I
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they
met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ire-
land when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and
Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at
all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is
hardly worth your while.Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood
is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish
Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early
years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty;
the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother
moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the
English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long
years.
Above allwe were wet.
Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift
slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick.The rain
dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Years
Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asth-
matic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains,
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