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But it was hardly time yet for them to have a sense of history or to regret the progress which would later leave the Upper House a roofless ruin. They would remember how that Easter week the foam of the spring storms was breaking right over the reef of rocks outside Doaghbeg shore. They would remember a frightening farmyard world of plunging horses and hostile ganders, and the gaunt features of old Fr John McAteer, retired now from pastoral work and sitting crippled by the fireside in the New House he had helped to build thirty years before; and the strangeness of a world without streetlamps, where tarred roads and running water and electric light were still part of an unimaginable future.

Mention of 'old Father John' reminds me that there was a ghost-story connected to his name; perhaps it was during this first post-war Irish trip that my two small sons heard it told. They do remember that on the night journey to Stranraer the conversation in the carriage turned to such things, and the lady sitting opposite told them about a benign old ghost in their family, who had lived to start but not to finish the building of a house he had long projected, and whose footsteps could be heard walking its passages once it was completed according to plan. It would have been apposite for Jim to have capped that one with his uncle's story, because it too had to do with the building of a house - the new curate's house which the young Fr McAteer started building soon after his appointment at Drimarone. The old folk shook their heads about the choice of site and talked about 'building on fairy ground', but Fr John was not the man to pay attention to idle old superstitions. Yet from his first night in it it was a troublesome place to live in, with bangings and mysterious shifting of furniture and kitchen objects during the night, waking him in his room upstairs while the deaf old housekeeper and the hired lad (whom at first he was inclined to blame) slept through it all. How often such things happened, or how long he had to suffer them, I am not sure; certainly they were said to have persisted even after he had began to believe they were uncanny and used the blessings and service of exorcism in the old Ritual. Finally - it must have taken an effort, because he was a proud spirit - he confided in his Bishop. At the time this was Bishop O'Donnell, a man with a saintly reputation, later to be Archbishop of Armagh, and according to the story he took the matter calmly and at first opportunity came himself and said Mass in the house. There was peace for good after that. The only little tail to the story came a generation later, when a College friend of Jim's who had been appointed priest at Drimarone told him that he had had to see to digging below the foundation level to deal with wall-dampness, and had come on clear evidence that the site was a long-forgotten graveyard.

Old Father John was to die within a year or two of that time, and inevitably his memory, since he had been so much a power in the family for so long, picked up a bit of legend itself. My sister-in-law Mamie would tell stories about his 'nearness' with money, and how he would look at incoming mail for unfranked stamps which could be picked off and used again. He certainly belonged to a generation of strong pastors who expected their wishes to be respected, and I quite believe that in his evening walks about the lanes of Ramelton he would be free with his blackthorn if he came across courting couples - in an ecumenical spirit too, since he made no distinction between young folk of Protestant families and those of his own flock. Nor was he wanting in courage. In 1920 when his nephew was ordained and came north to Derry to say his first Mass it was the time of anti-Catholic rioting and there were guns going off in the next street during the celebration meal. It was all the family could do to keep the elder priest from going out to tell those stupid people to stop trying to kill one another. When all the stories are told, he was a priest who laboured faithfully in his vocation for fifty years, and no-one knows what good he did and what souls he helped on their path.

Every summer after that, for twenty years, we spent our blessedly long teachers' holidays in the little house which we called 'Sheila's Cottage' after the old lady, last of her family, whose death had left it vacant. (Our visits did not stop in the Sixties, as you shall hear; but we contributed to progress ourselves by buying house and field and replacing the little irregular cottage with its red corrugated-iron roof by an up- to-date holiday home.) There were some years when with worries financial and otherwise bearing upon us Jim and I would talk about staying at home that summer and taking a few holiday trips down the Clyde. But we always ended up loading ourselves and the big hamper and the children (and later a bicycle or two) on to one of Paterson of Airdrie's biggest taxis and setting out for the Broomielaw and the SS Laird's Loch which would take us to Derry.

