? Surely not, if its owners were in any way connected to the great Charles Stewart Parnell? But perhaps they had had the roof removed themselves so as to avoid having to pay rates? Information was sparse, in part because so many Killiney residents were retired and had spent their active lives somewhere else. Many of those living – or having recently lived – in the roomy villas either on the hill top or down by the sea also had English names: Judd, Johnson, Robinson, Murray, Waterhouse, Hone, Starky, Fagan, Williams, Nutall-Smith, Boardman, Gibbon and even an ancient Mrs Parnell, who was thought to be eccentric because she wore nineteenth-century outfits featuring hats, buttoned boots, longskirts and black lace such as I see girls selling and modelling nowadays in London’s Camden Market. She was often in our number 59 bus queue, but no one had the nerve to ask her if she was connected to the ruined house. Perhaps we half thought of her as a ghost.

PROTESTANT KILLINEY
    Killiney Protestants varied. Some had represented the British Empire in India or Africa. Others, having inherited houses too expensive to keep up, lived frugally, while still others were feudal in their ways, like Captain Disney, who invited neighbourhood children to skate and slide on his pond when it froze, organised a fête every summer in his fields, and was generous with callers at