Breedge's mobile fish-and-chip business fails

Breedge's mobile fish-and-chip business fails in 1960, turning a plan to leave England and make a living at home into a financial and family crisis. The venture depends on a van bought with the deposit Breedge had saved for a house; when Con O'Brien crashes it after a successful night of trading, the van and the enterprise are lost. The episode also reveals the limits of the refuge Breedge seeks: her father brings her home, but soon presses her to leave again and ultimately supports Con's authority over her decisions.

A return built on savings

Before the business began, Breedge had been staying in Grevisk for three months, to her father's increasing irritation. In London, Con was finding building work intolerable. He had come there with dreams of stardom, but the reality of labouring on building sites made him determined to get out of England and return home. In 1960, with a wife, a baby, and another child on the way, the couple needed a way to support their growing family.

Breedge had saved carefully enough to put a deposit on a house. Con proposed using that money instead to buy a mobile fish-and-chip van, which he would operate from his hometown and take wherever crowds gathered: football and hurling matches, race meetings, markets, shows, and dances. His bakery training meant that cooking the simple food posed no difficulty. The choice redirected savings intended for a home into a business whose success would depend on the van, Con's work, and the family's ability to keep it supplied.

Trading and the crash

Con believed the van could become a travelling goldmine. Breedge and Con's family peeled and sliced potatoes while Con drove from town to town to sell them. The narrator judges the idea commercially sound: someone with business instinct could have made serious money and expanded it. But Con did not manage money with that discipline. When he made a killing, he celebrated it; Breedge, by contrast, was careful with money and had been the one to save the deposit that financed the venture.

The work did not give Breedge an independent place in the new household. Con's family lived in a small council house that was already overcrowded, and the family was on edge. When Breedge was not peeling potatoes, she kept to the small room they had given the couple, although they needed it for themselves. She seldom saw Con, and when she did, he was mostly tipsy. He was content with his life on the road and with running about with his old friends in town; Breedge's experience was largely one of work and confinement.

The business ended after Con sold everything at a hurling match. He celebrated with friends, then fell asleep at the wheel on the way home. Con was unhurt, but the chipper and the whole enterprise were a write-off. The contrast is decisive: a night that demonstrated the van's ability to sell out also ended the means of earning that had consumed the couple's house deposit. The source does not describe a new financial plan or a replacement vehicle; the immediate consequence is the collapse of the venture.

Return and the limits of refuge

Distraught, Breedge turned to her father, Francis (Frank) McGahern. He drove all the way to Kanturk and brought her home. She left her daughter with Con and his parents, separating herself from the child as she left her husband's household. The business failure thus produced not a simple return to family life but a divided family arrangement: Breedge went with her father while her daughter stayed behind.

The return placed Breedge in the care of a father she adored and with whom she would, the narrator says, have been happy to become a child again while recovering. She would have needed only meals and would have helped in the house and fields. Yet Francis (Frank) McGahern's declaration that "my house is open to every member of my family without exception, whether they choose to include or exclude themselves" did not mean that relatives could rely on his help once their needs made demands on him. Although he had driven a long way to answer Breedge's call, he soon used psychological pressure to make her stay intolerable. He complained to the other children about her presence and her pregnancy, while evading any direct answer about how long she could remain.

Francis (Frank) McGahern later reported with satisfaction that Con had arrived with his mother and taken Breedge home. The family then discussed whether the couple should return to England, as Breedge wanted, or remain in Kanturk, as Con wished. In a letter to Rosaleen, Francis (Frank) McGahern sided firmly with Con: as head of the household, he should make the decisions, and Breedge's place was helping him. The failed business therefore ends within a larger pattern of constrained choice. Breedge's savings had financed the venture, her labour had sustained it, and its collapse left her dependent on family decisions made chiefly by men.