This Boy's Heart

John Creedons scenes from an Irish childhood paint a colourful and sometimes hilarious picture of a changing Ireland and the growing pains of boyhood. Set in a city-centre household bustling with humanity, the cast includes a dozen children and another dozen adults, including aunts, an American writer, an African doctor, and a Scottish bookie. The streets outside overflow with brewery horses, beat clubs, dance halls, nuns, priests, a Turkish delight shop and a pub where a child could sit up on a high stool and smoke his cigarette in peace. Creedon spent the sixties striding the streets of inner-city Cork, with summers farmed out to friends and family in the countryside. His stories are set in wildly contrasting worlds, from urban exotica to spacious meadows, from tales of the open road to his classroom of over fifty boys. These are stories of friendship, fun, family and folklore. The result is a heart-warming and revealing journey into an Irish boyhood.