and if I keep writing successful threatening letters, helping myself to the odd few shillings from her purse and keeping the stamp money, I’ll have my escape money to America. If my whole family dropped from the hunger I wouldn’t touch this money in the post office. Often I have to write threatening letters to neighbors and friends of my mother and I worry they might discover me.They complain to Mam,That oul’ bitch, Finucane, below in Irishtown, sent me a threat- ening letter.What kind of a demon outa hell would torment her own kind with a class of a letter that I can’t make head nor tail of anyway with words never heard on land or sea.The person that would write that letter is worse than Judas or any informer for the English. My mother says anyone that writes such letters should be boiled in oil and have his fingernails pulled out by blind people. I’m sorry for their troubles but there’s no other way for me to save the money for America. I know that someday I’ll be a rich Yank and send home hundreds of dollars and my family will never have to worry about threatening letters again. Some of the temporary telegram boys are taking the permanent exam in August.Mrs.O’Connell says,You should take that exam,Frank McCourt. You have a bit of a brain in your head and you’d pass it no bother.You’d be a postman in no time and a great help to your poor mother. Mam says I should take it, too, become a postman, save up, go to America and be a postman over there and wouldn’t that be a lovely life. I’m delivering a telegram to South’s pub on a Saturday and Uncle Pa Keating is sitting there, all black as usual. He says, Have a lemonade there, Frankie, or is it a pint you want now that you’re near sixteen? Lemonade, Uncle Pa, thanks. You’ll want your first pint the day you’re sixteen, won’t you? I will but my father won’t be here to get it for me. Don’t  worry  about  that.  I  know  ’tis  not  the  same  without  your father but I’ll get you the first pint. ’Tis what I’d do if I had a son. Come here the night before you’re sixteen. I will, Uncle Pa. I hear you’re taking that exam for the post office? I am. Why would you do a thing like that? ’Tis a good job and I’d be a postman in no time and it has the pension. 333