My first photograph, which is not the oldest, directs me to Carlow town and to the house of my grandaunt Nan, who was the widow of James Kelly, a member of the RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary). She had a son and two daughters: Jay Kelly, a kindly man who played the harmonica, and my 'aunts' Margie and Dilly. Margie had very striking looks and played the piano, and sang for a time in a band formed by her husband, Percy McEvoy. Dilly was, I believe, one of my mother's dearest friends. Both enjoyed dancing and once, when we lived in Hacketstown, she came to stay with us when there was a carnival, and she and my mother went dancing every night for a week. The photograph was taken in the 1940s in the back yard of my grandaunt's house in Staplestown Road: I am sitting on my father's knee and my sister Eilis sits on my mother's. What I had forgotten, until Dilly reminded me recently, was that I was then given to attempting to jump from windows in an effort to fly, and that I used to say, "Don't make me be good; let me be bad."

The most wonderful thing about going to live in Hacketstown in 1948 or 1949 was the discovery that I was related to so many people. I remember a big lad coming up to me one day and announcing that he was my cousin. I felt terribly important being related to him. Then, when visiting at Kealy's in the Main Street, I was introduced to a man who, had he been wearing a bandanna, I would have taken for a cowboy. This was my granduncle Tom. It was the same wherever I went: introductions to new and unsuspected relatives. Of course, in addition to my blood relations, I had honorary uncles, aunts and cousins as well.

I'm not sure that it had actually been intended that we should live in Hacketstown. I have the feeling that the decision to stay was taken at the end of what was originally planned as a visit. Whatever the ostensible reason for our residence there, it was very much a question of my mother returning to a place which had happy associations for her, and where her family had been of consequence. During a somewhat nomadic childhood she had spent regular and happy holidays in the town, where her maternal grandfather, John Hutton, had been a prosperous shopkeeper. Among various papers which she carefully preserved was a yellowing notice, which she showed me when I was a child. It listed the family property which was to be auctioned following the bankruptcy which brought down the whole house of cards.

The photographs which I have of my maternal grandfather and grandmother, Jim Donoghue and Elizabeth Hutton, must date from about the time of their marriage at the beginning of the century. My grandfather was the son of an ex-DMP (Dublin Metropolitan Police) man, who had taken a farm at Moyne, Co Wicklow. His mother was a teacher, the sister of Garrett Reilly, a Hacketstown publican-cum-shopkeeper. My grandfather could remember the entertainments given at Coolatin House for the children of the tenants on the Fitzwilliam estates, of which he was one. My grandmother could remember Hume-Dick of Humewood driving throug Hacketstown in his carriage, with liveried attendants, throwing out money as largesse for the children - and the priest, during the Land War, urging the people from the pulpit not to let their children be pauperised in this manner. Hacketstown became a strongly Parnellite town (and Redmondite after that): my grandfather adored Parnell and, as a boy, he had travelled to Carlow on a sidecar in the company of his uncle, as part of a demonstration to support Parnell during the bitterly contested by-election of 1891 (which followed the 'Split' in the Irish Parliamentary Party provoked by the issue of Parnell's relations with Mrs O'Shea). He was apprenticed to serve his time in my great-grandfather Hutton's shop in the Main Street and eventually married his employer's daughter. He was a good singer, a convivial person, a man who liked his drink. However it came about, he spent most of his working life labouring, finally working for Crampton's in Dublin. My grandmother, who, if my mother's account is accurate, carried a lot of responsibility for keeping the show on the road, eventually had a big old Georgian house near the fire station in Dorset Street in Dublin and kept boarders.

There is also a photograph of my granduncle Joe Hutton, who was born in Tullow, Co Carlow, in 1868 and who died in 1917. He was a keen breeder of dogs and kept Imaal terriers. His wife was Bridget Quinn from the Black Ditches near Baltyboys in Co Wicklow. She and her sister Mary, who never married, ran his pub, Hutton's on the bridge at Baltinglass, following her husband's death. She was an intransigent Republican who was burned out by the Black and Tans during the War of Independence, and she later opposed De Valera's entrance into the Dáil (the Irish Free State parliament). My mother spent some time in Hutton's of Baltinglass as a young woman and two photographs exist from that period. One shows my mother, Mary Quinn and Mrs Hutton outside the public house. The other shows my mother and Mrs Hutton in the centre of what appears to be a wedding group. A figure in the second row plays a melodeon.

