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 all—we 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 Year’s Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asth- matic  wheezes,  consumptive  croaks.  It  turned  noses  into  fountains, 11