Years later, when our family had grown up, a neighbour told me that our departure for Ireland was something of an awaited event in Cairnhill Road, with folk watching the spectacle from behind their curtains, and no doubt smiling as Jim and the driver roped awkward items on the roof-rack and the children jockeyed for the best positions inside.

I should say that we were on very good terms with our neighbours, but that they perhaps saw us a little as odd-people-out. The neighbour who succeeded Mrs Brownlee once confided in me, a little ruefully, that our row of houses was known locally as 'the Catholic building' because it was the only one in the street with a Catholic family in it. Maybe her sons had suffered like Ian Brownlee before them; Ian had asked his mother in all seriousness if he was 'a wee papist' - this being what the boys along the road called him when they chased the young McIntyres and himself out of the local playpark.

There was great magic in the journey for all of our children, even in the very first years when economy dictated sitting in jam-packed rows in the 3rd-class deck, with the wee ones (who luckily all turned out to be excellent sailors) curling up to sleep in any corner they could find. In those austerity years large numbers of people were anxious to visit a country where butter and eggs were plentiful and cheap. The shipping companies seemed to cash in by treating the queues at the gangways rather like their other main cross-channel cargo, which was Irish cattle. There was one memorable occasion when Jim's patience with the style of things gave out. We had been standing in our hundreds for hours in the Broomielaw sheds waiting to show our sailing-tickets and shuffle our way on to the steamer, and he told the nearest representatives of authority, a Burns Laird official and a luckless policeman, exactly what he thought of it all. The fiery family temper which he normally kept so well hidden was given full rein, though as usual without a single objectionable word. The policeman said he was quite right sir but what could he do about it, and the listening crowd nodded sheepishly and congratulated us afterwards - 'that husband of yours was good gas!'. (Years later when our son John was a seminarian he met a priest who had known Jim well before the war - 'I've only seen him once since, and I'm afraid I didn't speak to him - it was on the Broomielaw waiting for the boat and he seemed to be a very angry man!')

It was not the discomforts of the passage but the wonder of it that kept our children on deck throughout the night as they grew older, as Jim showed them how the winking lights slowly appearing and disappearing guided them on course - Ailsa Craig and the two lights at either end of Rathlin Island, and Inistrahull showing far out north before they picked up the final light at the mouth of Lough Foyle and knew they would be in Derry not long after dawn.

For them there was a whole world of strangeness to be savoured when the Laird's Loch finally docked - everybody on the Derry quayside speaking in accents like their Grandma's, the policemen whose caps were not diced and who bore fearsome revolvers as part of their uniform, and the wait sitting on our luggage in the shivering morning until a lumbering black Ford V8 came along the cobbled street and George O'Donnell stepped out to help tie on the luggage and take us on our way to Fanad. 'I got your letter surely', he would say, laughing at the expressions of relief on our faces. Donegal had not really accepted 'New Time' as they called British Double Summer Time, and in terms of 'Old Time' George had had a very early start indeed that morning.

The first stage of our car-trip was actually very short. Bridget Hegarty, one of Jim's many cousins, would never have forgiven us if we had not gone up through the steep streets of the Bogside to call at their house in Wellington Street where her husband Hugh had a pub. ( I think Bridget was actually a second cousin, related to Jim through a grand-aunt called Bridget Barr who had married someone from the Derry side of Lough Swilly.) Their daughter Maureen was already well-known to our children because she had been a frequent visitor in Airdrie while she studied for a qualification in Domestic Science in Glasgow. There would be talk of who was dead and buried since the year before, who were engaged or had emigrated to England, and of crops and cattle because Hugh was also a dealer in livestock. Then we would be on our way, out from the city on the Letterkenny road and to the double stop at British and Irish Customs posts, no bother usually because George was well-known, and then - after just a slight apprehension as the officer 'took a look at us' - properly on our way at last in the morning sunlight and all joining in the singing the whole way down through Letterkenny and Ramelton and Milford to the shores of Mulroy Bay and the country I had known so well myself in childhood.

