I WAS always very fond of heights, and afterwards it struck me that reading was only another form of height, and a more perilous one. It was a way of looking beyond your own back yard into the neighbours’. Our back yard had a high wall, and by early afternoon it made the whole kitchen dark, and when the evening was fine, I climbed the door of the outhouse and up the roof to the top of the wall. It was on a level with the respectable terrace behind ours, which had front gardens and a fine view, and I often sat there for hours on terms of relative equality with the policeman in the first house who dug close beside me and gave me ugly looks but could not think up a law to keep me from sitting on my own back wall. From this I could see Gardiner’s Hill falling headlong to the valley of the city, with its terraces of tall houses and its crest of dark trees. It was all lit up when our little house was already in darkness. In the mornings, the first thing I did when I got up was to mount a chair under the attic window and push up the window-frame to see the same hillside when it was still in shadow and its colours had the stiffness of early-morning light. I have a distinct recollection of climbing out the attic window and, after negotiating the peril of the raised window-frame, crawling up the roof to the ridge to enlarge my field of view, but Mother must have caught me at this, because I do not remember having done it often.
Then there was the quarry that fell sheer from the neighbourhood of the barrack to the Ballyhooley Road. It was a noisome place where people dumped their rubbish and gangs of wild kids had stoning matches after school and poor people from the lanes poked among the rubbish for spoil, but I ignored them and picked my way through the discarded bully-beef tins and climbed to some ledge of rock or hollow in the quarry face, and sat there happily, surveying the whole neighbourhood from Mayfield Chapel, which crowned the hillside on the edge of the open country, to the spire of Saint Luke’s Church below me, and below that again, in the distance was the River Lee with its funnels and masts, and the blue hills over it. Immediately beneath me was the Ballyhooley Road, winding up the hill from Saint Luke’s Cross, with its little houses and their tiny front gardens, and (on the side nearest me) the back yards where the women came to peg up their washing; and all the time the shadow moved with a chill you could feel, and the isolated spots of sunlight contracted and their colour deepened. I felt like some sort of wild bird, secure from everything and observing everything – the horse and cart coming up the road, the little girl with her skipping rope on the pavement, or the old man staggering by on his stick – all of them unconscious of the eagle eye that watched them.