Thirty-five Acres, A Spade And A Fork

About the Book

I am a Londoner, but I married an Irish orphan brought up by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity in Stillorgan, which is now just a suburb of Dublin.

When he was fourteen, they considered their obligation finished and sent him to work in Offley on a farm owned by Mrs White. She was a good Roman Catholic and needed transporting to St Joseph’s monastery in Tipperary every Sunday. The monks there realised that a lad of fourteen still needed a father figure. The monk in charge of the dairy took him under his wing. This was the leading dairy in Southern Ireland at the time and where the seeds were sown for my husband’s dream to have his own farm.

The book is about our struggle to start farming in the fifties with no capital, which would be impossible in the twenty-first century and was difficult even then.

About the Author

The income-tax people classed me as ‘unearned income’. Anybody who reads this book will think this rather a joke. Our marriage was not one of love in the Hollywood sense, but in the biblical sense of the word, it grew gradually over the years. However, we both got what we wanted from the marriage. Sean, a helpmate to pursue his farming ambition, and I got from him eight children. My hobby was originally painting, but with my failing sight, I started to write on the word processor; eventually, I couldn’t see even that. Without Audrey Whelan’s help, I couldn’t have thought of publishing my story. I have dictated everything to her now, and she is invaluable to me.