Thrown on Life's Surge

This memoir is part of an Irish trilogy based on the experience and recollections of the author, a Dublin girl from Summerhill, a decaying north inner city area a short walk from the City Centre. Her first volume provides a glimpse of a Dublin childhood and family life in the Artisans Dwellings, Upper Buckingham Street in 1940's -1950's Dublin, and the second, in complete contrast, an account of running wild in the boglands of Galway during the long summer holidays. This volume covers...
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This memoir is part of an Irish trilogy based on the experience and recollections of the author, a Dublin girl from Summerhill, a decaying north inner city area a short walk from the City Centre. Her first volume provides a glimpse of a Dublin childhood and family life in the Artisans Dwellings, Upper Buckingham Street in 1940's -1950's Dublin, and the second, in complete contrast, an account of running wild in the boglands of Galway during the long summer holidays. This volume covers the period of a nurse training course at St. Anne's Skin and Cancer Hospital. There, age 17y, she learned to deal with the terminally ill on a daily basis in a setting that provided dignity, comfort, camaraderie and, more surprisingly, fun. The Nuns, her fellow probationers and the patients are all portrayed as people well remembered. The Nuns range from the 'She Devil' to the saintly and the probationers as culchie's to the core, united in their urge to escape bondage on the family farm. Stories of the patients are poignant, in particular those of Mikeen and Maggo. In contrast the humour of the deaths of Mrs. Von and the Widow Maker, and the hilarity of a Day at the Races is life affirming and funny.