The photograph which takes me back furthest into the past is not the old est. It shows my great-grandmother, Mrs Margaret Hutton (1845-1922), as a very old lady with three of her five daughters. She was a Murphy from Tullow, Co Carlow. Two of her daughters, Elizabeth and Nan, I have mentioned already. The others were Maddie, who died of TB at about the age of 26; Mary, who with her brother Joe, had been set up in a pub in Baltinglass by her father; and Nell, who never married. Mary subsequently married Dan Keogh, whose family came from Clough and who himself had been to America, and Joe went on to establish himself in a second pub. Both Nell and Nan, the only ones I knew personally, both trained as nurses and worked in Belfast for some time. Nell, like her sisters, had a musical training and she used, at one time, to play the organ in the Roman Catholic church in Hacketstown. She had the reputation of being a bit odd, and I was told that she would sometimes practice the popular songs of the day on the church organ. Of Mrs Hutton's sons, I had only been aware of one, Joe, until recently. But there were three more: John and James, who emigrated to America and who died there, and Paddy, who was retarded and who died young.

When we went to Hacketstown first we lived in a room at Hill's on the Green. Hill's was a substantial farm and Jim Hill was an old Republican who carefully preserved an immaculate tricolour which he would carry at the head of any parade which took place in the town. At harvest time there would be great scenes of activity in the haggard beside the house, as the threshing took place and stacks of straw and hay were constructed. Harvesting was a communal activity in which neighbours helped, and in which they assisted in turn.

My father continued to work in Dublin and used to travel to be with us at weekends. Until he got his first car, a Baby Austin, he frequently made the journey by bicycle. As a civil servant, he was in steady and comparatively well-paid employment at a time when prospects were grim in the countryside in general and workers were open to victimisation, like one of my uncles who was sacked for attempting to introduce a trade union in his employment. In this way and others we were privileged. Of course the Huttons' 'proto-empire' had collapsed by now. But all that was recent enough for people to know who we were. The first summer we were in the town my mother was asked to judge a fancy dress competition, awarding the prize unknowingly to the children of John Duffy, the head of a new dynasty.

I have two photos taken by my father in Hill's field in that first year in Hacketstown which show myself and my sister and a group of children from the Green. Among them are Mary Byrne, the sister of my friend Bill Bertie, and May Brien, whom I secretly considered the most beautiful girl in the world. The second photograph looks out over the southern foothills of the Wicklow mountains, including Shielstown Hill. It was a special hill for me since my grandfather told me of the occasion he had climbed it on an Easter morning and had seen the rising sun dance for joy on the distant sea at Christ's resurrection.

I also have a photograph taken at the corner of Kealy's in the Main Street the day I was confirmed by the aged Dr Keogh, bishop of Kildare and Leighlin. With me are two friends, Simon Byrne and Paddy Dempsey. The laneway in the photo led to the ball alley, beside which pitch-and-toss - vigorously denounced from the altar - was played on Sunday mornings. It also led to the Double-Ditch, which was a short cut in and out of the town. On the other side of the lane are the ruins of the outbuildings and bakery which extended at the back of my great-grandfather's shop.

My great friend at that period, as I have mentioned, was Bill Byrne, whose father was Bertie Byrne, a tailor who worked from his house on the Green. There were so many Byrnes in and around the town that families had to be distinguished by a nickname - there were the Hitler Byrnes and the Blueshirt Byrnes, for example - and my friend was Bill Bertie. Bill's family bred dogs and he and his brothers were great lampers and snarers of rabbits and setters of nightlines. From him I learned to identify each bird's nest by its formation and by the markings on the eggs. He also taught me the names of many birds, plants and trees. Through him I build up a whole new knowledge of nature which, to my regret, I have since largely forgotten. Bill was a gentle person who was a respecter of nature, and who would not wantonly or cruelly destroy it.

Journeying out to the bog stick in my mind: when my father was helping Bolgers cut the turf (later he was to say to me, "I'm a countryman lost in the city"), or when I went with Bill and his brothers to fetch turf home, loaded high on an ass's cart. Likewise, a journey through the villages to the east of Hacketstown in the cabin of one of Duffy's delivery vans, driven by the father of another new friend I had made, Matt Brien. Those early summers in Hacketstown seem to me to have been extraordinarily fine and the memory of them has been most often revived when travelling in rural France when some feature of a sundrenched landscape jogs my memory. In 1950, the Holy Year, we hired a hackney car, owned by Mrs Paddy Roche - whose son, Father Willie, was on the Missions - and driven by my mother's cousin, Addie Donoghue. We visited the churches in the parish in order to gain a plenary indulgence, travelling through outlying and beautiful parts of the parish which I had not seen before.

Addie, as a Hackney driver, was not wholly reliable. On another occasion when he was hired to drive us to Tullow, he had evidently doublebooked. We took in a funeral on the way, the mourners squeezing in beside us. As a postman, Addie was equally idiosyncratic. When the weather was particularly bad, he would not deliver to the outlying areas of his round. Instead, he would wait outside the church on a Sunday and slip the letters either to the people to whom they were addressed or to some neighbour. A little man with a slightly deformed arm, he had a sharp mind and a sharp tongue and was eternally quoting Lord Haw-Haw: "...their s-s-stuttering king and their b-b-bandy-legged queen..."

