I am a Londoner, but I married an Irish orphan brought up by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity in Stillorgan, which is now just a suburb of Dublin. When he was fourteen, they considered their obligation finished and sent him to work in Offley on a farm owned by Mrs White. She was a good Roman Catholic and needed transporting to St Joseph’s monastery in Tipperary every Sunday. The monks there realised that a lad of fourteen still needed a father figure. The monk in charge of the dairy took him under his wing. This was the leading dairy in Southern Ireland at the time and where the seeds were sown for my husband’s dream to have his own farm. The book is about our struggle to start farming in the fifties with no capital, which would be impossible in the twenty-first century and was difficult even then.