Angela's Ashes

It is the night before confirmation; Frank has a friend whom the neighborhood boys call Quasimodo Dooley. As a fundraising effort to support his dream of becoming a BBC broadcaster, Quasimodo offers to help Frank and Billy spy on his sisters showering. As Billy is about to climb the spout up to the second-floor window, Mikey Molloy shows up and insists on going first. The rain spout detaches from the roof, and Mikey falls to the ground and must be taken to the hospital with injuries. When Angela finds out about the incident, she tells Frank not to mention it at confession because it would delay his confirmation a year and Frank would outgrow the clothes that Angela bought for the occasion.

On the day of the confirmation, Frank gets a nose bleed and becomes very ill. Although Malachy and Grandma brush off his illness as “growing pains,” it turns out he has come down with typhoid fever. Frank has a very bad case but pulls through, which his dad attributes to the patron saint of desperate cases, St. Jude. While in hospital, Frank befriends a 14-year-old girl named Patricia who loans him a book on the history of England. In the book, there is a line from Henry VIII that is Frank’s first experience with Shakespeare. Patricia also reads aloud “the Highwayman” by Albert Noye and makes Frank memorize passages. Frank is eventually removed from his room for speaking with Patricia, who has diphtheria. Frank is moved to a room upstairs, which at one time was a fever ward for dying and starving patients during the Famine. The janitor, Seamus, becomes his friend and breaks the news to Frank when Patricia dies.

After two months, Frank returns to school, but instead of progressing to sixth class, he is held back in fifth. Frank decides to pay a visit to a St. Francis Assisi statue, where he prays to leave fifth class. The wish comes true when he is tasked with writing an essay about what would have happened if Jesus had lived in Limerick: Based on his writing, the teachers conclude that he should be in sixth.

Frank begins to recognize the multiple facets of his father’s personality: that he is an alcoholic but has a warm heart nonetheless and cares about his boys. His family lives in poor conditions, suffering from an infestation of fleas, flies, and rats and living next to both a stable and a lavatory that all the families dump their buckets of waste in. Malachy takes Frank with him when he goes to the town hall to file a complaint, but it is met with condescension and is dismissed.

Out of necessity and against his patriotic zeal, Malachy accepts a job in a factory in England. The promise of more wages provides hope to the McCourt family: They see their neighbors working the factories of wartime England and sending money back home, lifting their families out of poverty to some small measure. Malachy departs for England, and the family awaits the first money order. When the day they expect it arrives, the McCourt family is anxious, excited, and hopeful. However, the telegram with the money does not arrive, and they become suspicious.

Frank develops a severe case of conjunctivitis that again lands him in the hospital. While there, he reunites with Mr. Timoney. When Frank asks if he wants to be read to, Mr. Timoney refuses and tells Frank to rest his eyes. Also at the hospital, Seamus reappears and tells Frank that he memorized “The Highwayman,” which he recites for the entire ward to much applause. He also memorized another poem, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat,” which was a favorite of the deceased Patricia. Seamus arrives one day to say goodbye to Frank, as he is going to England to work in a factory and send home his wages to his wife. He promises to stay in touch with Frank, although he can’t read or write.

It turns out that Malachy has been drinking away his wages and causing trouble all over Coventry by insulting the British monarchy. Angela, much to her dismay, considers sending her boys to an orphanage so that she can go to the factories herself, with the prospect of reuniting with her boys in a year. However, she ultimately decides against this course of action because the orphanage is notoriously cruel; instead, Angela seeks relief from the dispensary, where Mr. Kane and Mr. Coffee exact the price of relief in the form of humiliating those seeking it. Mr. Kane interrogates Angela in front of the other people in the queue, who are all impoverished and in dire need of help. Kane ultimately grants relief to Angela, but the boys sense the humiliation Angela feels.