Eels

Eels are both food and legend in Frank’s account of his family’s journey to Dublin, where stories of Cú Chulainn turn a lake into a place of imagined adventure and a guard’s practical dream of retirement brings that heroic world back to everyday life.

Lough Neagh and the Cú Chulainn Story

As the family travels by bus toward Dublin, they see Lough Neagh, which Frank’s father identifies as Ireland’s largest lake. He tells the children that Cú Chulainn swam there after his battles, so overheated that the lake boiled over and warmed the surrounding countryside for days. The story makes the landscape a setting for heroic legend even as the family passes through it on the way elsewhere.

The father extends the tale to eels. He says that the family might someday return to swim in the lake and fish for eels to fry, unlike Cú Chulainn, who supposedly plucked the eels from the water and swallowed them wriggling because they gave him great power. Frank asks whether this is true, and his father confirms it. The exchange presents the legend as a shared family story: a child asks for reassurance, and the father gives an unqualified answer.

Eels in the Barracks

The image recurs during the family’s stay in a police barracks. A guard who has spoken with Frank’s father about places and people in the north says that he hopes to live one day on the shores of Lough Neagh, where he will fish. He singles out eels as plentiful there and says he loves them fried. His retirement fantasy echoes the father’s earlier vision of the family returning to the lake to fish and eat.

Frank asks his father whether the guard is Cú Chulainn. The guard laughs, and the father distinguishes the real man from the legendary hero: the guard is not Cú Chulainn, but he is a fine man who hopes to fish on the lakeshore. Eels thus connect the great feats of the story to a modest future of leisure and a familiar meal.

Narrative Significance

The two scenes move from a bus journey past Lough Neagh to a crowded barracks, but the eel story travels with the family. Its recurrence joins the father’s mythmaking to the guard’s ordinary hopes, without collapsing the difference between a legendary hero and a working man. In the children’s world, folklore is not separate from practical life: the same lake belongs to a national tale, a hoped-for return, and the prospect of fried fish.