Malachy leaves for Coventry

Malachy leaves for Coventry in search of paid work during the Second World War, when jobs are scarce in Ireland and English factories recruit Irish laborers for munitions production. His departure is framed as a wager on wages and remittances: the family expects money from England to ease its poverty, but the separation immediately leaves Angela and the children to manage alone. A brief initial payment raises hopes of security; the repeated failure of further money orders turns that hope into another cycle of waiting. The episode makes migration both a practical response to unemployment and a source of family abandonment, while keeping it distinct from Frank’s later decision to travel to America.

Causes and the promise of work

By the time Malachy considers leaving, Angela says she has had enough of bearing children and does not want another. The family’s circumstances make the question of work urgent: the war has created recruitment for Irish men to work in English munitions factories, the pay is attractive, and Ireland offers few jobs. At the same time, Angela and Malachy are at odds over her refusal of further pregnancies and his insistence on a wife’s religious and marital obligations. His potential departure therefore arises amid both economic pressure and strain at home.

The money sent by men working in England has become visible throughout the lane. Families receive telegram money orders, cash them at the post office, and spend the weekend buying food and preparing to go out. Their new clothes, visits to the Savoy Cinema, and fuller tables make remittances look like a route out of deprivation. Yet Malachy’s own political and social outlook complicates that prospect: he resents dependence on English money and says that Ireland’s unemployed will remain poor while others work for England. Angela answers with the immediate costs of staying: little work, little coal, worn clothes, and the dole. Their argument sets the practical need for wages against his objections to working for England.

Decision and departure

Malachy agrees to go after Christmas, describing America’s entry into the war as a reason the cause is now just. He signs with an agent for factory work in Coventry, a city widely said to be among the most heavily bombed in England. The agent presents the job in terms of abundant overtime and the chance to save, but the family has no guarantee that such promises will become lasting support. Malachy tells Frank that he will have to be the man of the house, giving the departure an immediate domestic consequence: responsibility shifts toward the eldest boy even before the family knows whether remittances will arrive.

The departure is prepared as though the expected income has already begun. Kathleen O’Connell, who runs the shop, knows Malachy is going to England and allows Angela credit for tea, milk, sugar, bread, butter, and an egg. Angela sets the egg aside for Malachy’s journey. At the station, he pats the children’s heads, reminds them to keep up their religious duties and, above all, obey their mother, then embraces Angela while she holds the baby Alphie. After a brief moment together, he picks up his bag, climbs the steps, waves, and leaves. The family returns home, drinks tea by the fire, and cries because he is gone; Angela then tries to reassure them that their troubles may now be over.

Waiting for remittances

The family’s expectation quickly attaches itself to the weekly arrival of a telegram. The departure of Mr. Meehan, who went to England with Malachy, gives the children a nearby point of comparison: when the telegram boy stops at Meehan’s, they think the McCourts must be next. Angela keeps her coat ready and waits by the fire rather than leave the lane. The children stop the telegram boys, explain that they are the McCourts, and ask whether there is money for them. One boy checks with the post office, but returns before the Angelus with no news.

The missed telegram has consequences beyond disappointment. The family cannot confidently leave home to shop, because a delivery might come while they are away; without the money order, they cannot buy food or join the weekend activity they see other families enjoying. Angela calculates the hours around the telegram boys’ lunch and the evening Angelus, while the children watch the day pass. When Michael asks for fish and chips, she says they will have them the following week. The hope of a payment thus becomes a timetable governing the family’s movements and expectations, even as the first Saturday ends without money.

The absence is also a public and social difference. Families that receive money can eat under electric light, buy provisions, and go to the cinema; those who do not receive it may rely on credit and remain indoors. Angela warns her children against speaking contemptuously of their father when one telegram boy describes his own father as a drinker in England who sends nothing. Her insistence on respect sits beside the family’s growing awareness that a father’s departure does not itself provide for those left behind.

A brief payment and renewed absence

After Malachy returns from a later absence, he leaves again for work in Coventry. He fries four pieces of bread, wraps two in each coat pocket, and sets off without enough money to take the train, intending to seek a lift on the Dublin road. Frank follows him as far as he can, from the lane down Barrack Hill and St. Joseph’s Street. Malachy tells him to go home to his mother. The farewell is followed by a letter reporting that he has arrived safely and repeating his appeal that the boys behave, attend to their religious duties, and obey Angela.

A telegram money order for three pounds arrives the following week. For a moment, the payment opens an extravagant field of imagined purchases: fish and chips, jelly and custard, Saturday films, and perhaps tea and cakes at the Savoy Café. The sum also seems to promise entry into the more prosperous life associated with families who receive money from England. But no further telegram comes the next Saturday or the Saturday after that. Angela returns to seeking assistance, and the children’s hopes of regular support give way to renewed scarcity. The three pounds is real, but it does not become dependable income.

Significance within the family’s migrations

The Coventry departure establishes a pattern in which migration is measured by its effects on those who remain: credit at the shop, hours spent waiting for a telegram, a first payment, and then the absence of regular support. The family’s vulnerability is not resolved by the act of leaving Ireland for work. Instead, the children absorb new responsibilities, and Angela continues to manage household need through credit and assistance. Frank’s later work and his promise to earn money for the family grow against this background of an absent father and uncertain remittances.

Coventry is not the same destination as America. It is a wartime labor destination that Malachy accepts reluctantly, partly because work is unavailable at home and partly because he believes the American entry into the war makes the cause just. Frank’s later passage to America requires its own decision and fare: when he arranges passage on the Irish Oak, he has saved fifty-five pounds. The contrast distinguishes the father’s hoped-for support through English wages from the son’s eventual effort to secure a future by crossing the Atlantic himself.