As the author moves on with her dreams of a career in nursing on hold, the scene shifts from London's East End across the river to the leafy suburbs of south-east London, then onwards and upwards to the Mecca of the medical profession in the golden triangle that was Harley St, Wimpole St and Devonshire Place. Working as a nanny cum housekeeper for two ambitious doctors and living en famille she takes on the responsibility of their six anarchic, unruly, bickering, lovable children. She charts their family life through the ups and downs of thirteen eventful years with humour and perspicuity as...

This is the story of Catherine Qualter born in 1859 in the townland of Gortcloonmore, two miles down a bog road in Claregalway that was so out of the way that it was said to be 'behind God's back'. The Qualter family home was one of eleven limewashed cottages clustered together in the little Gortcloonmore colony on the Lambert Estate which were registered in 1851 in the Griffith Valuation Household Survey, carried out to determine liability to pay the Poor rate (for the support of the poor and destitute within each Poor Law Union). Following the Famine years want and poverty continued to be a...