A HIGH grey wall stood between Limerick's diocesan college, St Munchin's, and the steep lane that ran from Henry street to the Shannon. Inside, country fellows whose joyless conditions remind me now of Stendhal's Scarlet And Black. Their mothers had high hopes of them: destined for Maynooth where, in due course, they would become priests.
Outside, the children of the lanes, like Frank McCourt, had been sent by their mothers to gather the coal that fell from lorries on their way up from the Dock road. They were destined to become carters or messengers or emmigrants.
We were outsiders too, the scatter of would-be priests who came from Clare, though in a sense different from the McCourts: lucky to face the seven-mile journey home, even with the wind and rain in our faces.
We were better-off than the boarders who gave us a shilling or two to smuggle in bags of Kimberley biscuits that would make their hunger, cold and general discomfort more bearable.
And even the boarders were a thousand times better off than the McCourts and their fellow pupils in Leamy's national school, a couple of hundred yards away in Hartstonge Street. For them, there was no relief and, as far as anyone could see, there would be no escape.
The principal of Leamy's, Mr Halloran, railed against the unfairness of it. Frank McCourt himself makes the point. Some schools send out the people who are to take professional charge of affairs (ours even produced several bishops); Leamy's, and schools like it send out messenger boys.
It's tempting to say that, to the middle classes or even the lower middle classes - and in Limerick in the 1950s tuppence ha'penny was always looking down on tuppence - the poorest of the poor were invisible.
We knew about them all right. Limerick wasn't, and isn't, such a big city that the McCourts could be missed. My mother, who milked a dozen cows every morning before cycling to work in the office of McMahon's timberyard, talked about the much greater hardship of "the poor shawlies".
One of our uncles, Dick Devane, had a pub in Mary Street, in the Parish, where women came to buy groceries and sometimes, like the McCourts, to beg their husbands to go home while they still had a few shilling.
The children who came with the women weren't invisible but they were silent, as they stood by the counter while my uncle's scoop dipped into polished bins with heavy cherrywood lids: "Half a pound of sugar, half a quarter of tea ...
Even this was often beyond the reach of Angela McCourt - and why wouldn't it, on a dole of 13 shillings a week for a family of six plus whatever could be scraped together from the assistance and the Vincent de Paul?
But Angela's Ashes is not a tract. It's the story of Malachy, who couldn't resist drink or company; and Angela, who couldn't resist him or the other forces, lay and clerical, that beat her down.
The book is not about the hungry and homeless as objects of pity or politics. The hungry and homeless speak for themselves; and not only of hunger but of love and sex. In tones of irony as well as complaint.
Resistance too: doors are shut in Frank's face by sacristans and Christian Brothers; one of his brothers begs at the front doors of the well-to-do on the Ennis road while the others nip round to steal wood and coal at the back.
Here are people we may have seen on Limerick's streets but seldom heard: Ab Sheahan, dropped on his head as a child, selling the Leader door to door; Pa Keating, gassed in the trenches, still black-faced because he works in the Gas Company; the Clohessys, in their tenement on Arthur's Quay and Mr Hannon, the carter whose bad legs finally him fit only for the City Home.
And some known only to the McCourts: little Margaret, who died in New York, Ollie, the first of the twins to go, and Eugene, who sat at the window waiting and calling to his dead brother until he too died.
McCourt writes in a matter-of-fact style which seems to suit the Limerick accent: "Grandma caught a chill the night we had the trouble in Roden lane and the chill turned to pneumonia. They shifted her to the City Hospital and now she's dead.
"Her oldest son, Tom, thought he'd go to England to work like other men in the lanes but his consumption got worse and he came back to Limerick and now he's dead..."
Even without his final, one-word chapter, I can near the echo: There it is, now. That's it.