John Banvilles Dublin, a city lost and found

I set out for the glades of nostalgia happily enough, with my trusty axe over my shoulder and whistling as insouciantly as Doc or Dopey, not realising I was to prove to be more thelatter than the former.

One of the most vivid memories I retain from childhood is of travelling by early morning train from Wexford, the town where I was born, to the wintry glitz and glamour of Dublin on the eighth of December each year from the age of four or five right up to the brink of adolescence. My birthday fell, and still falls, for that matter, though with an increasingly heavy thud, on 8December, and in those far-off days that date was a public holiday in Catholic Ireland, being the Feast of the Immaculate Conception yes, I know, I know and the day when country folk flocked to the capital to do their Christmas shopping.

The Eighth, as it was to us provincials, or Culchie Day, as Dubliners grimly dubbed it (culchies, in the disdainful vernacular of the capital, were and are the invaders from without the Pale), was for me a momentous occasion, looked forward to with brimming anticipation and mourned with hot tears when it was over: so of course it gave me just the place to start what has turned out to be my partial Dublin memoir.

I wrote an extended first chapter describing the train journey that beganin the pre-dawn darkness, the arrival atmid-morning in a drizzly but, to my eyes, scintillatingly exciting city, the birthday party at my Aunt Nans flat, the shopping trip to Clerys department store … This, I thought, will be childs play.

After that happy start, however, things got difficult. As everyone knows, for they have been told it often enough, the problem about writing about the writing life is that it is so dreary and uneventful all the hot stuff happens in the head: loves, wars, excursions and alarums, while the poor drudge sits hunched at his desk with nothing to indicate the inner turmoils save the tensed knuckles of his writing hand, stretched and sallow as the elbows of a plucked chicken.

The plain fact was, my self and my life were simply not interesting enough to me to sustain the writing of a memoir. I would have to bring in a mentor, a guide, an old hand who knew Dublin far better than I did, and whose memory was unclouded and clear while mine was clogged by decades spent devising plausible fictions. So I called on a friend I willcall Cicero to be my cicerone. Cicero is that rarest of beings, a truly cultured business entrepreneur, property developer and musical impresario. He is also a Dubliner to thebone, and to the heart.

He took me to places I had never known existed, such as the Blessington Street Basin or Sump, as it was unflatteringly called in Ciceros youth which was the citys first reservoir, and now is what the tourist board would describe as a hidden jewel in the heart of the metropolis. But it really is jewel-like, an amethyst set down amid a warren of streets lined with artisan dwellings that are now much sought after by the post-crash moneyed gentry and why not? Cicero was amazed by the transformation that has been wrought. In my day, he said, you wouldnt venture lightly after dark into this neck of the urban woods and look at it now!

Together we visited the Rotunda could any institution be more aptly named? the oldest functioning maternity hospital in the world, founded in the 18th century by a good man to treat the poor of the city. We called into the Botanic Gardens, planned and planted by one of the Rotundas surgeons. We viewed the stones of the original Abbey theatre, scattered prettily about the garden of ahouse on the Vico Road, high on a hillside overlooking Killiney Bay, Dublins answer to the Amalfi coast. We took a perilous tour of No 3 Henrietta Street, now internally a wreck (though it has recently been bought, surely with an eye to renovation), which mustin its day have been one of the handsomest and most sweetly proportioned Georgian houses in theseislands.

We took the shortest canal trip ever on Richie Saunderss renovated Liffey ferry, the last of its kind. From here, said Richie, as we nosed under the exquisite biased brickwork of the first of the Grand Canals bridges, we couldtravel on over to the Shannon! And we ended our months-long odyssey in the furry sunlight of a late-summer evening, drinking a parting glass together in Mulligans of Poolbeg Street, a fine pub and a former stamping ground for both of us.

In between the laps of our tour, I wrote of my early days living with that same Aunt Nan in the dilapidated grandeur of her flat in Upper Mount Street, with Yeatss daughter Anne for aneighbour, and the poet Patrick Kavanagh a frequenter of the front steps, a vantage from which he could scowl across at the offices of the Dolmen Press, Dublins leading publishers of poets, though not of Kavanagh. I recalled lost relatives, uncherished in their time and therefore a source of belated, worthless grief, and first loves, unrequited and now sweetly recollected.

I glanced back too at what I had left behind, at the small-town world of my inexpectant father and my mother whoyearned herself for Dublin as Chekhovs Irina yearned for Moscow. To me, I wrote of my parents, they seemed, until their final years, to be of an indeterminate age, creatures essentially of a different species, permanent and unchanging, simply there. Yet I noted too how, for all that they are gone, something essential of them remains, in my children. It is in the forms of the living that the dead most convincingly haunt us.

For all the crestfallen beauty of its buildings, Dublin was, of course, its people. I sketched a portrait of the Delahaye family, well-to-do Catholics residing their sort always resided in fashionable Fitzwilliam Square, and whose delightful daughter Stephanie Icourted, in vain, among the autumnal shadows of the Iveagh Gardens, and in the ersatz glamour, though it seemed not at all ersatz to us, of the Grafton Street Cinemas first-floor tea rooms. Iwrote of Baggotonia, Dublins answer to Fitzrovia and the Left Bank, where Brendan Behan reeled and Flann OBrien tottered, and too muchdrink was drunk, and too manymasterpieces were talked away on thesmoke-filled air of literary pubs. Iwrote of the sad young prostitutes who haunted the night streets, of the actor Michel Mac Liammir and the theatre manager Hilton Edwards, a homosexual couplebefore their time. Irecalled Irecalledeverything everything, thatis, that I could remember.

But is the Dublin I portrayed the same Dublin that I lodged in, all those years ago? And am I the same I that Iwas then? And when, oh when, does the past become the Past?

Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir by John Banville, with photographs by Paul Joyce, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on 20 October. To order a copy for 20.49 (RRP 24.95), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of 1.99.