talking to each other and it takes years of practice.There are people who don’t talk to each other because their fathers were on opposite sides in the Civil War in 1922. If a man goes off and joins the English army his family might as well move to another part of Limerick where there are families with men in the English army. If anyone in your family was the least way friendly to the English in the last eight hundred years it will be brought up and thrown in your face and you might as well move to  Dublin where no one cares. There are families that are ashamed of  themselves because their forefathers gave up their religion for the sake of a bowl of Protestant soup during the Famine and those families are  known  ever  after  as  soupers. It’s  a  terrible  thing  to  be  a  souper because you’re doomed forever to the souper part of hell.It’s even worse to be an informer. The master at school said that everytime the Irish were  about  to  demolish  the  English  in  a  fair  fight  a  filthy  informer betrayed them. A man who’s discovered to be an informer deserves to be hanged or, even worse, to have no one talk to him for if no one talks to you you’re better off hanging at the end of a rope. In  every  lane  there’s  always  someone  not  talking  to  someone  or everyone not talking to someone or someone not talking to everyone. You can always tell when people are not talking by the way they pass each other.The women hoist their noses, tighten their mouths and turn their faces away. If the woman is wearing a shawl she takes a corner and flings it over her shoulder as if to say,One word or look from you,you ma-faced bitch, and I’ll tear the countenance from the front of your head. It’s bad when Grandma won’t talk to us because we can’t run to her when we need to borrow sugar or tea or milk.There’s no use going to Aunt Aggie. She’ll only bite your head off. Go home, she’ll say, and tell your father to get off his northern arse and get a job like the decent men of Limerick. They say she’s always angry because she has red hair or she has red hair because she’s always angry. Mam is friendly with Bridey Hannon, who lives next door with her  mother and father. Mam and Bridey talk all the time. When my father goes for his long walk Bridey comes in and she and Mam sit by the fire drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. If Mam has nothing in the house Bridey brings tea, sugar and milk. Sometimes they use the same tea leaves over and over and Mam says the tea is stewed, coddled and boiled. 133