Dear Miss Hope, I am thirteen years old with black hair and some- thing terrible is happening and I can’t tell anyone not even my mother. I’m bleeding every few weeks you know where and I’m afraid I’ll be found out. Miss Agnes Tripple, Little Biddle-on-the-Twiddle, Devon. Dear Agnes,You are to be congratulated.You are now a woman and you can get your hair permed because you are having your monthlies. Do not fear your monthlies for all Englishwomen have them.They are a gift of God to purify us so that we can have stronger children for the empire, soldiers to keep the Irish in their place. In some parts of the world a woman with a monthly is unclean but we British cherish our women with the monthlies, oh we do indeed. In the springtime there’s a new messenger boy and I’m back in the office. Peter and Eamon drift off to England. Peter is fed up with Lim- erick, no girls, and you’re driven to yourself, wank wank wank, that’s all we ever do in Limerick.There are new boys. I’m senior boy and the job is easier because I’m fast and when Mr. McCaffrey is out in the van and my  work  is  done  I  read  the  English, Irish, American  magazines  and papers. Day and night I dream of America. Malachy goes to England to work in a rich Catholic boys’ boarding school and he walks around cheerful and smiling as if he’s the equal of any boy in the school and everyone knows when you work in an Eng- lish boarding school you’re supposed to hang your head and shuffle like a proper Irish servant.They fire him for his ways and Malachy tells them they can kiss his royal Irish arse and they say that’s the kind of foul lan- guage and behavior you’d expect. He gets a job in the gas works in Coventry shoveling coal into the furnaces like Uncle Pa Keating, shov- eling coal and waiting for the day he can go to America after me. 353