Frank McCourt10: Friday nights' vigil..

But then my father would ruin the whole thing with his drinking. He really drove my mother to the wall. He drove her into a nearly fatal depression with the drinking. If he got a job and he was paid on Friday night, there was kind of a dramatic element to this.

The men got out of work, out of the factories and the timber yards and the cement factories at 5:30. They would come home on Friday night, most of them, wash themselves to here, from here to here, never below. No, people didn't touch themselves with water from one end of the year to the other. They'd come home, wash their hands, throw water on their faces, have their Friday night tea, which was an egg because it was Friday, and then the women would give the price of a few pints and they'd go out and they'd have a few pints, talk, sing a few songs, come home, have tea, go to bed, and go to work the next morning. Five thirty, they were out. By six o'clock most of them were home for that wash and their tea. The Angelus would ring all over Limerick in all the churches and the women would wait, but my mother would wait on tenterhooks. If he wasn't home by 6:00 o'clock, boom, boom, bong, bong all around the city. If he wasn't home by the time the Angelus rang, he wasn't coming home and then she'd sink deeper and deeper into the chair by the fire, because we knew then the wages were gone and he'd arrive home after the pubs were closed, roaring and singing down the lane, "Roddy McCorley Goes to Die," and all the patriotic songs. He grieved over Ireland and didn't care if we starved to death that night and the next day.

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