The singing would be interrupted, perhaps, while we looked across the water at the wood of Cratlagh where Lord Leitrim met his end, and Jim (whose grandfather had been a friend of Mickey Rua McIlwee and used to net trout with him off the Doaghbeg shore) would point out the place where Mickey Rua and Neil Sheils had beached the borrowed boat and taken to the hills near the place called the Hawk's Nest on their way back to their homes in Fanad. Our own destination, of course, was on the other side of the peninsula. Our road took us to the Swilly at Portsalon, still at that time dominated by the great Ascendancy hotel beside the sands of Ballymastocker Bay, then to an obligatory halt to call on Jim's brother Ignatius and his numerous family at Carrowblagh. Then a certain turn in the narrow untarred road would give us a view between the fuschia hedges of Knockdonnelly and the Big Cliff and the houses of Doaghbeg, our own still hidden by the lift of a field; but ritually, while our children feasted their eyes on the longed-for scene, Jim would say - 'I think I see a wee - ' -some Gaelic word meaning a wisp of chimney-smoke - and sure enough Johnny Kelly would have the turf fire well lit and the big kettle over it for our arrival, and the cottage would be all fresh whitewash and the smell of new paint.

That little red-roofed house tucked close to the roadside became one of the fixed points in our small universe. The drumming of a heavy shower on the metal roof could drown conversation and almost frighten the wee ones - though young Jim remembers feeling cosy and protected in the kitchen with its thick rubble walls and the open fire which hissed now and again when a little of the pounding rain found its way down the wide squat chimney. It was not unknown for the blue turf-smoke to blow back down that wide chimney, depending on 'the art of wind' in the Donegal phrase. In years when Johnny Kelly, who owned the house and land, stored fodder or seed potatoes in the little barn below the house the wooden ceiling between us and the rafters could become a highroad at midnight for mice and rats who all put on - or so Jim insisted - sets of hobnailed boots for the journey.

We grew very fond of the thick-walled, cosy little house where we spent our summers, despite all the discomforts and limitations. Electricity and local water- schemes were well in the future, though Friel's local shop was ahead of its time with light provided by a wind-generator. The smallest outhouse at Sheila's cottage enclosed a chemical closet emblazoned with Victorian-looking script: ' As Used at Sandringham' in large letters. and in much smaller ones: 'in the Cottages of the Estate'. Water supply was a constant preoccupation even after Johnny fashioned an extra bit of guttering to preserve some of the plentiful rain-supply for my washing chores. 'Sheila's well' just across the road dried out at the first sign of seasonal weather, which meant a trip of a couple of hundred yards to 'Punty's well' with its better spring and purer water. It was in the glorious summers, when 'Punty's' became pebbles and clay, that we had the sweetest water of all; but it was precious indeed, drawn by Jim a full mile away at a spot above a foreshore of Lough Swilly, and carried with infinite care - two buckets balancd against a wooden frame - up the fields and little roadways to our cottage. There had to be resting-places, of course, but it was a matter of pride to choose these where there would be no shoogle and splash, and to bring the buckets through the doorway with the water still lipping the rims.

It is curious to look back on that life, where even the coming of the 'Tilley' lamp with its clear white light to replace the old wick-and-oil type was a significant event for our family of voracious readers. The national electricity scheme finally reached the 'bottom of Fanad' towards the end of our twenty-year use of the cottage, but the miniature electric cooker we bought only supplemented the work I did on the open turf fire with its sooty hooks and chains. How did I ever manage? There was even a year when Jim's brother Father John - Monsignor John by that time - ate every day with us during his fortnight's stay at the 'New House', and I managed to produce 3 courses at a regular time; not I'm afraid our usual way of working. But the food was good and plentiful enough and varied occasionally by the gift of a chicken which would arrive squawking in a string bag. (Plucking and cleaning it was no problem, but I had to call in help for the slaughtering.) And then sometimes Jim, and the boys as they grew older, would have luck in their fishing from the tidal rocks and we would have a feast of the rather coarse-fleshed lythe or the tastier glassan or mackerel.

