“The poor children, the poor children, the poor children”

“The poor children, the poor children, the poor children” is a recurring expression of pity in John McGahern’s memoir, spoken by women around the family during its move to Cootehall and repeated after Susan McGahern’s death. The words acknowledge the children’s vulnerability, but their public, insistent repetition also marks a gulf between what the community can say and what the bereaved child is living through.

The refrain and its circumstances

At the family’s arrival in Cootehall, the narrator hears the phrase as the family is taken from the lorry and welcomed by people at the barracks. The women are already crying; as the baby is carried down from the cab, their sympathy intensifies. The narrator says that this pitying is almost as hard to endure as entering and leaving his mother’s upstairs room. The refrain is not hostile, but its compassion still weighs on him: he is made the object of other people’s feeling at a moment when he cannot control what happens to his family.

The same words return after Susan’s death, when village women gather at the barracks around Katie and Mrs Cannon. The recurrence gives the expression a new gravity. What had accompanied a difficult relocation now attends a family bereaved of its mother. In both settings, the phrase becomes part of the public language surrounding the children, while the memoir distinguishes that language from the child’s own experience.

Public pity and private grief

After the funeral, relatives of John’s father return to the house in three carloads. The women repeat the refrain, and the narrator again finds it no easier to endure. He slips away toward the river rather than remain among the visitors and their talk. There, the contrast between communal mourning and solitary grief becomes unmistakable: those present have followed the coffin and watched the grave fill, but he has experienced the funeral through the clock he was following, apart from them.

The refrain also recurs at the church gate on the Sunday after the funeral. John struggles to keep pace behind his father’s blue uniform as his father goes to the front seat of the church, then stands beside him while a crowd offers condolences. The repeated pity becomes too much; John begins to weep, though those around him do not notice his anger. In this scene the words do not make grief easier to express. Their public repetition leaves his distinct response—anger as well as sorrow—unrecognized.

What the words cannot hold

The memoir sets the refrain against the particularity of John’s memories of Susan: walking lanes to school, travelling by train, visiting shops together, watching fires in Aughawillan, and going for milk by moonlight. These remembered acts give shape to a relationship that a general expression of pity cannot contain. After the visitors’ talk becomes unbearable, he hides in a small room beneath the stairs, buries his face in wool and camphor, and begins to weep. The movement from a crowded house to a dark, enclosed space makes his need for privacy concrete.

His grief is also bound up with remorse. He remembers choosing to spend time by the lorry rather than go upstairs to his mother, and wonders what she thought when she heard it leave. Later, after slipping away from the returning funeral party, he watches the boat head toward Oakport and thinks of the life now beginning without her. The refrain names the children as objects of compassion, but it cannot give John back the lost time or answer the questions he carries.

Narrative significance

The expression’s force comes from repetition and changing circumstance. At Cootehall it accompanies a family’s arrival and the visible vulnerability of the children; after Susan’s death it is heard among mourners, relatives, and people offering condolences. Each return connects public attention to the children with John’s increasing sense that his own sorrow is private and difficult to share.

The memoir does not dismiss the women’s sympathy. Instead, it shows its limits: a collective formula can recognize suffering without reaching the person who suffers, and repeated consolation can itself become an ordeal. Against the refrain, John’s solitary movements—to the hidden room, out of the house, and toward the river—trace a grief that the community’s words can witness but cannot absorb.