lection.Your mother has to get you a new suit somehow so she can show you off to the neighbors and relations and they give you sweets and money and you can go to the Lyric Cinema to see Charlie Chaplin. What about James Cagney? Never mind James Cagney. Lots of blather. Charlie Chaplin is your only man.But you have to be with your mother on The Collection.The grown-up people of Limerick are not going to be handing out money to every little Tom Dick and Mick with a First Communion suit that doesn’t have his mother with him. Mikey got over five shillings on his First Communion day and ate so many sweets and buns he threw up in the Lyric Cinema and Frank Goggin, the ticket man, kicked him out. He says he didn’t care because he had money left over and went to the Savoy Cinema the same day for a pirate film and ate Cadbury chocolate and drank lemonade till his stomach stuck out a mile. He can’t wait for Confirmation day because you’re  older, there’s  another  collection  and  that  brings  more  money than First Communion. He’ll go to the cinema the rest of his life, sit next to girls from lanes and do dirty things like an expert. He loves his mother but he’ll never get married for fear he might have a wife in and out of the lunatic asylum.What’s the use of getting married when you can sit in cinemas and do dirty things with girls from lanes who don’t care what they do because they already did it with their brothers. If you don’t get married you won’t have any children at home bawling for tea and bread and gasping with the fit and looking in every direction with their eyes.When he’s older he’ll go to the pub like his father, drink pints galore, stick the finger down the throat to bring it all up, drink more pints, win the bets and bring the money home to his mother to keep her from going demented. He says he’s not a proper Catholic which means he’s doomed so he can do anything he bloody well likes. He says, I’ll tell you more when you grow up, Frankie.You’re too young now and you don’t know your arse from your elbow. The master, Mr. Benson, is very old. He roars and spits all over us every day.The boys in the front row hope he has no diseases for it’s the spit that  carries  all  the  diseases  and  he  might  be  spreading  consumption right and left. He tells us we have to know the catechism backwards, forwards and sideways.We have to know the Ten Commandments, the 117