Walled Gardens: Scenes from an Anglo-Irish Childhood - Softcover

Annabel Goff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1906011028 ISBN 13: 9781906011024

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd, 2008

Synopsis

"Walled Gardens" is a brilliant portrait of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, struggling through the post-war depression aided by drink, horse-racing and religion, and their own idiosyncratic adaptations to modern life. Seen from the troubled perspective of the daughter of an aristocratic family in decline, we watch the disintegration of a marriage in elegant but emotionally chilled surroundings, and the struggle to keep up appearances, and a collapsing roof, in front of the neighbours. By turns sad, absured and funny, the story is ultimately liberating as failure leads to freedom.

About this title

Review:

A beautifully written account of a way of life now gone forever. -- Louise Guinness, Image

Beautifully written...A Unique character and flavour, which is extraordinarily well conveyed. -- William Trevor, The Irish Times

Her descriptions of places and people are evocative, sometimes moving, and sometimes very funny. -- Isabel Colgate, The Washington Post

Her narrative has a quality of brilliant social anthropology... she writes with delicacy of touch and beauty of style. -- John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph

Vividly entertaining...written with a quality of mercy added to the acute perceptions of a child. -- Molly Keane, The Spectator

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The bunch of carnations which I buy in New York at the Korean market on my corner brings with it a memory of the warm damp air of the greenhouses - the glass, grimy and a little green around the edges, the grapes pilfered off the vine (to my mother’s despair, since we would pick them randomly from any available bunch like small destructive apes); peaches eaten off the tree and the stones disposed of in the dirt below (a shallow dent made with the heel, the return pendulum movement of the toe covering the pit with earth); the lily pond with the frogs and the giant grandfather goldfish, an unhealthy, old-aged, pale pink; my father, on the roof, painting, watching Julia and me sharing a looted chocolate bar, unaware of his amused presence above. The old grey gardening trousers, held up with a dilapidated, old school tie, and the open collarless shirt carried the evocative small of tomato plants into the house with him at the end of the day.

The smell of tomato plants and carnations suited my father; although they were strong and distinctive, they were not sweet. My father had an acute sense of smell, and we were all - the children certainly, my mother perhaps less so - more than slightly proud of the time when he threw a vase of auratum lilies out of the library window. Their scent suggests something overblown, decadent. They are the lilies I imagine Shakespeare had in mind as ‘festering’. To my father they seemed excessive, and I know that his dislike of the colour red and his refusal to allow any of us to wear it came from the same but unnamed source.

His distaste for excess was reflected in his appearance. None of his family was tall and, though strong and physically fit, he had a small frame. I never saw him a pound overweight. Nor, I think, did I ever see him take a snack between meals or eat anything if he weren’t hungry. It took years after I had left Ireland to overcome the illogical belief that eating dessert is slightly unmasculine, and I am still not able to listen to a man discuss his weight or diet without some loss of respect.

My father’s face was formed by his bone structure and softened by his wit. It had no spare flesh, no additional colour. I don’t even know what colour his hair had originally been - by the time I remember him it was somewhat faded and thinning and a little grey. Even his name had been pared down. He had been christened Ernest, but all his life he had been known by his nickname, Sammy.

Children are supposed to wish their parents conventional, to conform to a standard which renders them invisible to the next generation. Since this was, in our case, clearly not possible, we aimed at the next-best thing: an acceptable stereotype. Once my father was established as a bona fide eccentric we would all be on safer ground, so we delighted in his habit of always using a smaller than normal fork and were proud of his allergy to fish.

About this edition

• Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1906011028
• ISBN 13: 9781906011024
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256