Lucky is there to catch them in his teeth and shake the life out of them.
We expect him to eat the rats but hell 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 thats a peculiar way for a dog to behave but
then what would you expect from a dog of the McCourts.
The minute theres a sign of a rat or a mention of one Mam is out
the door and up the lane. Shed 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 theres
always a rat nearby with his family waiting for their dinner.
We fight the rats and we fight the stink from that lavatory.Wed like
to keep our door open in the warm weather but you cant 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 its 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 wont 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 its dis-
gusting to think the fly sitting there on the sugar bowl was on the toi-
let bowl, or whats 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 theres one good thing about fleas, theyre 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 theres nothing we can do about the neighbors
and their buckets. If were 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
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