MemoirIt's not often you open a book and discover it's by a cousin you never knew you had and who writes of a place you know to your bones, yet makes it a new-found land.
The early section of Gaps of Brightness, Patricia Boylan's memoir of life in Dungannon and its environs in the first quarter of the 20th century opens a casement - for window is too modern a word for this vanished society - into the rural world of Old Tyrone.
This is the world I grew up in 30 years later; utterly unchanged in its rurality and its mores, yet entirely different in its modes. Ours was as rich in natural beauty, but poverty-stricken in terms of sociability and community living compared to Boylan's.
She describes a post-Edwardian age imbued with style and elegance, a world my grandparents shared and which we, as children, glimpsed as distinct and lost. Boylan's father was a Justice of the Peace, as was my grandfather, and she shared the same music teacher as my father.
In her world, people went punting, had swimming and diving contests, shopped at wonderful markets, put on plays and verse readings.
We had none of this. Perhaps the second World War brought it all to an end. The world I inhabited has already vanished like dew on the grass and Boylan's book shows that each generation loses the dispensation they grew up in.
I wish I had been able to read this book before I wrote mine. So many questions answered. Did the boats that plied the lough for eels have sails or simply oars before the arrival of the engine? Sails. How was the famous sticky toffee "yalla man" that pulled your teeth out at Lammas actually made? Here is the recipe. The method of making that staple of Ulster diets, wheaten bread, is slipped into the text as part of a glowing account of diurnal life. How did the husband of the beautiful but eccentric Lizzie Treanor (who was a cousin of my father and who lived down the road) die? He fell off a roof; she was the aunt of the author.
Every day on the way to King's Island, near where Boylan grew up, my mother, white-knuckled with fear, drove over the impossibly high bridge spanning a disused canal, which I thought had not been used for more than a century.
For little Miss Boylan a short time before, it was a focus of activity where "strong horses strained and heaved towing the barges . . . on to the canal on their journey towards Lough Neagh".
She wonders if the kitchen tables of Ardboe still have the snowy whiteness and satin touch achieved by scrubbing with silver sand from the lough shore. No. The tables in my day were already Formica-topped.
Her remembrances of Dublin, of her apprenticeship as an aspiring actress at the Abbey Theatre and of Lennox Robinson convey better than many more profound memoirs the atmosphere of the times. She can be quite sharp and she missed little, for all the innocence that shines out of the pages. Lady Gregory's diagnosis of Lennox Robinson's "morbidity", for example, is reinterpreted by her as "his need for a quick drink".
For years, her pristine voice was much appreciated as a reader on Austin Clarke's weekly poetry programme on Radio Éireann and a senior administrator at RTÉ fell in love first with the voice and then with its owner. After their marriage in 1941, they rented half of a large Georgian house in Dundrum with a half-acre garden, a fruit and vegetable garden, a hen-house and a potting-shed for £120 a year. Another vanished virtuous world.
There is an affectionate remembrance of Brendan Behan, a less fond one of Cyril Cusack, and a glimpse of T.S. Eliot.
All in all, this is a charming, unpretentious series of sketches, full of authentic detail, mimetic dialogue and affectionate observation spanning a lifetime and a century.
Polly Devlin is a writer and broadcaster. Her first book, All of Us There, is being republished as a Modern Classic by Virago this year
Gaps of Brightness By Patricia Boylan A. & A. Farmar, 185pp. €12.99