Mikey’s father, Peter, is a great champion. He wins bets in the pubs by drinking more pints than anyone. All he has to do is go out to the jakes, stick his finger down his throat and bring it all up so that he can start another round. Peter is such a champion he can stand in the jakes and throw up without using his finger.He’s such a champion they could chop off his fingers and he’d carry on regardless. He wins all that money but doesn’t bring it home. Sometimes he’s like my father and drinks the dole itself and that’s why Nora Molloy is often carted off to the lunatic asylum demented with worry over her hungry famishing family. She knows as long as you’re in the asylum you’re safe from the world and its torments, there’s nothing you can do, you’re protected, and what’s the use of worrying. It’s well known that all the lunatics in the asylum have to be dragged in but she’s the only one that has to be dragged out, back to her five children and the champion of all pint drinkers. You can tell when Nora Molloy is ready for the asylum when you see her children running around white with flour from poll to toe.That happens when Peter drinks the dole money and leaves her desperate and she knows the men will come to take her away.You know she’s inside  frantic  with  the  baking.  She  wants  to  make  sure  the  children won’t starve while she’s gone and she roams Limerick begging for flour. She goes to priests, nuns, Protestants, Quakers. She goes to Rank’s Flour Mills  and  begs  for  the  sweepings  from  the  floor.  She  bakes  day  and night. Peter begs her to stop but she screams, This is what comes of drinking the dole. He tells her the bread will only go stale.There’s no use talking to her. Bake bake bake. If she had the money she’d bake all the flour in Limerick and regions beyond. If the men didn’t come from the lunatic asylum to take her away she’d bake till she fell to the floor. The children stuff themselves with so much bread people in the lane say they’re looking like loaves. Still the bread goes stale and Mikey is so bothered by the waste he talks to a rich woman with a cookbook and she tells him make bread pudding. He boils the hard bread in water and sour milk and throws in a cup of sugar and his brother loves it even if that’s all they have the fortnight their mother is in the lunatic asylum. My father says, Do they take her away because she’s gone mad bak- ing bread or does she go mad baking bread because they’re taking her away? Nora comes home calm as if she had been at the seaside. She always says,Where’s Mikey? Is he alive? She worries over Mikey because he’s 115