Lost in Dublin

I guess I am a diasporan. In 1931 my father left Dunmore East at the age of 14 and more or less didn't come back: like Pat the Salt he ran away to sea; although The Da aka "Sir" didn't ship before the mast, but rather, in time, got to drive very big naval ships in quite exotic [and mundane] places. All his kids were born in England - Dover, because my mother was born there and went home to deliver the sprogs. But all my paternal rellies were in Ireland and, as kids, we returned every year to visit a diminishing store of agéd female relatives - Rosslare - Wexford - Tipperary - Wicklow - and home to wherever home was that year in England.

The year I turned 12 years old, we rang the changes on this round because my folks had business with the family lawyer in Dublin. It was also, coincidentally, the year we came with a 14ft touring caravan to save on hotels. The lawyer occupied fantastically dusty and decrepit chambers round the back of TCD - since demolished for the extension of the Mont Clare Hotel. Lest we die of boredom or from inhaling spores from long dead protestant dust, we three kids were deposited in the snug of Rice's Bar at the top of Grafton Street with minerals and bags of crisps. A peculiar choice? because Rice's, at least when I was a student a few years later, was The Dublin Gay Bar. But then again the whole othering anxiety balloon about The Gays (let alone The Zombies and The Kidnappers) hadn't gone up. So here we are in Rice's [◎pink blob] on the NW corner of Stephen's Green S; the parents are at the solicitor [▶blue arrow] on the NW corner of Merrion Square M. The car & caravan are parked extravagantly occupying several parking bays somewhere on Merrion Square.

As a Plan: so far, so good. But when I'd guzzled my mineral and the crisps were finished and I'd had enough being teased by my sibs, I announced that I was going to hang out in the caravan and stomped out of the pub. A while later, my parents returned to collect their family and head off towards the ferry port. Consternation! Contingency plan to leave one parent in Dublin to liaise with the Gardai and the Bureau of Missing Persons; while the other parent returned to England as scheduled with the rump of the family.

Meanwhile, I'd made two circuits of Stephen's green [we'd parked beside a large park with trees, here was a large park with trees] and found no caravan. I then started cutting through the Green to sneak up on the ephemeral caravan and catch it before it disappeared again. Eventually, I cut my losses and returned to Rice's to endure more [parched] abuse from my brother and sister. Let me tell you, the Prodigal son was in the ha'penny place compared to what I experienced in a torrent of relief-plus-annoyance. So it all ended happily ever after, as we all caught the ferry together that night. The mobile-phone generation cannot imagine the sketchiness of communication protocols in the 1960s.

We never toured in the caravan again and it was parked up on blocks in the field next to our house in Essex. I adopted it a tuthree years later as my atelier: banging out rubbish poetry on an old Olivetti portable typewriter.

A few years later, I was old enough to vote and old enough to leave home so I left Essex and turned up to try studenting in Trinity College Dublin. I was no longer answerable to my parents who were 400km and an Irish Sea away; so I could get lost in Dublin without causing an international incident.
I was still trying to locate people / things round the periphery of Stephen's Green though.