.    .    . At the end of the week Mrs. O’Connell hands me the first wages of my life, a pound, my first pound. I run down the stairs and up to O’Con- nell Street, the main street, where the lights are on and people are going home from work, people like me with wages in their pockets. I want them to know I’m like them, I’m a man, I have a pound. I walk up one side of O’Connell Street and down the other and hope they’ll notice me.They don’t. I want to wave my pound note at the world so they’ll say,There he goes, Frankie McCourt the workingman, with a pound in his pocket. It’s Friday night and I can do anything I like. I can have fish and chips and go to the Lyric Cinema. No, no more Lyric. I don’t have to sit up in the gods anymore with people all around me cheering on the Indians killing General Custer and the Africans chasing Tarzan all over the jungle. I can go to the Savoy Cinema now, pay sixpence for a seat down front where there’s a better class of people eating boxes of choco- lates and covering their mouths when they laugh. After the film I can have tea and buns in the restaurant upstairs. Michael is across the street calling me. He’s hungry and wonders if there’s any chance he could go to The Abbot’s for a bit of bread and stay there for the night instead of going all the way to Laman Griffin’s. I tell him he doesn’t have to worry about a bit of bread.We’ll go to the Coliseum Café and have fish and chips, all he wants, lemonade galore, and then we’ll go to see Yankee Doodle Dandy with James Cagney and eat two big bars of chocolate.After the film we have tea and buns and we sing and dance like Cagney all the way to The Abbot’s. Michael says it must be great to be in America where people have nothing else to do  but  sing  and  dance. He’s  half  asleep  but  he  says  he’s  going  there some day to sing and dance and would I help him go and when he’s asleep I start thinking about America and how I have to save money for  my  fare  instead  of  squandering  it  on  fish  and  chips  and  tea  and buns. I’ll have to save a few shillings from my pound because if I don’t I’ll be in Limerick forever. I’m fourteen now and if I save something every week surely I should be able to go to America by the time I’m twenty. There are telegrams for offices, shops, factories where there’s no hope of a tip. Clerks take the telegrams without a look at you or a thank you. There are telegrams for the respectable people with maids along 314