I spent a good deal of time making the big soda-bread scones which the children so much preferred to the square loaves from the Milford Bakery, and which were baked in a pot-oven suspended over the turf-fire. The measures of flour and baking-soda and cream of tartar and sour milk were the ones my mother had taught me, and all would go well if Jim's Aunt Biddy did not make her daily visit to us before I had the dough safely packed into the pot-oven. Biddy John Roe in her seventies was the aunt or grand-aunt of practically everybody in the two or three neighbouring houses, and had little to do but pay calls and make sure that family standards were being kept up. She was full of strong ideas and strong certainties, and one of them was about how a scone should be baked. 'Ah, it wants kneading, it wants kneading,' she would say, getting between me and the table and suiting the action to the word. And I would try to tell myself inwardly that it was all kindly meant, and that she wasn't to know how much my children preferred the final result 'with holes in it' as one of them said, to the slabby and solid object which was going to come out of the oven this time.

One memory leads to another - years later, when Biddy was long dead, and my son John was sitting reading a book of Radio Eireann talks on 19th Century Ireland while I saw to a scone. He began to laugh, and then to read out a scholarly paragraph which described how the woman-of-the-house in those olden times would ensure even baking by stacking small pieces of glowing peat on the oven lid with the fire- tongs. Which was precisely what I, Principal Teacher of Art in St Margaret's Junior Secondary, Airdrie, was doing at that particular moment in the early 1960s; and I have a photograph to prove it.

'But what do you do all day in a place like that?' I can still hear them say, people whose idea of a summer break was to take the weans to Girvan or Butlins or - a generation on - to Benidorm. I suppose it depended on your point of view. One of John's seminary friends talked about 'being stuck for weeks in this place in the back of beyond called Rathmullan'. For us Rathmullan, a historic little town south of Fanad on Lough Swilly, was a once- or twice-a-summer excursion to visit Susan or Mamma or whoever was occupying the holiday house they rented there, and to join the crowds milling on the beach or the pier for the annual Regatta, interesting in its own way but not altogether a welcome change from the peace and quiet of Doaghbeg.

But if Doaghbeg was quiet it was anything but lonely, since for Jim it was 'home' and for the rest of us therefore a community where we belonged. Some of our time was taken up by visits of duty to this relation or that, by hired car if they were my own people on the Far Side. But it also meant a way of life where folk were dropping in morning, noon, and evening and our youngsters becoming accustomed to a world where doors were seldom closed much less locked. ( 'I came as far as Richardsons,' Aunt Biddy would say, 'but I saw your door shut and turned back' - on a day when Jim and the children were at the shore, and maybe I was trying to get on with a bit of baking!) Nobody seemed too busy to accept small interruptions with Scottish accents, though on our side we had to mark some boundaries about talking on family matters and knowing not to overstay. We didn't want too many saying, as one lady did, ' God love him, but it's great how wee Jim pulls in his chair with the rest when he sees there's a bite of dinner going!'

Another Scots family spent their holidays in Doaghbeg as we did, and we saw quite a lot of each other. Jimmy Campbell had been a contemporary of mine at Jordanhill Training College, and was headteacher of a primary school in Tranent. He and his wife had local ancestry like ourselves (Campbell is a common Donegal name) and their six children were much of an age with our four. They generally got on well together, though there was some difference in attitudes. ' I wish Gordon Campbell wouldn't call them "the natives",' our Tom would say, and perhaps the Campbell children, with their East-coast accents and the kilts the boys wore to Sunday Mass at Ballynacrick, were more consciously outsiders than ours were. Their father was an energetic and resourceful man who certainly confounded local opinion by spending his summers building his own holiday home to an unheard-of design. 'He'll never look out of his front door,' said the local sage, but his sons and he finished the house by their own labour, and it is still there and used by members of the family. Indeed one of the daughters, Patricia - always called 'Paddy' - remained a constant visitor to Fanad down the years and became much more of an insider than most of us 'Scotchies'. She has kept in touch with me too and been a faithful friend, and I love to be visited by her and her husband Hugh.

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