Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not commit adultery what? Thou shalt not commit adultery, sir. And what is adultery, Clohessy? Impure thoughts, impure words, impure deeds, sir. Good,Clohessy.You’re a good boy.You may be slow and forgetful in the sir department and you may not have a shoe to your foot but you’re powerful with the Sixth Commandment and that will keep you pure. Paddy Clohessy has no shoe to his foot, his mother shaves his head to keep the lice away, his eyes are red, his nose always snotty.The sores on his kneecaps never heal because he picks at the scabs and puts them in his mouth. His clothes are rags he has to share with his six brothers and a sister and when he comes to school with a bloody nose or a black eye you  know  he  had  a  fight  over  the  clothes  that  morning.  He  hates school.He’s seven going on eight,the biggest and oldest boy in the class, and he can’t wait to grow up and be fourteen so that he can run away and pass for seventeen and join the English army and go to India where it’s nice and warm and he’ll live in a tent with a dark girl with the red dot on her forehead and he’ll be lying there eating figs, that’s what they eat in India, figs, and she’ll cook the curry day and night and plonk on a ukulele and when he has enough money he’ll send for the whole fam- ily and they’ll all live in the tent especially his poor father who’s at home coughing up great gobs of blood because of the consumption. When my mother sees Paddy on the street she says,Wisha, look at that poor child.He’s a skeleton with rags and if they were making a film about the famine he’d surely be put in the middle of it. I think Paddy likes me because of the raisin and I feel a bit guilty because I wasn’t that generous in the first place.The master, Mr. Ben- son, said the government was going to give us the free lunch so we wouldn’t have to be going home in the freezing weather. He led us down to a cold room in the dungeons of Leamy’s School where the charwoman, Nellie Ahearn, was handing out the half pint of milk and the raisin bun.The milk was frozen in the bottles and we had to melt it between our thighs.The boys joked and said the bottles would freeze our things off and the master roared,Any more of that talk and I’ll warm the bottles on the backs of yeer heads.We all searched our raisin buns for a raisin but Nellie said they must have forgotten to put them in and 120