You have a puss on you like your father from the North. Do you think
now you can boil the water for the tea without burning the house
down?
She cuts three slices from a loaf, smears them with margarine for us
and goes back to bed.We have the tea and bread and its one morning
were glad to go to school where its warm and there are no yelling aunts.
After school she tells me sit at the table and write my father a letter
about Mam in the hospital and how were all at Aunt Aggies till Mam
comes home. Im to tell him were all happy and in the best of health,
send money, food is very dear, growing boys eat a lot, ha ha,Alphie the
baby needs clothes and nappies.
I dont know why shes always angry. Her flat is warm and dry. She
has electric light in the house and her own lavatory in the backyard.
Uncle Pa has a steady job and he brings home his wages every Friday.
He drinks his pints at Souths pub but never comes home singing songs
of Irelands long woeful history. He says,A pox on all their houses, and
he says the funniest thing in the world is that we all have arses that have
to be wiped and no man escapes that.The minute a politician or a Pope
starts his blather Uncle Pa thinks of him wiping his arse. Hitler and
Roosevelt and Churchill all wipe their arses. De Valera, too. He says the
only people you can trust in that department are the Mahommedans for
they eat with one hand and wipe with the other.The human hand itself
is a sneaky bugger and you never know what its been up to.
There are good times with Uncle Pa when Aunt Aggie goes to the
Mechanics Institute to play cards, forty-five. He says,To hell with the
begrudgers. He gets himself two bottles of stout from Souths, six buns
and a half pound of ham from the shop on the corner.He makes tea and
we sit by the range drinking it,eating our ham sandwiches and buns and
laughing over Uncle Pa and the way he goes on about the world. He
says, I swallowed the gas, I drink the pint, I dont give a fiddlers fart
about the world and its cousin. If little Alphie gets tired and cranky and
cries Uncle Pa pulls his shirt back from his chest and tells him, Here,
have a suck of diddy momma.The sight of that flat chest and the nip-
ple shocks Alphie and makes him good again.
Before Aunt Aggie comes home we have to wash the mugs and
clean up so she wont know we were stuffing ourselves with buns and
ham sandwiches. Shed nag Uncle Pa for a month if she ever found out
and thats what I dont understand.Why does he let her nag him like
that? He went to the Great War, he was gassed, hes big, he has a job, he
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