ABSTRACT
It was a Saturday morning; I will never forget that, the excitement of the weekend, music on the radio, augmented by this anxious wait for the results to come. ‘You have to be patient,’ my mother would say. ‘It’ll take them a long while to mark all those wee tests.’ I was up already that morning, early for me. We liked to lie to lunchtime on a Saturday, the way that working class families often do. I was jittery with expectation, and the brown envelope came, eventually, clattering through our letter box, as thick and as heavy as a slab of Irish soda bread.
