Family refuses to move in with their father

The family’s refusal to move in with Francis (Frank) McGahern turned his proposed move to Dublin into a clear boundary between his plans and his children’s lives. John McGahern, Margaret, the narrator’s younger sister, and Monica did not refuse to help him find a home; they refused to give up their separate rooms and lodgings to live with him. Their signed reply exposed the difference between assistance and obedience, and Francis never answered it.

Background to the Move

At Christmas, John helped his father with work on the land. The work temporarily concealed their temperamental differences: Francis was friendly in a bluff, jocose, and forced manner, and John could respond sympathetically to his talk of selling the property and moving to Dublin. The prospect had initially seemed like one of his father’s recurring plans, which tended to lose their appeal once they became feasible. John also saw practical reasons the move might be unwelcome to Agnes McShera: the family had a beautiful place, her mother and relatives were nearby, and neither she nor Francis knew Dublin.

The atmosphere at home made the proposal more than a change of address. Francis’s aggression and Agnes’s more indirect control had left the household poisoned; Dympna had become sullenly submissive, while Frankie was openly confrontational. Francis used threats, scolding, abuse, and sarcasm, but his more extreme threats proved to be bluffs when challenged. Agnes, meanwhile, was drawing her own relatives more frequently into the house and defending her husband against outside criticism even as she resisted him within the marriage. The proposed move emerged from this divided household, not from an uncomplicated family decision to relocate.

Francis’s Request

Only a couple of weeks after John returned to Dublin, a letter arrived from Grevisk dated 8 January 1960. It included a sale advertisement for a large, rundown property above a greengrocer’s on the North Strand. Francis asked John to look into the matter and, without delay, to take Margaret and Monica into his confidence and find the family a house or flat in Dublin. He presented the move as imperative and in the family’s interest, complaining that he was tired of hearing about disputes with people in the locality. He described himself as a former police sergeant and suggested that those around him were taking satisfaction in his difficulties.

John had first dismissed the idea as impractical, but the letter showed that his father was serious. He understood the proposal as consistent with Francis’s way of thinking: even apparently unpredictable violence, John observed, occurred in surroundings where his father was protected. Leaving the locality would take Francis away from a position he no longer held and from people he had antagonized as a sergeant. Buying a Dublin property could also make his children tenants in the family home: they would pay rent to him rather than to their existing landlords. These were John’s readings of his father’s interests, rather than terms laid out in the letter, and he came to see that the move might serve Francis even if it unsettled everyone else.

The Siblings’ Reply

John went to Margaret and Monica, but did not carry out his father’s request in the intended manner. The three siblings read the letter alike and agreed on a response: John would write that they would give Francis every possible help in finding a Dublin house or flat, while making plain that they would not leave their own rooms or lodgings to live with him. All three signed the letter. Their refusal was therefore neither a rejection of his move nor a withdrawal of practical support. It denied the assumption that his decision to relocate gave him the right to uproot them as well.

They considered it important to state this limit at the outset. They did not want Francis to move under the belief that he was doing so for their sake, only for that expectation to fail later. Their letter instead located responsibility for the move with him: he could pursue a Dublin home, and they would assist, but they would not become its household by surrendering the separate arrangements they already had. The joint signature gave the refusal a force distinct from an individual objection; the siblings had reached the same conclusion together.

Silence and Aftermath

Francis never answered. When Margaret and Monica visited him a short time later, he had taken to his bed and refused to see them. Agnes was kind to the visitors, but his room stayed closed throughout their weekend visit, and he did not appear. She cheerfully remarked that he often formed such notions only for them to be forgotten. The episode thus ended not with a negotiated move, but with silence and withdrawal; the letter records the family’s decision, while the closed room leaves Francis’s response unspoken.

The episode’s decisive distinction is between helping Francis move and moving in with him. By offering practical assistance, the siblings avoided making their decision a simple refusal of his stated plan. By declining to abandon their own rooms and lodgings, they also refused to let his needs define where they would live. Their position exposed the gap between Francis’s claim that the move was for the family and John’s conclusion that it chiefly served his father’s interests. The unanswered letter leaves that disagreement unresolved, but the siblings’ shared decision is unambiguous.