Susan’s pregnancy and the birth of Frank’s seventh child

Susan McGahern’s pregnancy and the birth of her seventh child bring the family’s private fears into view while showing how carefully she maintains her own judgment within marriage. With the possibility of cancer recurrence still present, the pregnancy unsettles Francis (Frank) McGahern, who responds with fasting, prayer, and urgent consultation. Susan, though conscious of the uncertainty, refuses to let anxiety dictate her decisions. The episode culminates in the birth of a healthy son on November 4, 1943, and in a disagreement over his name that makes the child’s arrival a small but telling contest over who gets to decide.

The pregnancy and the fear of recurrence

The family does not initially know that a new crisis has begun. In letters to Francis, Susan reports matter-of-factly that her expected period has not arrived; by Easter, she is certain she is pregnant. The calm tone of the news contrasts with the medical uncertainty surrounding it. Her oncologist, Dr Corcoran, writes to Francis that he has advised against what has happened, and that if the possibility of recurrence exists, the present condition could bring about rapid progress. He cannot assess the situation fully until he sees Susan again. For the moment, he advises them to wait and says there is no reason either of them should worry.

Francis reacts at a distance, from the barracks: he has begun a novena for Susan and has started fasting. He also writes to Dr Corcoran, and presses Susan to see a priest, Father Ignatius. His response places religious intercession alongside medical advice, as if both might offer some protection against an outcome neither spouse can control. Susan agrees to arrange a meeting with the priest, but does not allow Francis’s alarm to rush her. She says she is otherwise in good form, trusts God to bring her safely through, and observes that doctors are not infallible.

Her reassurance is not the same as denying the risk. She knows where she stands, as she tells Francis, but makes trust rather than panic the governing principle. In another letter she thanks him for fasting while gently suggesting that he is doing too much. The difference between them is less a division between belief and disbelief than a difference in how they meet uncertainty: Francis seeks further acts of protection, while Susan accepts that the outcome cannot yet be known and continues to make practical decisions.

Arrangements and choices

When the birth approaches, Susan goes to Dublin for several days to see Dr Corcoran and make arrangements. The memoir places this journey amid the work and demands of home life. John McGahern remembers hoping for a boy after so many girls, and explaining that he wanted someone with whom to play football and who could help him with the jennet. Susan answers by asking why he would prefer a boy to whatever God chose to send. The exchange holds a child’s practical hope beside his mother’s acceptance of uncertainty.

The choice of where to give birth becomes a more consequential disagreement. Francis wants Susan to go to the nursing home in Boyle, where Dympna was born, because it would cost less than a Dublin hospital. Susan refuses. She decides to have the baby at Holles Street, and takes care not to make it seem to Francis that she has accepted advice from Maggie or anyone else instead of his. In a letter she explains that she discussed Holles Street with nobody but Dr Corcoran; Maggie did not know of the plan until Susan asked her to accompany her there. Susan also recalls feeling unwell during a holiday in Cootehall and deciding that, for that reason, she would not remain there to give birth. Her letters document both the decision and the care with which she manages the disagreement around it.

While waiting to enter Holles Street, Susan stays at the small Cumberland Hotel in Westland Row. The place brings the approaching birth into a longer family chronology: it is almost exactly nine years since she was in Dublin, at Percy Place, expecting her first child. She fears that the birth may be delayed and that she will have to remain at the Cumberland into the middle of the month. The interval is rendered not as an abstract medical wait but as days spent away from home, with the date of her first delivery returning in memory as she awaits this one.

The birth and the naming dispute

On November 4, 1943, Susan gives birth to a son, described as a healthy lump. He is her seventh child, and his arrival answers the uncertainty that has structured the preceding weeks without erasing the illness that made the pregnancy frightening. The family’s attention then turns from the question of whether the pregnancy will be safely completed to what the child will be called.

Francis wants to name the boy Jude, after the patron saint of hopeless cases, a choice connected to Susan’s cancer. Susan stands firm against him. She objects that such an unusual name would make the child too conspicuous among other children. He is christened Frances Jude Anthony and grows up as Frank, though Francis insists on calling him Jude during his early years. The naming preserves both parents’ claims in a single name: Francis’s religious association remains in the formal choice, while Susan’s objection shapes the name by which the boy is known in childhood and thereafter.

Significance within the family story

The episode follows the pattern of a family crisis through letters, decisions, and ordinary arrangements rather than through a single dramatic confrontation. Medical uncertainty enters the home through Dr Corcoran’s cautious warning; Francis answers with prayer, fasting, and the proposed visit to Father Ignatius; Susan accepts the spiritual language but retains authority over the pace and practical course of events. Her choice of Holles Street over the less expensive nursing home in Boyle, and her insistence on resisting the name Jude, show that reassurance does not make her passive. Even while depending on medical attention and family help, she continues to decide for herself.

The birth also gathers together several different measures of time: the possible return of illness, the wait at the Cumberland Hotel, the memory of the first child expected nine years earlier, and the arrival of a seventh. For John McGahern, the hope for a brother belongs to the immediate world of football and farm work; for his parents, the pregnancy carries the weight of health, faith, expense, and the future. The healthy birth provides relief, but the disagreement over the child’s name preserves the more complicated truth of the episode: the new life is welcomed into a family where love, fear, religious hope, and personal authority coexist.