when I back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of
course, a miserable childhood:the happy childhood is hardly worth your
while. Worse than the odinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish
childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but
nothing acan compare twith the Irish version:the poverty,the shiftless
loquacious alcoholic father, the pious dedeated mother moaning by the fire,
pompous priests, bullying schoolmsasters, the English and the terrrible things
they did to us for eight hundred long years.