Malachy McCourt's Move to England and Abandonment of His Family

Malachy McCourt’s move to England is a migration undertaken in the name of family support that instead becomes a lasting absence. During the war, with few jobs in Ireland and comparatively well-paid factory work available across the water, he agrees to go to Coventry. His family imagines wages, better food, decent housing, and eventually a route to America; what follows is a brief payment, then silence, debt, and the hardening knowledge that he has not provided the support they expected.

Causes and the promise of work

War creates the immediate economic pressure. English agents are recruiting Irish workers for munitions factories, while employment at home is scarce. The surrounding families’ experiences make the prospect seem tangible: fathers in England send telegram money orders that let households buy food and clothes, and the remittances are publicly visible in the lane. At the same time, migration is framed by class and national identity. Irish workers may find employment in England, but they remain conscious of their lower-class position and of the history that makes the destination politically charged.

Frank asks his father why he cannot go to England so the family might have electricity and a wireless, and so Angela could speak proudly about what they were eating. Malachy asks whether Frank wants him at home. Frank says he does, but imagines that his father could return after the war and that the family might then go to America. Malachy agrees to leave after Christmas, explaining his decision through America’s entry into the war and the justice of the cause. He signs with an agent for factory work in Coventry, a city described as heavily bombed. The agent’s promise of plentiful work and the possibility of saving wages gives the departure a practical rationale, even as the family’s larger hopes reach beyond England.

Departure and imagined prosperity

The morning Malachy leaves, the expectation of income is already changing how the family can survive. Kathleen O’Connell, the shopkeeper, knows he is going to England and expects money to come back, so she extends credit for tea, milk, sugar, bread, butter, and an egg. Angela sets that single egg aside as nourishment for the journey. The small transaction makes the family’s hope concrete: credit bridges the present because they expect wages to arrive soon.

After the departure, Angela and Bridey Hannon sit by the fire upstairs, smoking and drinking tea while Frank listens from the stairs. They picture boots and coats, food enough to end the children’s hunger, eggs and rashers on Sundays, a proper lavatory, and electric light. Their imagined timetable is precise: the first money order may take two weeks while Malachy settles into his job, buys work clothes, and finds a place to stay; later, they hope for five pounds a week, payment of debts, savings, and a move first to England and eventually to America. The plan treats migration as a sequence of connected stages, with family reunification and transatlantic escape as its eventual destination.

The promised remittance also becomes a daily focus. Angela cannot leave the fire for fear the telegram boy might arrive while no one is home. The family watches other households receive money, shop for the weekend, and appear newly prosperous. They stop passing telegram boys to ask whether anything has come for the McCourts; Angela expects a rush of deliveries before the Angelus and postpones shopping lest she miss their own. When the post office confirms that no money order has arrived, the anticipated weekend collapses into another wait. The contrast between neighbors’ visible purchases and the family’s continued dependence on credit turns the telegram into both a practical necessity and a measure of exclusion.

The remittance fails

Malachy’s first subsequent payment briefly seems to vindicate the decision. After returning to Ireland for a time and setting out again for England, he sends a letter telling the boys to obey Angela and attend to their religious duties, followed a week later by a three-pound money order. The household responds as if a new life has opened: it imagines fish and chips, desserts, Saturday films, and even tea among Limerick’s wealthier patrons. But no further money order comes the next Saturday or on the Saturdays after that. Angela returns to seeking charity, and the family’s expectations of dependable wages give way to repeated disappointment.

Later, after Frank has spent time in hospital, Mr. Downes returns from England and reports what he has heard about Malachy in Coventry. According to the report, Malachy spends his wages drinking in pubs, sings Irish rebel songs, and repeatedly loses his lodging after failing to pay rent. The account says that the local magistrates are losing patience and that he may be expelled from the country if the conduct continues. This information is second-hand, but within the family’s circumstances it explains why the expected support has not materialized: the wage that was supposed to sustain a household is being spent elsewhere, and even Malachy’s own accommodation is insecure.

Consequences for Angela and the children

The failure of the remittances intensifies an already precarious economy. Angela sees the shopkeeper’s willingness to extend credit diminishing; her own mother resists lending money, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society questions her continued requests for assistance while her husband is in England. She is ashamed of the children’s torn clothing and broken shoes. She considers whether placing the boys in an orphanage might allow her to find work in England and bring them over later, but cannot bear the separation and distrusts the care they might receive. Public assistance becomes the remaining option, though applying for it feels humiliating to her.

The children take on more of the work of keeping the household going. When Angela is unable to get out of bed, Frank and Malachy fill the twins’ bottles with water and sugar; Frank later boils sour milk and combines it with stale bread to feed them. In another episode, Frank accompanies Uncle Pat while he delivers newspapers around Limerick, carrying eight papers under each arm and collecting money from customers. These scenes do not describe a direct consequence of the move alone, but they show the family’s broader response to the absence of reliable adult earnings: care, food provision, and paid work are redistributed among Angela, relatives, neighbors, and children.

The same dependence recurs in Frank’s later work. As a coal-delivery boy, he helps John Hannon deliver sixteen bags to houses on the Ennis Road and North Circular Road, where the work is physically demanding and tips are uncertain. Hannon urges him to stay in school and leave Limerick, contrasting that advice with the example of Frank’s father, who has gone to England and left his family without support. The passage connects Malachy’s migration to Frank’s emerging sense that escape must involve his own effort rather than confidence in a wage sent home by his father.

From English labor to Frank’s departure

England remains part of the family’s imagined route out of poverty even after Malachy’s failure to provide dependable money. Angela’s hopes of joining him give way to consideration of public assistance, while Frank’s own ambitions increasingly point farther afield. At the end of the narrative, approaching his nineteenth birthday, Frank takes money from Mrs. Finucane after finding her dead and decides that it will complete the funds he needs to leave. At O’Riordan’s travel agency he learns that travelling to America by air would require going through London and cost too much; instead, he books passage on the Irish Oak, leaving from Cork, for fifty-five pounds.

The contrast between the two journeys is decisive. Malachy goes to England as a wage earner whose income is expected to sustain those left behind, but his absence becomes a source of financial and emotional insecurity. Frank’s passage to America is funded by money he has gathered himself and is presented as his own deliberate departure. The family’s earlier hopes had treated migration as a shared progression from Ireland to England and then America; Malachy’s failure turns that imagined progression into a more solitary undertaking. His move therefore remains consequential not simply because he crosses a border, but because the promised return of wages never becomes a stable basis for family life.