A visit which we made regularly was to my grand-aunt Bridget, my maternal grand-father's sister, who lived under the summit of Eagle Hill, from which there was a magnificent view over Hacketstown and the countryside around. A photo shows my sister and me with grandaunt Bridget's husband, Mike Byrne, standing outside the door of the single-storied farmhouse. A feature of the kitchen which fascinated me was the bellows contraption which was fixed beside the open fireplace. A wheel was turned by hand and this drove a belt which operated a bellows beneath the hearth. In the garden was an apple tree. We were always afraid to touch the apples since granduncle Mike always claimed to have counted them.

Having lived for a couple of years on the green, we moved outside the town to Rathnafishogue ('the [ring] fort of the larks'), where we lived in a rented house. Fields rose behind the house, beside which there was a small grove of resinous conifers and an orchard. A stream ran through the land, on which dams could be built, and there was one large beech tree which could be climbed and built in. Some time before the area was electrified we got a Tilly lamp to light the kitchen. Until them we used candles and oil lamps to light the house. Throughout our time the water was fetched by bucket from the stream or the well, both of which were close to the house. In the kitchen there was a large open fireplace, with hobs and a crane which had adjustable fittings. It was on this fire that my mother baked and cooked throughout the period we lived in 'Fishogue.

Among the many visitors who were always very welcome in our house was Charlie Carroll, a farmer who lived across the river in the Borough. In the evening he would frequently cross the river Derreen by the stepping stones to visit us. He had a way with words and I loved listening to him, whether he was telling a ghost story or some story concerning poachers, or describing how, years before, he had driven cattle to Rathdrum fair. He could captivate an audience with his mastery of words.

At the top of our lane was a house where people gathered to talk and play cards. This was Peter Byrne's. Peter Byrne was an old-IRA man who was confined to a wheelchair. His wife, on whom the bringing up of the family largely devolved, was a good friend to us. When my grandfather came down from Dublin to live with us, he loved to visit Peter Byrne's in the evening. A photograph shows him with my sister and with Marie and Lilly Byrne (now Mrs Donal Kavanagh) at this time.

One of the photos from Rathnafishogue shows my sister and me with two of our dogs: Tips, the cocker spaniel which Ted Tynan, the Garda seargent's son, gave her; and Winkie, the wheaten terrier which my father bought from Bertie Byrne. I can't remember to whom the donkey belonged, but the youth standing beside it with us is Jack Foley. The Foleys were a widely travelled family. Some of the children were born in the United States. At this time they had one of the larger farms in Rathnafishogue; later they had a shop in Tullow. Jack had a droll way of telling a story.

Another photograph records one of my mother's unsuccessful commercial ventures. This particular year she raised a batch of turkeys for the Christmas market, spending considerable amounts of money on feed for them. When she took them to market to sell she was told that they had crooked breasts, which reduced very much the price she got for them. In the photo she is wearing the slacks she some times even wore to church. When she reached the Double-Ditch, she would sit down on the steps and roll the slacks up under her coat so that they were no longer visible.

Living by the river, we were well positioned to buy salmon which poachers wished to sell without running the risk of bringing them into Hacketstown. A photo shows Jackie Tallon, who occasionally brought us salmon. One poacher, on whom the Gardaí and bailiffs kept constant watch, was said to dispose of his salmon by sending them in to town in pairs, draped under his wife's gabardine. In Jackie Tallon's company on this occasion was Dick Tutty, a joiner who was verger of the Church of Ireland church. We kept a couple of hives of bees in the orchard and Dick Tutty would come, with his smoker and his veiled hat, to look after the bees and to remove the honey. Another person who performed the same task was Bill Kelly of the Green, who, if I remember rightly, had a vast repertoire of anecdotes concerned with poaching.

A last photograph is the one reminder I have that we were great cyclists in those years. It was taken on an occasion when we had cycled to Tinahely, to the circus. With my mother and sister and myself are Catherine and Ted Tynan, two of the children of Seargent Tynan who was stationed in Hacketstown. By this time, we had moved back to Dublin, so that my sister and myself could attend secondary school, but we still had the house at Rathnafishogue, and still spent our summers there.

When I think back on those years in Hacketstown now I know I idealise, but certainly that time represents a formative moment in my life that is still a point of reference. It was, it seems now, a time of intense happiness, as well as some equally intense unhappiness - soon couple with confusion on the onset of the undirected drives of early adolescence. In fact, it was probably, for the most part, more ordinary than that. It was during those years at Rathnafishogue, however, that I first began to take conscious pleasure in listening to people who relished words, part of a not yet fully registered realisation that there is an art in their use.