1. what do they mean by the consumption, what disease is this?
2. is the girl frankie has sex with his age or is she supposed to be an older women, if she's his age why is she on her own all the time?
3. when the women who loans the money dies frankie steals her money but when he takes the money out of her box he throws some back , but why, why does he not take it all?
1. TB -Tubercolosis
2. I think Teresa (the girl he has sex with) is his age.
3. I think because he doesn't need it all - he's not being greedy, all he wants is enough to get him off to the US
2. I thought she was a little bit older than him..
Anyway, it is an excellent book! You shuold read it.
i think she was like two or three years older than him and she was always on her own because she had the consumption!!
Apparently, she was always on her own simply because her parents were away from home when the telegrams were delivered. Why? Because parents are often away from home on some errand or another (if they are not total louts - chained to the home because they can't find work or something productive to do with their lives in their community.) I suppose her father was away, working. I can't vouch for her mother (I would never leave a sick child at home alone - but TB is a "wasting illness" - you are sick, but you live from day to day OK until the end of it), but maybe her mother was also occupied outside of the home in some productive capacity she felt she could handle, even with an "almost of age, sick child. Ah, but to leave children alone at home for too long...
shareSome of the other people here have already said their answers to your questions; I'll say mine.
1. The consumption is TB (or, tuberculosis). It was a big illness of the time, with people constantly dying from it. It affects primarily the lungs (hence the coughing), but can also spread to the nervous system and the circulatory system. There are several different classes of the disease, and you could have an infecton of TB or the actual disease of TB. It is the second top killing disease in the world, taking the lives up up to 2 million people worldwide per year. Nowadays, infants in first world countries are given an immunization for the disease, which helps control it. But back in Frank's days, if you got it, you were as good as dead.
2. I tried to reason this out here. Frank got his job as a telegram delivery boy at 14 or so. I pretty sure Teresa was 16. I don't know why she was alone all of the time, but I always sort of thought that it was because she had the consumption, which (if you have not the infection, but the disease) is infectious. I always thought that her parent's left her alone to die. But then again, if she had TB so bad, why didn't Frank get it? I don't know.
3. I've read Angela's Ashes many many times, and seen the movies a couple of times to boot, and I have always questioned this, too. I thought that, perhaps, he knew that somebody would eventually find the loan lady (forget her name at the moment), and if they saw that her box of dough was empty, they would know that she was robbed. Now, of course, we must remember that Frank was a very paranoid kid, and that he was the kind of person who would actually think that if he took all of the money, somebody would hunt him down and shoot him somehow. He didn't want this, of course, so he left some behind.
There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark.