a jam jar and dabbed at our bites.The salt burned but he said we’d feel better soon. Mam sat by the fireplace with the twins on her lap. Dad pulled on his trousers and dragged the mattress off the bed and out to the street. He filled the kettle and the pot with water, stood the mattress against the wall, pounded it with a shoe, told me to keep pouring water on the ground to drown the fleas dropping there.The Limerick moon was so bright I could see bits of it shimmering in the water and I wanted to scoop up moon bits but how could I with the fleas leaping on my legs. Dad  kept  pounding  with  the  shoe  and  I  had  to  run  back  through the house to the backyard tap for more water in the kettle and the pot. Mam said, Look at you.Your shoes are drenched and you’ll catch your death and your father will surely get the pneumonia without a shoe to his foot. A man on a bicycle stopped and wanted to know why Dad was beating that mattress. Mother o’ God, he said, I never heard such a cure for fleas. Do you know that if a man could jump like a flea one lep would take him halfway to the moon? The thing to do is this, when you go back inside with that mattress stick it on the bed upside down and that will confuse the little buggers. They won’t know where they are and they’ll be biting the mattress or each other, which is the best cure of all.After they bite the human being they have the frenzy, you know, for there are other fleas around them that also bit the human being and the smell of the blood is too much for them and they go out of their minds.They’re a right bloody torment an’ I should know for didn’t I grow up in Limerick, down in the Irishtown, an’ the fleas there were so plentiful an’ forward they’d sit on the toe of your boot an’ discuss Ire- land’s woeful history with you. It is said there were no fleas in ancient Ireland, that they were brought in be the English to drive us out of our wits entirely,an’I wouldn’t put it past the English.An’isn’t it a very curi- ous thing that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland an’ the English brought in the fleas. For centuries Ireland was a lovely peaceful place, snakes gone, not a flea to be found.You could stroll the four green fields of Ireland without fear of snakes an’ have a good night’s sleep with no fleas to bother you. Them snakes were doin’ no harm, they wouldn’t bother you unless you cornered them an’ they lived off other creatures that move under bushes an’such places,whereas the flea sucks the blood from you mornin’ noon an’ night for that’s his nature an’ he can’t help 60