"The misery and fear of women and children was mostly hidden from view and luckier children were shielded from it but it was always there."

Violence and Alcohol...We took a friends cousin visiting from America to the pub one day. He had been boasting endlessly about what a tough environment he had been brought up in: Italian-Irish in NY.
The pub seemed relaxed but you catch the nuance, so we placed him with a line to the door. Within half an hour punches were swinging and bottles being smashed over heads.

He declared after we got him out (he was trembling...) that he had never seen violence erupt like that in the whole his life living in the Bronx. The macho boasting ceased totally from that point on.

There's nothing heroic about poverty and hardship: it makes people mean and hard: often psychotically so and they inflict their pain on everyone around then.