An Irish childhood - Peter Somerville-Large

Peter Somerville-Large grew up with his brother Phil in a nursery world at the top of a smart house in Dublin from where they could watch Fitzwilliam Place far below, with the horse-drawn delivery vans, the animals being driven to market, and their father's patients arriving to visit the consulting rooms on the ground floor.

The family had houses in the country too, with livestock and vegetable gardens, and a bevy of eccentric relations, among them Edith Somerville (of Somerville and Ross fame). When Peter was five, his father bought an island - twenty bare rocky acres on the north shore of the Kenmare River in County Kerry - which he saw as paradise. There were extraordinary parties, sailing trips, fishing expeditions.

An Irish Childhood, beautifully written, takes the reader back to the sensations and excitements of childhood, and paints the most vivid picture of a vanished world - at once so recent, yet so far away.