TO SCHOOL THROUGH THE FIELDS An Irish Country Childhood <i> by Alice Taylor (St. Martin’s Press: $14.95; 151 pp.) </i>

For anyone in need of a quick vacation, Alice Taylor’s memoir of her childhood in County Cork will do as well as an afternoon spent sitting in a field of grass high enough to blot out the skyscrapers. A best seller in Ireland (“where scribblers are ten a penny,” the London Daily Mail reminded readers), “To School Through the Fields” is composed of vignettes, character sketches and poems that evoke a world of warmth, security and wonder at God’s creation. A special mass said at a poor neighbor’s house sticks in the child’s memory not only because of its beauty but also because “in the middle of the last blessing, the curate exclaimed, with extra vehemence, ‘Christ!’ “--an escaped hen had pecked him through the makeshift altar cloth.

Taylor’s was a quiet corner of the world, so tucked away in the countryside that “lorry drivers dreaded our farm, and one cranky individual once poked his head out of his cab at my father and demanded: ‘Does the Almighty God know that people live down here?’ ” But Taylor’s telling makes the world of her village universal, and sets her firmly in that mysteriously potent Irish storytelling tradition.