Dympna leaves home to study in England

Dympna’s departure from home turns a narrow exam result into a route out of her father’s reach. She leaves for Dublin before sitting her Leaving examination, then, dissatisfied with the Civil Service, remakes her education through night school and the University of Reading. Her eventual teaching work near Breedge and Rosaleen in London extends that escape into a new life among her sisters.

Life at Home and the Attempt to Leave

After Frankie left, Dympna was miserable. In appearance she most resembled her father, and the narrator recalls that she seemed to grate on him more than the other children. Her dogged passivity made it harder for him to attack her physically once he was, to some extent, checked and watched; he nevertheless did what he could to unnerve her. Her departure therefore grew out of a household in which even the possibility of getting away was uncertain.

With little hope, she sat the Civil Service examination a year early, aiming to escape. Her father anticipated that she might try to leave with Rosaleen for London and disparaged her preparation in a letter, treating her as lacking the atmosphere of work required for an examination. His response exposed the pressure surrounding her attempt: she was trying to secure a future while he cast doubt on her capacity to do so.

Dublin and a Change of Direction

Dympna did not achieve a high position in the examination. That year, however, the result was sufficient, and she left for Dublin without waiting to sit her Leaving examination. The departure was an immediate break with the expected sequence of schooling, not the culmination of a settled academic plan. What mattered first was that the modest result gave her a way out.

The Civil Service did not make her happy. Like Frankie, she returned to night school, turning the first escape into a second chance at education rather than accepting a career that did not suit her. The parallel with her brother links their departures while preserving the different courses their lives took: each had to continue studying after leaving home in order to find a more fitting direction.

Reading, Teaching, and Life Near Her Sisters

Dympna eventually won a place at the University of Reading and earned a good degree. She then began teaching near where Breedge and Rosaleen lived and worked in London. The path from Dublin to university and into teaching gives her departure a longer consequence: she does not simply leave the family home, but builds a professional life and settles within reach of the sisters who had also made their lives away from it.

Narrative Significance

The episode is told retrospectively by John McGahern as part of the family’s wider dispersal. Dympna’s attempt to leave begins under the shadow of her father’s mockery and succeeds through an exam result that is merely sufficient; later progress depends on her own return to study. The movement from a constrained home to Dublin, Reading, and teaching near her sisters makes education both a practical means of escape and the structure through which she shapes a life beyond her father’s household.