‘In spite of nearly thirty years in an English industrial town’, Peter Donnelly wrote in his autobiography, ‘my parents are still peasants, retaining the outlook they had when they just left home.’ Donnelly's family migrated—perhaps just after the Great War—from Yellow Rock, ‘a hillside in South Armagh’, to the north Lancashire shipbuilding town of Barrow-in-Furness, when he was six years of age. Like most of those who settled in west Cumbria, Donnelly was an Ulsterman by birth; unlike the majority, his early life afforded him great opportunities. Donnelly went to Ushaw college, County Durham, to study for the priesthood, but he was drummed out for a lack of application. By the age of twenty-one, he was back in Barrow—a well-educated man with a penchant for poetry, theology and classics, but without prospects befitting his education. His failure at Ushaw, and a series of dead-end jobs, bred in Donnelly a melancholy disposition which stirred the sentimental visions of Yellow Rock and Ireland which litter his musings; a love of pastoral Ireland, he repeatedly reminds us, alienated him from ‘Dirty Barrow’. At the same time, Donnelly's writings also evince a strong sense of family and community throughout—a feeling of belonging which was, in reality, a product of life in Barrow, for the Donnellys only returned to ‘Yellow Rock’ for holidays.

Donnelly's memoir is an evocative telling of his life. It is more than merely a trip down memory lane, for it occasionally uncovers the darker side of the migrant's world. Shortly after his ignominious return from Ushaw, Donnelly was detailed by his disappointed parents to be the family representative at the funerals of friends and neighbours—an experience which clearly lived on in his memory. Donnelly tells, for example, how the ceremony for one man, Mick Rush, left ‘an impression of loneliness which constantly intrudes upon me’. Rush, it seems, left Ireland as a young man and never returned. He was a bachelor and spent his life in lodgings. Despite his evident loneliness, Rush was popular with children who cadged pennies from him, even though he would ask: ‘Where would I get it? Sure I haven't the price of a pig's waistcoat.’