Lucky is there to catch them in his teeth and shake the life out of them. We expect him to eat the rats but he’ll leave them in the lane with their guts hanging out and run to my father for a piece of bread dipped in tea. People in the lane say that’s a peculiar way for a dog to behave but then what would you expect from a dog of the McCourts. The minute there’s a sign of a rat or a mention of one Mam is out the door and up the lane. She’d rather walk the streets of Limerick for- ever than stay one minute in a house that has a rat in it and she can never rest  because  she  knows  that  with  the  stable  and  the  lavatory  there’s always a rat nearby with his family waiting for their dinner. We fight the rats and we fight the stink from that lavatory.We’d like to keep our door open in the warm weather but you can’t when peo- ple are trotting down the lane to empty their brimming buckets. Some families are worse than others and Dad hates all of them even though Mam tells him it’s not their fault if the builders a hundred years ago put up houses with no lavatories but this one outside our door. Dad says the people should empty their buckets in the middle of the night when we are asleep so that we won’t be disturbed by the stink. The flies are nearly as bad as the rats. On warm days they swarm to the stable and when a bucket is emptied they swarm to the lavatory. If Mam cooks anything they swarm into the kitchen and Dad says it’s dis- gusting to think the fly sitting there on the sugar bowl was on the toi- let bowl, or what’s left of it, a minute ago. If you have an open sore they find it and torment you. By day you have the flies, by night you have the fleas. Mam says there’s one good thing about fleas, they’re clean, but flies are filthy, you never know where they came from and they carry diseases galore. We can chase the rats and kill them.We can slap at the flies and the fleas and kill them but there’s nothing we can do about the neighbors and their buckets. If we’re out in the lane playing and we see someone with a bucket we call to our own house, Bucket coming, close the door, close the door, and whoever is inside runs to the door. In warm weather we run to close the door all day because we know which families have the worst buckets.There are families whose fathers have jobs and if they get into the habit of cooking with curry we know their buckets will stink to the heavens and make us sick. Now with the war on and men sending money from England more and more families are cooking with curry and our house is filled with the stink day and night.We know the families with the curry, we know the ones with the cabbage. Mam is 211