Word: mam
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...they married, she a lady's maid in Liverpool. He failed his way through a variety of tiny enterprises, including-for nine of Emlyn's formative years-the operation of a country pub. Dad was at home on either side of a bar, beery, convivial and feckless. Mam was "conventional to the point of defeatism, shy of strangers and painfully conscious of the immorality of spending one penny unless there was a halfpenny behind it." Neither of them was more than barely literate. Welsh was their language; Emlyn hardly heard an English word until...
Perennially jobless Dad, without a tanner for a smoke, rages at hunger and helplessness, beats up nagging Mam, or stares at the wall. When the back rent piles up, it comes time for a "moonlight flit"-the household goods piled on a barrow and trundled at midnight to a vacant tenement in another slum...
Unlike other junior colleges. Foothill starts students on probation if their high-school average is C or less, and its dropout rate is a hardhearted 40%. On the academic side, Foothill matches the curriculum at four-year colleges; the mam difference is more guidance and smaller classes. Foothill's teaching loads are kept deliberately low, for example, so that teachers can spend more time advising students or poring over their required weekly compositions. As one apparent consequence of such attention, Foothill's transfer students generally get better grades at four-year colleges than those who started out there...
Lenore died shortly after Marta was born. Manuel, the oldest, was eight at the time. "I was asleep on a mat on the floor next to my brother Roberto. My little sisters, Consuelo and Marta, slept on the bed with my mamá and papá. As though in a dream, I heard my father calling. He called to us when he saw my mother slipping away from him. I was always a sound sleeper and my father had to shout. 'Get up, you bastards! Hijos de la chingada! Your mother is dying and you lying there. On your...