Cootehall Garda Barracks

Cootehall Garda Barracks is the police station where the McGahern family settles after leaving their home at Corramahon, and where the narrator lives with his father after Susan McGahern’s death. The building’s double use—as a working barracks and a crowded household—makes it more than a change of address: ordinary domestic routines unfold inside an institution whose public authority is embodied by the father’s uniform and whose rooms become inseparable from the children’s grief and vulnerability.

From Police Station to Family Home

The barracks first appears as the destination of the narrator’s independent bicycle journey to Cootehall. Exhausted after missing the turn and travelling in a wide circle, he arrives without meeting his father on the road. Guard Cannon welcomes him and takes him into the living quarters, where Biddy, a deaf woman who works half-days cooking and cleaning, has stayed late because the boy is expected. She prepares him a meal of fried egg, bacon, black pudding, fried bread and scalding tea. Because she lip-reads, conversation is difficult; Guard Cannon rephrases the narrator’s words, and Biddy claps her hands and shouts joyfully when she understands. The living room is already a place where police-household work and care meet: an orderly helps bridge a communication gap while a worker’s meal welcomes a child into the station.

The family’s later arrival is not an ordinary move. As Susan’s death approaches, the children are kept from school, brown hens are packed into crates, and a lorry comes to Corramahon. Pat McManus receives a note from the driver and passes it to Maggie, who reads it quietly, too quickly for the others to hear. The workmen load the household piece by piece: furniture, kitchen vessels, lamps, religious pictures, bedding and bicycles. Even the iron beds are left until last because their rusted joints make them difficult to take apart. The relocation thus begins under the pressure of illness and uncertainty, before the children know that their mother is about to die.

The Family’s Arrival and the Building’s Acoustics

The journey to Cootehall passes through Fenagh, Keshcarrigan and Leitrim village, crosses the Shannon at Battlebridge and continues along narrow roads. At the barracks, Francis (Frank) McGahern waits in full uniform with Guard Walshe, Guard Cannon, Guard Murray and two guards’ wives. He lifts each child from the lorry and kisses them; the women cry when Katie McManus steps down carrying the baby. Their pity for the children weighs heavily on the narrator, making the arrival feel at once like a welcome and a public acknowledgment of the family’s distress.

The guards take off their tunics and help carry the furniture inside, while Francis remains in uniform. The building has been empty long enough for its large rooms to return echoes. The girls call out to hear them answer, then shout louder until their father orders them to be quiet; they begin to cry. The episode shows how the barracks’ physical scale, initially a source of excitement, is abruptly subjected to household discipline. Once the furniture is in place, the atmosphere loosens into quiet jokes and laughter, although their father remains silent. A few hens already scratch in the rhubarb beds; the newly arrived brown hens stay crated until they adjust to their surroundings.

Outside, the cultivated part of the large barrack garden is thick with potato plants, their white and purple blossoms moving in the breeze. The Tarred Boat is tied in an inlet below the dayroom, and the river and Oakport Estate lie beyond the bedroom window. These details give the station a rural setting rather than separating it from the landscape: the family’s new home includes cultivated ground, livestock, a boat and a view across water and woods. That night the narrator sleeps with his father in a large iron bed with broken brass bells, too numb and heartsick to care where he is.

A Household Reshaped by Death

The children are not sent to school for the next two days. On the third, a telephone rings in the dayroom. Guard Cannon knocks at the living-room door and tells the sergeant there is a personal call. After Katie asks whether it is from Corramahon, Guard Cannon nods; she bursts into tears, and the narrator joins her. Francis then comes back from the dayroom and tells the children that their mother died at a quarter to three. The barracks is therefore the setting not only of the move that separates the children from Susan, but also of the message that confirms her death. The telephone call makes the station’s working rooms part of the family’s private bereavement.

After Susan’s death, the sleeping arrangements fix the new household into the building’s upstairs plan. The narrator shares the iron bed with his father at the head of the stairs. His five sisters and brother sleep in the next room along the landing; a small room for the maid is at its far end. Across from the father’s room are the orderly’s bedclothes, office supplies and the barracks’ single typewriter. The windows overlook the entrance, Coote’s Archway, Lenihan’s orchard wall and much of the village; from the father’s room, the view also takes in a large sycamore, the river and the navigation signs at the entrance to Oakport Estate.

Intimacy, Authority and Memory

The bedroom’s details endure in the narrator’s account as a measure of the long nights spent there. When he cannot sleep, he counts the thirty-two grooved boards in the ceiling. A fireplace is seldom lit, and a small white enamel pot with a spout for urine is kept on his father’s side of the bed for the narrator to empty in the morning. On clear nights, moonlight catches the brass bells along the iron railing at the foot of the bed. The room is described through its fixed objects and repeated routines, not as a refuge from the barracks but as the place where the child remains physically close to its authority.

The narrator also recalls that, when Francis came to bed late, he would ask whether the boy was awake and massage his belly and thighs, presenting the contact as a way to relax muscles, ease wind and bring on sleep. The child, with little knowledge of sex, initially took this explanation at face value and later turned away on some pretext when it was safe to do so. Looking back, he suspects that his father was masturbating. This retrospective account makes the shared bedroom an especially troubling space: the barracks’ orderly domestic geography does not guarantee safety, and the father’s claim to be acting for the child’s good sits beside the adult narrator’s changed understanding of the contact. The building thus holds both the practical record of a family’s relocation and the memory of an intimacy that the child could not then interpret.