About the Author

Writing about growing up in Northern Ireland during a time of deep division.

For me, no small part of the excitement of going to the rugby match in Dublin was crossing the border into the Republic of Ireland. The Republic felt genuinely foreign to me, different culture, language and religion. The border crossing itself was more than mildly interesting; it was fraught with tension and drama.

Terry Ogle

What he conveys in this moving memoir of his tenth year of life is an elegiac sense of community and family roots from rural South Down that has rarely been represented in this way. Inter religious prejudice is a basic societal value at the time. Interweaving his own memories including a
memorable road trip to Dublin, with the tales of relatives and local characters, he re-creates the non-politically correct tenth year of his childhood with humor, and nostalgia.

Personal background

Terry grew up and was educated in Northern Ireland. After his office in Belfast was blown up three times during the “troubles’” he immigrated to Canada. He worked as a management consultant in North America, West Africa and South East Asia. For twenty years he owned and operated a small software company. He like old British cars and cats but mostly he loves
writing.

He has three adult children, Hannah, Sarah and Myles.

Development of the Story

Following the demolition of his family home in the small village of Clough, he decided that his Canadian family would only ever learn about his upbringing if he wrote about it.

After all there was nothing for them to see. He started to write an Irish memoir to inform them of what life was like back in Ireland in the fifties. As he wrote he began to realize his upbringing (considered normal at the time) included what we would now consider to be unacceptable family bigotry, a belief in the supernatural, and political corruption.

There is much joy and humorous entertainment in his writing but on a deeper reading the world of Northern Ireland as he experienced it at ten presages the reasons for the “Troubles” which would follow, last for thirty years, and claim three thousand six hundred lives and the wounding of thirty thousand more.