house, who  makes  me  laugh  over  Ukridge  and  Bertie Wooster  and Jeeves and all the Mulliners. Bertie Wooster is rich but he eats his egg every morning for fear of what Jeeves might say. I wish I could talk to the girl in the blue dress or anyone about the books but I’m afraid the Kerry nurse or Sister Rita might find out and they’d move me to a big- ger ward upstairs with fifty empty beds and Famine ghosts galore with green mouths and bony fingers pointing.At night I lie in bed thinking about Tom Brown and his adventures at Rugby School and all the char- acters in P. G.Wodehouse. I can dream about the red-lipped landlord’s daughter and the highwayman, and the nurses and nuns can do nothing about it. It’s lovely to know the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head. It’s August and I’m eleven. I’ve been in this hospital for two months and I wonder if they’ll let me out for Christmas.The Kerry nurse tells me I should get down on my two knees and thank God I’m alive at all at all and not be complaining. I’m not complaining, nurse, I’m only wondering if I’ll be home for Christmas. She won’t answer me. She tells me behave myself or she’ll send Sis- ter Rita up to me and then I’ll behave myself. Mam comes to the hospital on my birthday and sends up a package with two chocolate bars and a note with names of people in the lane telling me get better and come home and you’re a great soldier,Frankie. The nurse lets me talk to her through the window and it’s hard because the windows are high and I have to stand on Seamus’s shoulders. I tell Mam I want to go home but she says I’m a bit too weak and surely I’ll be out in no time. Seamus says, ’Tis a grand thing to be eleven because any day now you’ll be a man shaving and all and ready to get out and get a job and drink your pint good as any man. After fourteen weeks Sister Rita tells me I can go home and aren’t I a lucky boy that the day will be the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. She tells me I was a very good patient, except for that little problem with the poem and Patricia Madigan, God rest her, and I’m invited to come back and have a big Christmas dinner in the hospital. Mam comes for me and with my weak legs it takes us a long time to walk to the bus at Union Cross. She says,Take your time.After three and a half months we can spare an hour. People are at their doors on Barrack Road and Roden Lane telling me it’s grand to see me back, that I’m a great soldier, a credit to my 202