Synopsis

This sparkling memoir gives a personal view of Irish rural life from the Economic War of the 1930s to the farming boom and recession of the 1970s. It describes the upbringing of a Protestant only child on a farm in north Tipperary-an idyll interrupted by two years at school in Dublin during the 1940s. Taking over the farm on her father's death, working the land and animals the author recounts with great humour, acuity and poignancy her dealings, from the age of seventeen, at fairs throughout the country-Limerick, Kilrush, Cahirmee, Ballinasloe, Spancilhill -a lone woman in a man's world. With rare brio and eye for character, incident and idiosyncrasy, Quarton lovingly documents a world of country people, eccentric relatives, home cures and recipes, and unaffected living. Breakfast the Night Before is both entertaining and enduring.

'It makes riveting reading and I was desperately disappointed when I reached the final page. Marjorie Quarton is a natural storyteller'-Grania Willis, The Irish Field.

'I defy anyone to dip into Breakfast the Night Before and put it down without reading to the end. This special blend of humour crosses the divides of age, sex, religion and social standing.'-The Irish Times.

"Mrs Quarton writes with wit. Her experiences are related in a lovely, dry style, which does not conceal her deep love for horses and understanding of that strange animal which is the human being. Breakfast the Night Before is a passport to another world that anyone can enjoy, and I recommend it highly. -- Morgan Llwelyn, author of Lion of Ireland and The Horse Goddess.

Excerpt

Life wasn’t all buying and selling horses in my early farming days. I of course had to grow crops. The war years had seen a boom, when you could throw any kind of wheat into a bag and it would end up as flour – optimistically called ‘white’.

We had ploughed out a lot of extra land, bought an extra horse and paid extra labour in order to produce more wheat. Modern strains of wheat ripen early; hay-time and harvest overlap. When I was growing wheat it ripened in mid September or, if the weather was unkind, even later. Times got very hard in the early fifties, when I was running the farm for my father and working on it along with three workmen. I wasn’t allowed to give orders, so I had to indicate to Paddy, Edmund and John what I wanted without telling them to do it.

In April 1958, my father died, after a desperate illness, lasting about three months. My mother was asthmatic and I tried my hand at nursing. My father wouldn’t hear of hospital, although he grumbled about my methods. ‘You’re not dosing a bullock,’ he would say. Neither would he allow anyone else to look after him. My mother couldn’t possibly heave a big heavy man about. I could and did. For the last fortnight, I don’t think I left the house once.

The summer which followed my father’s death was one of the worst on record. The farm was under-stocked, over-staffed and had long ceased to be a paying enterprise. I had hastily ploughed out an extra ten acres and sown it with wheat in order to meet my commitments. It was ready in mid September, but most of the field was too wet to carry machinery. Many farmers lost all their wheat that year. We would have lost most of ours except for industry born of desperation. Edmund and I scythed the last and wettest two acres, and my mother helped to tie the sheaves. We dragged the sheaves by hand to higher ground, where we could take a trai