Dear Muiris,

IT is 50 years since we first met on that bus in Luton Airport. We were UCD students heading off to work for the summer in a pea factory in Suffolk. It was our first time out of Ireland and we were full of excitement thinking of the adventures ahead. Our first-year exams were done and dusted and the atmosphere of teenage freedom on that rattling bus was intoxicating. I have a vivid memory of that time — I even remember how much the flight (pre-Ryanair) cost: £4 one-way!

We rented a house with four other guys in the town of Lowestoft (famous for being the most easterly place in the UK). We worked eight-hour shifts, six days a week, feeding the vines into chutes where the peas were washed, sorted and then canned. The sun blazed and we soon had the most fantastic tans. But I, being of fair disposition, got sunstroke and ended up in bed for three days. On clocking off on a Saturday, we made our way to the seaside resort of Great Yarmouth where we had fish and chips and attended the local ballroom, always on the lookout for some pleasant female company. I recall you buying an expensive angel-blue linen jacket that made you stand out in a crowd. You were very good at chatting up the ladies!

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had been released that year, so we all bought it with our pea-gotten gains. The Beatles were magic to my ears (although you preferred the grungier Rolling Stones).

That was the summer of ’67, a wonderful rite of passage. But all good times have to end. The two of us splurged on a short holiday in Paris and returned to further arts studies at UCD. You never finished second year, as you met a Canadian girl in Rice’s pub in St Stephen’s Green and returned with her to Montreal (“just for a short while”). You returned home months later and applied for a visa. You were gone for good before I was due to sit my next exam. You were a popular guy, a great reader and brilliant raconteur. In April ’68, your many friends gathered in Rice’s to bid you farewell and wish you luck in Montreal (my present to you was a French dictionary).

We heard you married, and later relocated to Vancouver. I gradually lost track of you after your mother died, but recently heard you had been ill. Neither of us had been assiduous letter-writers. If email had been around then, perhaps it would have been easier to keep in touch. But, Muiris, we are both old men now; so it’s important to keep alive the great memories of our youth. And that summer in Lowestoft was truly the greatest time. John O’Byrne, Harold’s Cross, Dublin 6W