"Peter Somerville-Large grew up with his brother Phil in a 1930s nursery world at the top of a smart Georgian house in Dublin. From here they would watch Fitzwilliam Place far below, with its traffic of animals being driven to market, the comings and goings of horse-drawn delivery vans and their father's patients arriving to visit the consulting rooms on the ground floor." "The family had houses in the country too, complete 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 remarkably energetic father bought an island - twenty bare rocky acres on the north shore of the Kenmare River in County Kerry - his idea of paradise. There were extraordinary parties, sailing trips, fishing expeditions. Gradually, as the century progressed, the parties grew fewer and the grand houses fell into disrepair." "This memoir 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."--BOOK JACKET.