I've read "Angela's Ashes" and "Tis" by Frank McCourt. Both were wonderful and I would recommend them to all. Barb in Michigan -----Original Message----- From: irelandgenweb-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:irelandgenweb-bounces@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Jean R. Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 4:51 PM To: IrelandGenWeb-L@rootsweb.com Cc: TRANSCRIPTIONS-EIRE-L@rootsweb.com Subject: [Irish Genealogy] Memoir,Lanes of Limerick - "Angela's Ashes" (1996) Frank McCOURT SNIPPET: "Frank McCOURT's life and his searing telling of it, reveals all we need to know about being human," wrote the 'Detroit Free Press when his award-winning memoir, 'Angela's Ashes' was published in 1996. Frank taught English for many years at Stuyvesant High School in NYC after he returned to the States from Ireland as a young man. Here are some excerpts: "My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret dead and gone." In the lanes of Limerick the family tried to survive on what amounted to fried bread and tea. Father had problems finding and then keeping a job. "The lice are disgusting, worse than rats. They're in our heads and ears and they sit in the hollows of our collarbones. They dig into our skin. They get into the seams of our clothes and they're everywhere in the coats we use as blankets. We have to search every inch of Alphie's body because he's a baby and helpless. The lice are worse than fleas ..... The shirt I wore to bed is the shirt I wear to school. I wear it day in day out. It's the shirt for football, for climbing walls, for robbing orchards I go to Mass and the Confraternity in that shirt and people sniff the air and move away. If Mam gets a docket for a new one at the St. Vincent de Paul the old shirt is promoted to towel and hangs damp on the chair for months or Mam might use bits of it to patch other shirts. She might even cut it up and let Alphie wear it a while before it winds up on the floor pushed against the bottom of the door to block the rain from the lane. ... We go to school through lanes and back streets so that we won't meet the respectable boys who go to the Christian Brothers' School or the rich ones who go to the Jesuit school, Crescent College. The Christian Brothers' boys wear tweed jackets, warm woolen sweaters, shirts, ties and shiny new boots. We know they're the ones who will get jobs in the civil service and help the people who run the world. The Crescent College boys wear blazers and school scarves tossed around their necks and over their shoulders to show they're cock o' the walk. They have long hair which falls across their foreheads and over their eyes so that they can toss their quiffs like Englishmen. We know they're the ones who will go to university, take over the family business, run the government, run the world. We'll be the messenger boys on bicycles who deliver their groceries or we'll go off to England to work on the building sites. Our sisters will mind their children and scrub their floors unless they go off to England, too. We're ashamed of the way we look and if boys from the rich schools pass remarks we'll get into fights and wind up with bloody noses or torn clothes... Grandma's next-door neighbor, Mrs. Purcell, has the only wireless in her lane. The government gave it to her because she's old and blind. I want a radio. My grandmother is old but she's not blind and what's the use of having a grandmother who won't go blind and get a government radio? Sunday nights I sit outside on the pavement under Mrs. Purcell's window listening to plays on the BBC and Radio Eireann, the Irish station You can hear plays by O'Casey, Shaw, Ibsen and Shakespeare himself, the best of all, even if he is English .... And you can hear strange plays about Greeks plucking out their eyes because they married their mothers by mistake. One night I am sitting under Mrs. Purcell's window listening to 'Macbeth.' Her daughter, Kathleen, sticks her head out the door. Come in, Frankie. My mother says you'll catch the consumption sitting on the ground in this weather. Ah no Kathleen. It's all right. No. Come in They give me tea and a grand cut of bread slathered with blackberry jam. Mrs. Purcell says, Do you like the Shakespeare, Frankie? I love the Shakespeare, Mrs. Purcell. Oh, he's music, Frankie, and he has the best stories in the world. I don't know what I'd do with meself of a Sunday night if I didn't have the Shakespeare. When the play finished she lets me fiddle with the knob on the radio and I roam the dial for distant sounds on the shortwave band, strange whispering and hissing, the whoosh of the ocean coming and going and Morse Code dit dit dit dot. I hear mandolins, guitars, Spanish bagpipes, the drums of Africa ... here is the great boom of Big Ben, this is the BBC Overseas Service and here is the news. Mrs. Purcell says, Leave that on, Frankie, so we'll know the state of the world. After the news there is the American Armed Forces Network and it's lovely to hear the American voices easy and cool and here is the music, oh man, the music of Duke Ellington himself telling me take the A train to where Billie Holiday sings only to me, 'I can't give you anything but love, baby. That's the only thing I've plenty of, baby.' Oh, Billie, Billie, I want to be in America with you and all that music, where no one has bad teeth, people leave food on their plates, every family has a lavatory, and everyone lives happily ever after. And Mrs. Purcell's says, Do you know what, Frankie? What, Mrs. Purcell? That Shakespeare is that good he must have been an Irishman." Check out the Ireland GenWeb website at: http://www.irelandgenweb.com/ It is a good place to get help with your family research. Help wanted: County Coordinators ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to IRELANDGENWEB-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message