Recently I’ve had a strong urge to go back to visit Highfield Grove. Maybe it’s just because technically I can’t because it’s over the 5km limit at the moment. But I’ve never really felt the urge before. I have been filled with memories of the house for months now. Dreaming about it a lot and now, writing about it.

A house that has been changed beyond belief or recognition. Its transformation appeared years ago in an Irish Times Property Supplement. And then after that it was on Air bnb and on Rent.it so I got to see the inside of the house. It’s not on line at the moment. I know that the people who owned it at that time lived between Dublin and the US so perhaps they are here permanently now.

I don’t know that if I did get the opportunity to go inside if I would be able to. Would seeing it as it is now, destroy my memories?

Let me describe what I recall.

It had a brown wooden hall door, both window boxes always with some flowers in bloom. There was a tiny square hallway straight off the street. About three foot square with lino on the floor. This led into a sitting room with a high ceiling and an open fire. Replaced in later years by a gas fire when the former got too much like hard work.

The house was always spotlessly clean and smelling of polish. Mam had lots of bits and pieces, ornaments and souvenirs from theirs and other people’s holidays. There was a glass china cabinet in one alcove to the side of the fireplace. In the other alcove there was a wooden unit that housed various pieces of silver and china and of course the drinks cabinet. The pieces of silver and brass were cleaned and polished every Saturday morning and they gleamed. The sitting room had a carpeted floor and a three-piece suite. I remember various wallpapers over the years but the one that stays in mind most was probably the oldest. A pattern with Chinese buildings, bridges, pergolas etc. Wonder what that was about!

Off the sitting room to the right were the two bedrooms. Growing up the front bedroom was Mam and Dads it was very small in hindsight, but to us it was the ‘good’ bedroom. That’s where you went if you were sick and needed Doctor Laffan to come to the house. I have memories of being unwell and lying in the bed while I waited to hear the sound of Mams high heels click clopping back from the shops with a copy of a Bunty or Judy comic for me.

Both my sisters had left home by the time I was fourteen so I don’t have a huge amount of memories of our time together in the back room. I have a few. I remember Vera and my cousin Lily putting on their make up at the mirror in the wardrobe before they headed out on a Saturday night. I remember when we went from a double bed and one single to the bunk beds. I remember my dolls sitting on the ledge over the fireplace in the bedroom. I remember that fire lighting but only very rarely.

When it was just me living at home, we swopped rooms and Mam and Dad went into the backroom. This was my bedroom for the next seven or so years. There had been the posters on the wall. Donny Osmond, David Casssidy and co. But then I progressed to Queen, Neil Young, Santana, Steely Dan to name but a few. I bought a record player on credit in Arnotts and a big event every now and then would be a trip to the record shop in Rathmines to buy a new album or LP as we called them.

My best friend spent almost every Saturday night of our teenage years with me after our night out at the Disco and we would squeeze into the single bed and chat until the small hours. This happened again the night before I got married as she was my Bridesmaid.

Years later when My Dad died, Mam moved back into the front room. I think she found it hard to sleep in the double bed on her own.

On another wall in the sitting room was a door to a little parlour, which had been the original kitchen. It had a dresser from which I remember sneaking lumps of marzipan off the block that had been bought for the Christmas cake every year. I’m sure Mam must have noticed but she never said anything.

There was a step down into a lean to makeshift sort of kitchen that My Dad had built with my Uncle John. It was a ‘House that Jack built’ kind of a house. For example the light switch in the front bedroom turned on the light in the back bedroom and vice versa.

I have a vivid memory of sitting on the kitchen step. My sister had a part time job and I remember her handing me a copy of a new comic she had bought me. It was called Twinkle. She bought it for me regularly after that.

I clearly remember my Dad washing himself at the kitchen sink and shaving at the mirror on the kitchen wall. And the smell of the Brylcream. We had no bathroom back then. Hard to believe now really.

A door from the kitchen led to a little yard. Again there was a window box full of flowers. And a whitewashed wall with a climbing pink rose tree. A door painted annually that led to an overgrown disused laneway that ran at the back of the terrace. At the back of the yard there was an outside toilet and to the right of this the coalhouse. The yard also housed a kennel for my dog Sindy, who lived until I was about fifteen.

So that was it really. It changed in later years just after I was married when an extension was built with a new kitchen and a bathroom to the rear but the rest remained the same.

The Census shows that in 1911, at the time when tram workers inhabited the houses, a family lived in number 10 with five children ranging in age from a baby to thirteen years of age. When I was growing up in the Gove there were families with up to twelve children. How did they manage with just two bedrooms, a tiny kitchen and an outside toilet?

But then everything I remember about the house changed. They built down and they built up. The photos that I saw were unbelievable. Underneath the original house they had built a kitchen, that seems to be accessed by a stone stairs. They went up into the attic for bedrooms as well. From the outside, the front of the house looks the same but is unrecognisable inside.

Perhaps if it ever comes up on Airbnb again I might book a night. Just to have a nosey. But then again maybe not. After all do I really want to see the uber slick designer pad? Probably best to remember the upside down light switches, my Mam sitting on the floor singing her head off while polishing the brass fire surround, the crazy Japanese wall paper and all the singsongs around the fire.