In the gas-lit room, lying there on the big bed with Daddy, I heard the deaf mute breathing heavily with his exertions. Daddy drew back the room-dividing curtain to show the crazed face of the drunken man shadowboxing in the cracked mirror, which hung from a chain attached to a nail on the wall. I was frightened. Daddy pulled the curtain back till the man was hidden, put his arm protectively around me, and, in a hoarse whisper, encouraged me to join him in the following childish chant:
“Dummy chant chatch me now!”
Mammy lay next to him, holding my baby brother. Four of us in a bed with a curtain separating us from ‘the dummy’. There may have been other lodgers in Small’s Lodging House in Antrim Street, but that is the only memory I have, and, I think, the first memory of my life.

That,s frightning Dabbler. My parents started their married life also in a lodging house around Bridge Street in the 40s. Billy Hull from Eagle,s Terrace,Lowroad whom I lived beside for a short while in Whiteabbey in the 60s told me about the conditions in the lodging houses around that era but you describe it more apt.
Donald