The Banyan Tree

On an overgrown and rundown farm in Ireland in the late 1980s widowed Minnie O¿Brien (a shopkeeper¿s daughter in the village) remembers the past: courtship and marriage to craftsman-farmer Peter, the lover of her life, whom she met at a country fair; their wedding and Dublin honeymoon in 1922; life on the farm; the births of three children; and what became of them. Brendan goes off to be a missionary in Africa; Sheila is a nurse at Guy¿s hospital; Frankie seeks freedom in the Australian outback. Between the turf-cutting and roof-laying, ceilidhs and hurling matches of her early married days and the ¿modern¿ age of mains electricity and ¿airoplaines¿ lie well-worn footpaths of reminiscence down which Minnie rambles contentedly as she waits for her men to come home.