Cyril Benson dances. He has medals hanging from his shoulders to his kneecaps. He wins contests all over Ireland and he looks lovely in his saffron kilt.He’s a credit to his mother and he gets his name in the paper all the time and you can be sure he brings home the odd few pounds. You don’t see him roaming the streets kicking everything in sight till the toes hang out of his boots, oh, no, he’s a good boy, dancing for his poor mother. Mam wets an old towel and scrubs my face till it stings, she wraps the towel around her finger and sticks it in my ears and claims there’s enough wax there to grow potatoes, she wets my hair to make it lie down, she tells me shut up and stop the whinging, that these dancing lessons will cost her sixpence every Saturday, which I could have earned bringing Bill Galvin his dinner and God knows she can barely afford it. I try to tell her, Ah, Mam, sure you don’t have to send me to dancing school when you could be smoking a nice Woodbine and having a cup of tea, but she says, Oh, aren’t you clever.You’re going to dance if I have to give up the fags forever. If  my  pals  see  my  mother  dragging  me  through  the  streets  to an  Irish dancing class I’ll be disgraced entirely.They think it’s all right to  dance  and  pretend  you’re  Fred Astaire  because  you  can  jump  all over  the  screen  with  Ginger  Rogers. There  is  no  Ginger  Rogers  in Irish  dancing and you can’t jump all over.You stand straight up and down and keep your arms against yourself and kick your legs up and around and never smile. My uncle Pa Keating said Irish dancers look like they have steel rods up their arses, but I can’t say that to Mam, she’d kill me. There’s a gramophone in Mrs. O’Connor’s playing an Irish jig or a reel and boys and girls are dancing around kicking their legs out and keeping their hands to their sides. Mrs. O’Connor is a great fat woman and when she stops the record to show the steps all the fat from her chin to her ankles jiggles and I wonder how she can teach the dancing. She comes over to my mother and says, So, this is little Frankie? I think we have the makings of a dancer here. Boys and girls, do we have the mak- ings of a dancer here? We do, Mrs. O’Connor. Mam says, I have the sixpence, Mrs. O’Connor. Ah, yes, Mrs. McCourt, hold on a minute. She waddles to a table and brings back the head of a black boy with 141