Andrew Bennett credited as playing...
Narrator
- Narrator: [First lines] When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how my brothers and I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood. The happy childhood is hardly worth telling. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood. And worse still is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
- Narrator: If I were in America I could say "I love you, dad", the way they do in the films. But in Limerick they'd laugh at you. In Limerick you are only allowed to say you love God, and babies, and horses that win. Anything else is softness in the head.
- Narrator: We must have been the only Irish family in history to be saying good-bye to the Statue of Liberty instead of hello. We were going back to Ireland where there was no work and people were dying of the starvation and the damp. It made no sense to me, but what did I know. I was only five going on six.
- Narrator: My friend, Mikey Molloy, tells us all about how much money we'll make at the Collection after our First Communion, when we all knock on the neighbors' doors and get as much as five shillings for sweets and cakes and even go to the Lyric Cinema to see James Cagney.
- Narrator: I want to be Fred Astaire. Irish dancers look like they have steel rods stuck up their arses.
- Narrator: I'm glad I did the First Communion. I'm glad I got my First Confession over and done with. Now I'm free to grow up. Old enough to be ten, anyway. Old enough to pay the ultimate penance for growing up. Worse than joining the army or the police or going to Australia or becoming a nun in Africa. Worse than that, I had to learn Irish dancing.
- Narrator: Mikey Molloy persuaded us to go to Peter Dooley's house. Peter Dooley has a hump like the one Charles Laughton had... in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That's why they call him Quasimodo. Oh, and he has these four sisters with the enormous breasts.
- Narrator: Begging for leftovers is worse than the dole. Worse than the St. Vincent de Paul Charity. My own mother begging. This is the worst kind of shame - begging for the leftovers from the priests' dinner. Like tinkers holding up their scabby children on street corners. Worse than borrowing from the money lender.
- Narrator: Paddy Clohessy found a priest to confess our hideous sins to. He's 90 years old and deaf as a turnip.