House for Two Pounds

A richly recounted memoir of growing up in an Irish farming community in the 1940s

A love of Ireland and the Irish is what shines through this little memoir.

Growing up amongst the fields, woods and characters of a farming community near Cork, Kathleen Iggulden depicts a world that is both immediate and real, yet belongs to a now-distant past. Here is a pony and trap to church every Sunday, evenings full of fiddle, flute and song, and new shoes and clothes twice a year.

Kathleen's childhood in the 1930s involved two or three generations - her parents, her brother and sisters, as well as the daily lives of farmworkers and craftsmen, friends and relations. She beautifully chronicles rural celebrations and forgotten practicalities of country life - all painted with a sensitive touch and a freshness of observation. She saw her people as intensely polite, decent and innocent, with humour and music always ready. She saw them as poets, and poetry as the highest art.

Recounted with immense charm and wit, A House for Two Pounds is a wonderful, vivid account of a childhood on an Irish farm - and an enduring people, just on the cusp of change.