Mam, say our prayers. He tells Mam he’ll write and she says, Oh, yes, the way you always did. He stands before her with his suitcase. She gets up, takes down the box of chocolates and hands them around. She puts a chocolate in her mouth and takes it out again because it’s too hard and she can’t chew it. I have a soft one and I offer it for the hard one, which will last longer. It’s creamy and rich and there’s a nut in the middle. Malachy and Michael complain they didn’t get a nut and why is it Frank always gets the nut? Mam says,What do you mean, always? This is the first time we ever had a box of chocolates. Malachy says, He got the raisin in the bun at school and all the boys said he gave it to Paddy Clohessy, so why couldn’t he give us the nut? Mam says, Because ’tis Christmas and he has sore eyes and the nut is good for the sore eyes. Michael says,Will the nut make his eyes better? ’Twill. Will it make one eye better or will it make two eyes better? The two eyes, I think. Malachy says, If I had another nut I’d give it to him for his eyes. Mam says, I know you would. Dad watches us a moment eating our chocolates. He lifts the latch, goes out the door and pulls it shut. Mam tells Bridey Hannon, Days are bad but nights are worse and will this rain ever stop? She tries to ease the bad days by staying in bed and letting Malachy and me light the fire in the morning while she sits up in  the  bed  passing Alphie  bits  of  bread  and  holding  the  mug  to  his mouth for the tea that’s in it. We have to go downstairs to Ireland to wash our faces in the basin under the tap and try to dry ourselves in the old damp shirt that hangs over the back of a chair. She makes us stand by the bed to see if we left rings of dirt around our necks and if we did it’s back down to the tap and the damp shirt.When there’s a hole in a pair of pants she sits up and patches it with any rag she can find.We wear short pants till we’re thirteen or fourteen and our long stockings always have holes to be darned. If she has no wool for the darning and the stockings are dark we can blacken our ankles with shoe polish for the respectability that’s in it. It’s a terrible thing to walk the world with skin showing through the holes of our stockings.When we wear them week after week the holes grow so big we have to pull the stocking forward 271