"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood," says Frank McCourt at the beginning of Angela's Ashes, "is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Narrated in the historic present tense, McCourt's memoir provides a lyrical and painful account of growing up in Limerick, Ireland.
In the following passage from chapter three of Angela's Ashes, Frank and his younger brother Malachy return home to find that that their parents have been forced to move upstairs to "Italy."
from Angela's Ashes*
by Frank McCourt
Two weeks before Christmas Malachy and I come home from school in a heavy rain and when we push in the door we find the kitchen empty. The table and chairs and trunk are gone and the fire is dead in the grate. The Pope is still there and that means we haven't moved again. Dad would never move without the Pope. The kitchen floor is wet, little pools of water all around, and the walls are twinkling with the damp. There's a noise upstairs and when we go up we find Dad and Mam and the missing furniture. It's nice and warm there with a fire blazing in the grate, Mam sitting in the bed, and Dad reading the The Irish Press and smoking a cigarette by the fire. Mam tells us there was a terrible flood, that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door. They tried to stop it with rags but they only turned sopping wet and let the rain in. People emptying their buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen. She thinks we should stay upstairs as long as there is rain. We'll be warm through the winter months and then we can go downstairs in the springtime if there is any sign of dryness in the walls or the floor. Dad says it's like going away on our holidays to a warm foreign place like Italy. That's what we'll call the upstairs from now on, Italy. Malachy says the Pope is still on the wall downstairs and he's going to be all cold and couldn't we bring him up? but Mam says, No, he's going to stay where he is because I don't want him on the wall glaring at me in the bed. Isn't it enough that we dragged him all the way from Brooklyn to Belfast to Dublin to Limerick? All I want now is a little peace, ease and comfort.
Memoirs by Frank McCourt
- Angela's Ashes, 1996
- 'Tis, 1999
- Teacher Man, 2005
* Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt was published by Scribner in 1996. It is available in the U.K. in a HarperPerennial paperback (2005).
