Cowslips and Chainies: A Memoir of Dublin in the 1930s

✍ Scribed by Crowley, Elaine

• Book ID: 109595702
• Publisher: The Lilliput Press
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 162 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781874675808

✦ Synopsis

Cowslips and Chainies is a poignant memoir of childhood in 1930s and early '40s Dublin. Best-selling novelist Elaine Crowley's account of tenement life is by turns hilarious and intensely sad. Her beloved, consumptive father -- generous, handsome and fickle -- works at the local undertakers. Her proud, resourceful mother, struggling with privation, alternates slaps with kisses in a turbulent relationship with young Nella. Through the eyes of a natural storyteller, we enjoy scenes from a receding past vividly enacted: the teeming life of the Iveagh Market; the street-games and domestic strife; the stratagems for survival among pawnbrokers and money-lenders. We share in Crowley's wide-eyed witness of a pre-school plot to murder the neighbour's toddler, the excitement of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, the trauma of leaving the Liberties for a Corporation house on the city fringe, attempts at sex education thwarted by nuns, her first job in the sewing factory at the age...