Moving to the upper floor "Italy"

The move upstairs, renamed “Italy,” is a temporary refuge created by flooding in the McCourt family’s Roden Lane house. It brings the family together around an upstairs fire, but does not remove the dangers of the home: rain and waste still threaten the household, and poverty leaves them with few alternatives.

The house and the flood

The family’s house stands at the end of a row of six homes on Roden Lane, on Barrack Hill. Its two rooms on each of two floors give the family space to move between rooms and up and down the stairs—an abundance they appreciate despite the home’s poor conditions. Their lavatory is not private: it serves the lane’s eleven families, whose buckets are emptied beside the house.

In the weeks before Christmas, Frank and Malachy return from school in heavy rain to find the kitchen empty of its table, chairs, and trunk. The family and furniture have been moved upstairs, where a fire is burning. Angela explains that rain came down the lane and under the door; rags intended to block it became soaked and let more water in. The flood combines with the waste emptied outside to make the kitchen unfit for the family to use.

“Italy” as refuge

Angela proposes staying upstairs while it continues to rain, hoping they can return to the ground floor in spring if the walls or floor show signs of drying. Malachy McCourt calls the upstairs a warm foreign holiday destination and proposes the name “Italy.” The joke recasts displacement as a stay in a more comfortable place, even though it is forced by a flooded, damp home.

The Pope’s image remains on the downstairs wall. Malachy asks whether it can be brought upstairs, but Angela refuses: she wants it to stay where it is rather than have it looking at her in bed. Her remark also recalls the family’s successive moves from Brooklyn to Belfast, Dublin, and Limerick, making the image a witness to their repeated displacement.

The limits of the move

The move changes where the family lives inside the house, not the conditions surrounding it. The shared lavatory continues to contribute to the household’s misery, and Angela later says the smell outside the door, rather than the River Shannon, is what may kill them. In warmer weather, overflow and seepage are joined by flies, bluebottles, and rats.

Malachy takes Frank to complain at the Town Hall. The official offers no remedy beyond moving, which the family cannot afford, and dismisses the prospect of new lavatories for houses expected to be demolished after the war. The exchange reveals how little recourse the family has: their immediate response to the flood is to move upstairs, while their complaint about the wider sanitation problem is met with the same absence of practical help.

A precarious shelter

The upstairs refuge is warm while the rain lasts, but it is not a durable solution. The family’s hope of returning downstairs depends on the house drying out, and the underlying problems of damp, shared sanitation, and poverty remain. The episode therefore makes the domestic space itself part of the family’s struggle: even a small measure of comfort requires adapting to a home that the weather and neglected infrastructure repeatedly make unsafe.