Bread and Molasses

The countless crazy capers of a poor Cape Breton coal miner's son in the hungry thirties. Andy and his ten brothers and sisters never had quite enough to eat. But always resourceful, Andy once ate an orange-flavored cardboard duck, to supplement a meagre Christmas dinner.

With warmth and humour, Andy reveals a thousand human predicaments , then describes his ingenious escapes from both the hazard and the punishment. A celebration both of survival and life, Bread and Molasses, is a deeply human document of hard times, good times - of love, laughter, and hilarity - but most of all, a funny funny book.

(Excerpt) The Night Billy Burglarized Pa

We not only had trouble with ghosts, but also one time with a burglar, who just happened to be a member of our family.

As Billy reached his late teens, he had a tendency to keep late hours. Pa never got wind of his escapades until one muggy summer night when Billy was eighteen. All the doors were locked for the night and everyone was asleep. Billy was my bed mate at this time. About 3 a.m. I was awakened by a commotion outside the window - somebody was out there waving his arms around. While I was gazing sleepily out the window, Pa and Freddy came into the room. If there had been a light in our room, we would have noticed that Billy's side of the bed was empty. Instead, Pa, seeing the person outside flaying wildly with his arms, gave me a vicious shove, saying, "Lay down or you'll be shot. There's a fool down there and he's pointing a gun at you." Hurriedly they left my room, Pa picking up our alarm clock in his flight to catch the maniac.

Billy told me later that he saw so many heads at the window, he decided he'd better get out of there and went around to get in the front room window. As he pushed open the window and climbed in, he knocked over a flower pot. Upstairs, Freddy whispered to Pa, "He's in the house.", and the suspense built. Freddy, creeping behind Pa, grasped a claw hammer and Pa, with muscles taut, clutched the alarm clock.

The phone at the bottom of the stairs had two silver bells. As they rounded the top of the stairs, something glinted off the bells. "There he is." shouted Pa and sent the alarm clock reeling through the air, smashing the phone to pieces. Hearing this excitement, I began to realize Billy wasn't beside me in bed. I ran out and told Pa, "It's Billy." My father walked straight back to his room saying, "I'll deal with him in the morning." The sentence was that Billy had to go to bed when he got home from school for a whole month. Freddy, forty years later, is still ashamed to talk about the incident, but remembers he once had a job as a night watchman where his only means of protection was a hammer. Which was nothing compared with the other watchman, who was armed only with an alarm clock.

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