in the ledger.After the papers are delivered we unload the magazines at the office and go home to breakfast for fifty minutes. When I return to the office there are two other boys, Eamon and Peter,  already  sorting  magazines,  counting  and  stuffing  them  into  news- agents’ boxes along the wall. Small orders are delivered by Gerry Halvey on his messenger bicycle, big orders in the van. Mr. McCaffrey tells me stay  in  the  office  so  that  I  can  learn  to  count  magazines  and  enter them in the ledger.The minute Mr. McCaffrey leaves Eamon and Peter pull out a drawer where they hide cigarette butts and light up. They can’t believe I don’t smoke. They want to know if there’s something wrong  with  me,  the  bad  eyes  or  the  consumption  maybe.  How  can you  go out with a girl if you don’t smoke? Peter says, Wouldn’t you be  a  right eejit if you were going out the road with the girl and she asked you for a fag and you said you didn’t smoke, wouldn’t you be a right eejit then? How would you ever get her into a field for a bit of a feel? Eamon says, ’Tis what my father says about men who don’t drink, they’re not to be trusted. Peter says if you find a man that won’t drink or smoke that’s a man that’s not even interested in girls and you’d want to keep your hand over the hole of your arse, that’s what you’d want to be doing. They laugh and that brings on the cough and the more they laugh the more they cough till they’re holding on to one another banging one another  between  the  shoulder  blades  and  wiping  tears  from  their cheeks.When the fit passes we pick out English and American maga- zines and look at the advertisements for women’s underwear, brassieres and panties and long nylon stockings. Eamon is looking at an American magazine called See with pictures of Japanese girls who keep the sol- diers happy so far away from home and Eamon says he has to go to the lavatory and when he does Peter gives me a wink,You know what he’s up to in there,don’t you? and sometimes Mr.McCaffrey gets into a state when boys linger in the lavatory interfering with themselves and wast- ing the valuable time for which Easons is paying them and on top of it putting their immortal souls in danger.Mr.McCaffrey won’t come right out and say, Stop that wanking, because you can’t accuse someone of a mortal sin unless you have proof. Sometimes he goes snooping in the lavatory when a boy comes out.He comes back himself with the threat- ening look and tells the boys,Ye are not to be looking at those dirty magazines from foreign parts.Ye are to count them and put them in the boxes and that’s all. 344