And they laugh and drink their tea and smoke their Woodbines and tell one another the fag is the only comfort they have. ’Tis. Question Quigley tells me I have to go to the Redemptorist church on  Friday  and  join  the  boys’  division  of  the  Arch  Confraternity. You  have to join.You can’t say no. All the boys in the lanes and back streets that have fathers on the dole or working in laboring jobs have to join. Question says,Your father is a foreigner from the North and he don’t matter but you still have to join. Everyone knows Limerick is the holiest city in Ireland because it has the Arch Confraternity of the Holy Family, the biggest sodality in the  world. Any  city  can  have  a  Confraternity, only  Limerick  has  the Arch. Our  Confraternity  fills  the  Redemptorist  church  five  nights  a week, three for the men, one for the women, one for the boys.There is Benediction and hymn singing in English, Irish and Latin and best of all the big powerful sermon Redemptorist priests are famous for. It’s the sermon that saves millions of Chinese and other heathens from wind- ing up in hell with the Protestants. The Question says you have to join the Confraternity so that your mother can tell the St.Vincent de Paul Society and they’ll know you’re a good Catholic. He says his father is a loyal member and that’s how he got a good pensionable job cleaning lavatories at the railway station and  when  he  grows  up  himself  he’ll  get  a  good  job  too  unless  he runs  away and joins the Royal Canadian Mounted Police so that he can sing “I’ll Be Calling You Ooo Ooo Ooo,” like Nelson Eddy singing to Jeanette MacDonald expiring with consumption there on the sofa. If he brings me to the Confraternity the man in the office will write his name in a big book and some day he might be promoted to prefect of a section, which is all he wants in life next to wearing the Mountie uniform. The prefect is head of a section which is thirty boys from the same lanes and streets. Every section has the name of a saint whose picture is painted on a shield stuck on top of a pole by the prefect’s seat.The pre- fect and his assistant take the attendance and keep an eye on us so that they can give us a thump on the head in case we laugh during Bene- 146