Walled Gardens: Scenes from an Irish childhood

Walled Gardens is a journey both in time and place - to the south of Ireland in the 1940s and 50s. An Anglo-Irish household, too late to benefit from the last years of the Ascendancy, yet too early to integrate into the mainstream of Irish life, clings to a charmed but ruinous way of life. A deteriorating house, bereft of central heating and dotted with pails to catch rain from the leaking roof, deteriorates in the hands of inexperienced servants drawn from the local cottages or impoverished small farms. Outlandish and impractical schemes to make money, to maintain a life of fox-hunting and horse-racing, fail as surely as a marriage. Annabel Davis-Goff's account of her family and childhood is evocative, moving and sometimes very funny.