John McGahern and Francis (Frank) McGahern’s father–son relationship

John McGahern and Francis (Frank) McGahern’s father–son relationship develops through a repeated, unsettled alternation between distance, domination, and brief intimacy. John’s childhood recollections place Francis outside the ordinary routines of home for long stretches, then make his arrival an event charged with anxiety. Later gestures of attention—a river outing, a bicycle, a comic annual, and time spent together in the fields—offer a different possibility, but do not erase the fear or make the closeness dependable.

Absence and an early encounter

John remembers no visit by Francis to the bungalow, although he knows that Francis must have come there in the Blue Baby Ford. The car itself survives in memory more vividly than its driver: a jar of brightly coloured sugarsticks sat on the dashboard, visible but never opened or shared. John likens them to permanent flowers, desirable precisely because they remain untouched. That image belongs to a childhood in which the father is present as a possibility but not as a remembered companion.

John’s first recollection of Francis from that period comes during a summer at the barracks in Cootehall, where John, his mother, and his grandmother had gone with the twins. Francis decided to cut John’s long curls despite the child’s frightened protests. His mother and grandmother were distressed, but their reaction only strengthened Francis’s resolve. Wearing his uniform, with three silver stripes on its blue sleeve, Francis took John into the dark hallway, set a chair on a newspaper, and used small silver shears taken from a green box. He had locked the two women in the living room while he carried out the haircut.

When the curls were gone, Francis returned to the room exultantly, carrying them in the newspaper folds. He recited a biblical line about the women of Jerusalem and their children. In adult retrospect, John makes the sheared curls resemble the severed head of John the Baptist brought into the room on a silver plate. The scene joins physical control to religious language: the father’s authority is enacted against the child’s protests, then given a triumphant, scriptural frame. John’s sisters later suggested that Francis had felt displaced in their mother’s affections after John’s birth. John considered that explanation insufficient; he believed that, whether or not that hurt existed, Francis would have found another cause for conflict.

Discipline, fear, and care

Francis’s wish to toughen John shaped his schooling. He complained that John’s mother spoiled him and saw the short walk to Augharan School as an opportunity to pull the boy away from her protection. There, Mrs McCann used bamboo canes, and when those splintered she substituted ash, sally, and hazel switches. Children were punished for mistakes, lapses of attention, and indiscipline, sometimes in the corridor away from the classroom. John had not been accustomed to being beaten and experienced the school’s severity as a descent from his mother’s gentleness. He tried intensely to leave Augharan School and follow her and the twins to Beaghmore School, but could not.

Fear also attached itself to Francis’s visits at home. John remembers tension when his father was present: Francis scolded over money, the running of the household, and his wife’s relatives, and sometimes continued complaining without any clear provocation. One late-night arrival in a black mood focused on John’s face, which was covered with scabs from a childhood illness. Francis kept him home from school and drove him to a doctor in Carrigallen. After a long appointment and an argument whose substance John could not understand, they went to a chemist, then returned home. Francis ordered Bridgie McGovern to boil water, prepared a basin, mirror, and towel, disinfected a sharp knife, and removed the scabs himself. The procedure worked and left no scars, but John experienced it as a terrifying, formal ceremony.

The treatment’s success did not make the encounter feel safe. The next time the Blue Baby Ford arrived, John hid in a chestnut tree near the house. He watched the car and the home from there, heard his name being called, and stayed out of sight until the car had left and the calls had grown more anxious. This reversal—an act that had physically healed him followed by his effort to avoid his father—captures the difference between practical care and a relationship in which care could be trusted.

Control after their mother’s absence

After John’s mother was gone, the children were more directly exposed to Francis’s scoldings, sudden rages, and beatings. John recalls that his father’s surviving letters often accused their mother of turning the children against him, while John believed Francis’s own conduct was driving them away. At times Francis could charm them and draw them towards him, but when they responded, he found them tiresome and could not sustain the closeness he had initiated. John’s account therefore presents estrangement not as a simple refusal by the son, but as a pattern repeatedly produced by the father’s own changes of manner.

The family’s daily life at the barracks gave this authority a fixed routine. The children ate quietly while Francis sat apart, facing a large sideboard mirror; a squabble or other noise brought a quelling look. Before they left for school, he inspected their appearance and often checked behind their ears. The day ended with the Rosary. He knelt where he had eaten, with a newspaper on the cement beneath him, while the children knelt on chairs around the room. Among the prayers was one for their mother, though the children did not know where she was or what they were praying for. Afterward they went to Francis one by one and kissed him goodnight. The ritual held the household together through obedience and ceremony, even as the children remained without their mother’s protection.

Francis’s violence was not confined to the son. John recalls his father pursuing the very young Margaret through the open house and sending her spinning into the rhubarb bed when their mother stood in his way. Francis caught and shook the child. The episode places John’s fear within a wider family climate: his own relationship with his father was shaped not only by what Francis did directly to him, but by the force with which he saw Francis exert authority over the other children.

Fragile approaches to intimacy

The clearest counterpoint to the barracks’ discipline came on the Tarred Boat. On the river, John held the lines while Francis rowed, and the quiet seemed to free Francis, for a time, from his usual self. In a good mood he joked that a great pike was coming up from Moran’s Bay on a motorbike. John could hear his sisters playing uninhibitedly back at the barracks. Yet the outings were fragile: tangled lines or a slip of the tongue could undo the day. They introduced John to the river, which later became a necessary place of escape and solitude, but they did not establish a reliable ease between father and son.

A further change came when Francis began to court John’s favour. He bought him a Christmas annual featuring Count Curly Wee and Gussie Goose, along with a small boy’s bicycle. In spring, when Francis stayed with him, John went with him through the fields. Together they walked barefoot over wet peat as workmen trampled it into black paste, shaped it into rows, and left it to dry. Such practical shared activity contrasted sharply with the haircut and the medical procedure: here John accompanied his father rather than being physically managed by him. Francis also promised to take him to the Ulster Final, a yearly ritual for himself, and planned a journey to it by way of Mass in Ballinamore. The surviving account records the promise and the plan, not a settled reconciliation. Across these memories, Francis’s approaches to his son remain real but precarious, unable to make affection secure against the authority and anger that had marked their earlier life.