Monica Connell - Gathering Carrageen

My sister and I are standing at the waters edge, the frayed residue of waves foaming around our bare feet. Behind us dry sand is blowing horizontally across the beach; in front of us the full force of the Atlantic wind. We are leaning into it to stand upright. Our windcheater hoods are flapping, our black hair streaking across our faces, salty and wet. We are shouting to each other and laughing, but our words are drowned by the crashing of the breakers over the rocks and the roar of the wind.

When I was a child growing up in Belfast we often spent the summer holidays in Donegal. Usually we stayed in a traditional cottage that was rented long-term by some friends of my parents. It was in a small village of six houses, all thatched roofed except ours, which was slated, all clustered round the communal hand-pump, where in the mornings groups of women chatted as they filled their buckets and jerry cans. There was no running water or electricity in the village. For lighting we used paraffin lamps and candles. My mother cooked on a butane stove in the corner of the living room. There was no bathroom; we washed in basins filled from buckets, and there was a chemical toilet in the stone byre opposite the house, where the turf was stored, and various tools and sacks and cans of sheep dip and paint, which must have belonged to the owner.

Like most traditional Irish cottages this one had three rooms. The middle one was the living room with its stable door to the outside and its fireplace at one end with the old and blackened cast iron potato-pot suspended on a chain above it, and the turf basket, and the shelf above with its pebbles and shells and pieces of driftwood that our friends had collected on the beach. Behind the hearth, where it was warmed by the fire, was a bedroom where my sister and I slept on two divans. Our parents room was through a low door at the opposite end of the living room.

I remember days and days of rain; low cloud, drizzle, downpours that lasted all through one day and into the next. My sister and I put on windcheaters and took carrots and potatoes to the grey pony in the field behind the house, feeling her soft muzzle brushing our palms and breathing her damp pony smell. We played with the sheepdog puppy, Shep, and took her for walks on a length of string. And whatever the weather we went down to the beach: gathering shells, playing in the sand dunes, and (if our mother was there) swimming. Sometimes, after a swim, wed run all the way home in our towels and stand shivering by the fire as our mother made us hot chocolate or tomato soup out of a tin.

My father usually walked, all day. In the morning he made himself sandwiches (cheese and pickle, ham), which he packed in his knapsack with a flask of tea and a map, and set out in his walking boots and anorak, striding over the hills. He walked for miles, sometimes along the cliffs to a place Id only been to by car, a deserted fishing village at the end of a long un-tarred track: three stone houses, ruins, a rocky harbour lashed by the waves. No one lived there now, but there were some fishing boats upturned at the top of the pier and you could see the coloured floats of lobster pots bobbing about in the waves. I imagined the life they must have lived there, the loneliness, the danger when the boats put out to sea, and still now, as an adult, I picture my father sitting on the sheep-cropped grass on the cliff eating his sandwiches, silent, inconsequential amidst the shrieks of the seabirds, and the wind and the interminable breakers pounding the shore.