We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It
A Memoir of My Irish Boyhood
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
“You don’t have to be Irish to cherish this literary gift—just being human and curious and from a family will suffice.” —Malachy McCourt, New York Times bestselling author of A Monk Swimming
In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s.
Tom Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, muddy, and back-breaking.
It was a time before rural electrification, the telephone, and indoor plumbing; a time when the main modes of travel were bicycle and animal cart; a time when small farmers struggled to survive and turkey eggs were hatched in the kitchen cupboard; a time when the Church exerted enormous control over Ireland.
We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It recounts Tom’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life’s adversities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Phelan (In the Season of the Daisies) stitches together a series of tender and earnest anecdotes of coming-of-age in the rural Irish midlands of the 1940s. Growing up on a farm, Phelan raised pigs, helped his father with the horses ("while Dad cleaned the stable and scattered soft barley straw, the children walked the horses around the farmyard"), and drove cattle to a nearby livestock fair, where he learned the art of negotiating (when one buyer made "a meaningless offer, Dad wouldn't even look at the man"). In elementary school, Phelan learned "to perform my first religious rite the sign of the cross." Phelan had expressed interest in becoming a priest, and before he headed off to college his neighbor warned him that if he became a priest "he'll be sorry in the long run." Nevertheless, Phelan was ordained to the priesthood in 1965, but left it 11 years later. Phelan's father provides the heartbeat of the memoir: he's a taciturn, no-nonsense man who loved and respected his family, worked hard, ("Every day, Dad organized the cleaning up after dinner, with himself doing the washing"). Phelan's vivid images of life on the farm and at school provide a rich and colorful snapshot of the times that shaped him.
