You have a puss on you like your father from the North. Do you think now  you  can  boil  the  water  for  the  tea  without  burning  the  house down? She cuts three slices from a loaf, smears them with margarine for us and goes back to bed.We have the tea and bread and it’s one morning we’re glad to go to school where it’s warm and there are no yelling aunts. After school she tells me sit at the table and write my father a letter about Mam in the hospital and how we’re all at Aunt Aggie’s till Mam comes home. I’m to tell him we’re all happy and in the best of health, send money, food is very dear, growing boys eat a lot, ha ha,Alphie the baby needs clothes and nappies. I don’t know why she’s always angry. Her flat is warm and dry. She has electric light in the house and her own lavatory in the backyard. Uncle Pa has a steady job and he brings home his wages every Friday. He drinks his pints at South’s pub but never comes home singing songs of Ireland’s long woeful history. He says,A pox on all their houses, and he says the funniest thing in the world is that we all have arses that have to be wiped and no man escapes that.The minute a politician or a Pope starts his blather Uncle Pa thinks of him wiping his arse. Hitler and Roosevelt and Churchill all wipe their arses. De Valera, too. He says the only people you can trust in that department are the Mahommedans for they eat with one hand and wipe with the other.The human hand itself is a sneaky bugger and you never know what it’s been up to. There are good times with Uncle Pa when Aunt Aggie goes to the Mechanics’ Institute to play cards, forty-five. He says,To hell with the begrudgers. He gets himself two bottles of stout from South’s, six buns and a half pound of ham from the shop on the corner.He makes tea and we sit by the range drinking it,eating our ham sandwiches and buns and laughing over Uncle Pa and the way he goes on about the world. He says, I swallowed the gas, I drink the pint, I don’t give a fiddler’s fart about the world and its cousin. If little Alphie gets tired and cranky and cries Uncle Pa pulls his shirt back from his chest and tells him, Here, have a suck of diddy momma.The sight of that flat chest and the nip- ple shocks Alphie and makes him good again. Before Aunt Aggie comes home we have to wash the mugs and clean up so she won’t know we were stuffing ourselves with buns and ham sandwiches. She’d nag Uncle Pa for a month if she ever found out and that’s what I don’t understand.Why does he let her nag him like that? He went to the Great War, he was gassed, he’s big, he has a job, he 246