Walled gardens : scenes from an Anglo-Irish childhood

Goff, Annabel1994

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Summary

Walled Gardens is a journey both into a time and a place - the South of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The author describes a childhood outside the main currents of the 20th Century; her parents still went fox-hunting and horse racing, and relied on readily available servants from a vast and inexpensive work-pool. At the same time they had no central heating, no television, and the roof leaked. Like many other Anglo-Irish families they attempted outlandish and impractical schemes to maintain deteriorating driveways and crumbling houses. Her father was a witty baronet born into a generation down on its luck; the author observes how his marriage to her beautiful mother gradually falls apart. This is an affectionate yet unsentimental memoir of a transitional generation, one born too late to benefit from the last years of the Ascendancy, but to early to integrate into the mainstream of contemporary Irish life.